NGOs, Political Protest, and Civil Society

Carew Boulding is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Colorado, Boulder. She received her PhD in Political Science from the University of California, San Diego. Boulding's research focuses on how democracy works in younger democracies. She has published research on political participation, participatory budgeting, attitudes toward democracy, and government accountability. Her work has appeared in the Journal of Politics, Comparative Political Studies, World Development, the Latin American Research Review, Party Politics, and Studies in Comparative International Development.

• 1. Introduction; 2. NGOs, mobilization, participation, and democracy; 3. Local NGO activity and its consequences in Bolivian municipalities; 4. NGOs, associations, protest, and voting in Latin America; 5. Associational activity and participation in developing democracies; 6. Civil society, protest, and attitudes toward democracy; 7. Conclusions: articulating democratic discontent.

'Recent literature on the resurgence of protest in Latin America may have inadvertently reinforced the divide between protest politics and electoral politics. Boulding's first-rate analysis of NGOs' protest activity suggests that this divide is fluid rather than fixed. Her study makes an important contribution to the existing literature by explaining how the political context conditions the influence of NGO activity, and how this context, in turn, encourages NGOs to promote protests in some cases and voting in others. Boulding's study also provides a solid foundation about the effects of protest on new democracies, showing that protests are not always incompatible with the workings of young democracies. The methodological sophistication of her analysis is outstanding and well executed. Overall, Boulding has left a footprint on the contentious and comparative politics literatures.' Moises Arce, University of Missouri