Urban Protest in Mexico and Brazil
Kathleen Bruhn
Cambridge University Press, 2008

What factors cause social/political organizations and movements to decide to protest in order to advance their cause? At times, such protests have been strong even when their party ally is in power.

In this book, Kathleen Bruhn provides a detailed analysis of leftist social movements in Mexico City and Sao Paulo, Brazil, based on several years of fieldwork in these countries and a unique, author-generated database drawn from newspaper archives. Her research evaluates the relative roles of such things as party resources, internal leadership, culture, and party alliance in determining a group's propensity to protest, and when they are most likely to do it during a particular regime.

Review
"Not only does her comparative study of movements in Brazil and Mexico shed light on the dynamics of contention in an important and understudied regime context, but in focusing her analysis on the dynamic relationship between states, parties, and movements, the author offers a model for the way movements ought to be studied. This book deserves to find a broad audience in sociology and political science."

— Doug McAdam, Stanford University