María Inclán and Paul Almeida: Surveying Demonstrations in Mexico

María Inclán and Paul Almeida: Surveying Demonstrations in Mexico Protest crowd assembled in the main square of Mexico City (photo by María Inclán)

Dr. María Inclán, from the Department of Political Studies at the Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas (CIDE) in Mexico City, and Dr. Paul Almeida, from the Department of Sociology at UC Merced, were awarded a 2011 UC MEXUS-CONACYT Collaborative Grant to launch the pilot project, “Surveying Demonstrations in México,” for which they interviewed protest participants and non-participants. The research integrates into a larger international project, “Caught in the Act of Protest: Contextualizing Contestation” (www.protestsurvey.eu), that seeks to create an inter-university network of research teams interested in collective action and protest surveying. So far nine countries have joined the project officially, and Almeida has undertaken protest surveys in three Central American countries and is in the process of conducting them in Argentina and Chile. With the support of the UC MEXUS-CONACYT collaborative grant, the team of Inclán and Almeida successfully conducted four different protest surveys in Mexico City: the annual rally and march commemorating the 1968 students’ massacre in Tlatelolco, a May Day rally, a LGBT Pride Parade, and one of the marches organized by the #YoSoy132 movement during the Mexico 2012 presidential electoral campaign. The collaborative grant enabled Almeida to gain additional funding from the UC Pacific Rim Program to collect protest survey data in Honduras, El Salvador, and Costa Rica and Inclán to receive support from CIDE’s Fondo de Apoyo a la Investigación (FAI) for four more protest surveys in Mexico City during 2012 and 2013. In 2015, Inclán also organized a two-day conference at CIDE with representation from each of the country research teams with the goal of producing an edited volume, currently in the making. For additional information and publication references, please consult Dr. Inclán's or Dr. Almeida's web pages or their collaborative grant page. El Equipo: the project’s research team (photo by Paul Almeida) Original article and sources can be found here: http://www.ucmexus.ucr.edu/spotlight/inclan_almeida.html

Book, "Mobilizing Democracy: Globalization and Citizen Protest" by Paul Almeida

Mobilizing Democracy: Globalization and Citizen Protest

Paul Almeida’s comparative study of the largest social movement campaigns that existed between 1980 and 2013 in every Central American country (Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Panama) provides a granular examination of the forces that spark mass mobilizations against state economic policy, whether those factors are electricity rate hikes or water and health care privatization. Many scholars have explained connections between global economic changes and local economic conditions, but most of the research has remained at the macro level. Mobilizing Democracy contributes to our knowledge about the protest groups "on the ground" and what makes some localities successful at mobilizing and others less successful. His work enhances our understanding of what ingredients contribute to effective protest movements as well as how multiple protagonists—labor unions, students, teachers, indigenous groups, nongovernmental organizations, women’s groups, environmental organizations, and oppositional political parties—coalesce to make protest more likely to win major concessions.