Protests, Signalling and Coalitions: Opposition-Movement Interactions in Argentina’s Anti-Government Protests (2012-2013)

The political science literature tends to minimise the relevance of protests events over electoral processes, generally considering these but expressions of socio-economic grievances rather than constitutive factors in electoral dynamics. Not only this, but the causal arrow generally points the other way, with features of the party system, such as party fragmentation, acting as major drivers of social mobilisation. This paper challenges this conventional view by examining the Argentine protest cycle of 2012-2013, the contentious cycle that preceded the 2015 presidential election of Mauricio Macri, and the end of over decade of left-of-centre ‘Kirchnerist’ administrations. Drawing on detailed empirical data, it will be shown that the protest cycle had major effects over opposition politics, incentivising the formation of electoral alliances and factioning within the ruling party, both fundamental occurrences for the unexpected defeat the government suffered in the 2013 legislative primaries, and for the centrifugal dynamics that ensued. In particular, we argue that the protests acted as signalling and elite-learning mechanism, indicating opposition parties of the extent of discontent with the government, and providing them with ready-made oppositional framings, which became incorporated in their campaigns. Moreover, the evidence shows that the increasing polarization that accompanied the protests facilitated contacts between anti-government activists and opposition leaders, and that these contacts stimulated the formation of new electoral coalitions, as activists provided opposition leaders with ‘decoding’ keys to read the protests as an opportunity rather than a risk. In this manner, the paper illuminates the non-institutionalized interface between protest movements and institutions, as contributes to the under-explored issue of movement-opposition interactions.