Measuring the Impact of Popular Organization:

would like to thank Karen Remmer for her guidance in the grant proposal process which made the field work possible and Ken Roberts and Ken Coleman for reading many drafts. I would also like to thank the members of the Frente Democrático Campesino. This work would not have been possible without all of their generous help. 2 Introduction The research on social movements and popular organizing 1 in Latin America has not yet adequately addressed one very fundamental question: Why do social movements matter? The social movement literature has largely focused on explaining the causes of collective action rather than the impact of autonomous organizations on the political system. This focus stems from two underlying motivations. First, theories of revolution provide most of the theoretical framework for understanding popular movements; and revolutionary theory takes the importance of the outcome, a revolution, as a given. Secondly, collective action is a persistent anomaly in the rational choice research paradigm. Paradigmatic theory-building thus leads many researchers in the direction of explaining causes rather than outcomes of protest movements. Recently, however, scholars have become aware of the need to investigate the impact of social movements on the broader political system. 2 This paper offers a theoretical model for understanding the impact of social movements on the political system, and then provides statistical evidence of one social movement's impact on electoral competition in rural municipalities. The objective of this paper is first, to put forth an explanation of how popular organizations can impact the political system and second, to provide a clear demonstration of this process. I will argue that when organizations of civil society confront political openings from above with an appropriate response, important changes can be made in the political system. While this study focuses on one popular movement in one state of Mexico, it establishes a basis for understanding the potential effects of the rise of strong opposition challenges to the ruling Partido Revolucionario Institutional (Institutional Revolutionary Party, PRI). This study will test the hypothesis that popular organizations do impact the political system in a meaningful and measurable way. The empirical evidence to support this hypothesis comes from an examination of local level politics in the rural districts of the state of Chihuahua. The data is the result of field research carried out in the summer of 1995. An analysis of electoral results throughout the state is linked with a study of …