Informal Institutions and Community Development Protests: Evidence from Sub-Municipal Localities in Mexico

Abstract

Why are citizens in some communities able to protest to bring attention to their grievances, while not in others? While a long literature has contended that informal civil society institutions facilitate contentious collective action, not all organizations do so, and some might even discourage it. I argue in this article that inclusive institutions—open to everyone in a community—facilitate protests, while non-inclusive institutions uniting some particularistic sub-groups within communities hinder them. The former provide communities with broad social networks fostering communal unity, while the latter erode communal unity through provoking internal conflicts. I provide evidence for this theory in the sub-municipal context of Mexico, using statistical analysis of data from an original survey of sub-municipal community presidents and qualitative fieldwork evidence from Puebla and Tlaxcala.