| Contemporary social movement theory is more or less unified today in political process theory, a synthesis of resource, social-psychology, and opportunity schools of protest analysis. But this synthesis has failed to adequately identify a role for economic phenomena, particularly in the context of industrializing countries, where debt pressures and instability are common. This research uses the Mexico case to argue that "economy" needs to be more deliberately considered within political process theory. Analysis is based on a two-year database of nationwide protest events in Mexico---from January 1, 1999 through December 31, 2000---constructed from news reports from the state news agency, Noticias de Mexico (NOTIMEX). The period under observation captures the impact of economic policy under two presidents, Zedillo and Fox, and is bisected by Fox's watershed electoral victory in July, 2000. These data are validated through a cross-comparison with two regional daily newspapers and official protest data from Mexico City, and are analyzed on two levels. First, a descriptive analysis identifies patterns of protest based on time, regional differences, event issues and targets, and the threads of different issue and group protest "campaigns." Second, a time-series OLS multiple-regression model is used to examine the effects of economic and political process theory variables on the frequency of protest, treating each of the 31 states in Mexico (excluding Mexico, DF) as the units of observation and analysis. By controlling for political process theory factors, the impact of economic phenomena in the model---price inflation, unemployment, wages, and direct foreign investment---are isolated and shown to defy the conventional treatment of them as undifferentiated "resources". Findings support the argument that economic phenomena need to be reexamined as factors unto themselves in the modeling of protest mobilization. |
