With Friends like These: Protest Strategies and the Left in Brazil and Mexico*

This paper looks at the impact of Left victory and Left party alliance on the protest behavior of popular movements, based on an original dataset of protest in Mexico City, Brasilia, and São Paulo. I ask, first, whether Left victories reduce levels of protest, and second, whether party alliances constrain protest. My findings suggest that neither hypothesis is systematically correct. Organizations do not protest significantly less against their allies. Nor do Left governments experience less protest in general. Indeed, in two of the three cities analyzed, Left governments experienced more protest than conservative governments, much of it directed by their own political allies. In all three cities, Left party allies protest significantly more regardless of who is in power. These results suggest, first, that the tactical repertoires of movements reflect fairly stable characteristics of movement type, resources, and/or culture, as some sociological work has argued. Indeed, these stable characteristics trump changes in local political opportunity structures as predictors of movement tactics. Second, political opportunity structures do matter, but in inconsistent ways across cases. Therefore, my findings also suggest the potential fruitfulness of further specifying the contextual conditions under which Left victories result in increased or decreased tendencies to protest.