In this study, Marcos E. Pérez seeks to explain what keeps working-class activists in Argentina’s Unemployed Workers’ (or “piquetero”) Movement mobilized decades after the first pickets spontaneously arose. This is a fascinating question because it touches on an experiment that is more than two decades old and has profound implications for the future of market reforms and democratic consolidation in Latin America. Dr. Pérez is a sociologist and his findings are most relevant to that discipline. The book however advances important debates about contentious politics taking place among political scientists.

Argentina, the country on which the book is based, is one of the most contentious polities in Latin America. The country is one of Mason W. Moseley’s (2018) “protest states” (Protest State: The Rise of Everyday Contention in Latin America), a new democracy where rates of protest have rivaled those of conventional political participation (e.g., joining a political party or volunteering for a political campaign) for years. Argentina has a weakly institutionalized democracy despite undergoing a democratic transition in 1983. This is in stark contrast to two of its neighbors—Uruguay and Chile—with Uruguay’s considered the strongest democracy in the region.

Argentina began the post–World War II period with the highest levels of development in Latin America. As the region embraced market reforms, unemployment at first increased but then declined in the 1980s. In Argentina, however, unemployment never came down (p. 110); quite the contrary, it became a long-term problem. In the late 1990s, those excluded from the formal economy turned to blocking traffic to draw attention to their plight. What followed is “the largest movement of unemployed workers in the world” (p. 21) and one of the most innovative social experiments of the twenty-first century: the use of state funds to provide activists with food and workfare in exchange for participation in group activities.

Piquetero organizations operate according to a principle that could be formulated as “to each according to her need and contribution.” Individuals who approach an organization looking for help have the opportunity to become involved in its activities, earning the benefits they receive while keeping politicians attuned to their needs. Some activists in poor health even qualify for a pension or two weeks’ vacation per year without having to work (p. 129). This gives many working-class Argentinians who would otherwise be unemployed a chance to find dignity and purpose in life through their participation in enterprises such as work cooperatives, soup kitchens, and milk cups. They also take part in self-improvement schemes like vocational training and remedial high-school classes (p. 94).

Pérez’s study is based on more than three years of ethnographic study in the Buenos Aires metropolitan area, where the worst deterioration in the labor market since the 1970s and “the largest piquetero organizations developed” (p. 39). Pérez conducted in-depth interviews with 133 current and former piqueteros in nine different organizations. He used snowball sampling to locate individuals who had quit the movement. Leaders and rank-and-file activists are featured in his interviews, with a majority belonging to the latter group. He was also a keen observer of their activities. The result is a nuanced and balanced account of the factors that explain why some join and stay in these groups while others do not.

Pérez makes several contributions to the study of social movements. In so doing, he sheds light on questions and explanatory factors that have not received a great deal of scholarly attention, at least in political science. First, he seeks to understand not just what motivates individuals to join these movements but also what keeps them mobilized long after they enroll. He finds that contrary to what we might expect, many join despite being initially hostile to, apprehensive of, or indifferent toward the goals and activities of their organizations. Second, Pérez finds that activists remain committed not so much because of ideological alignment, but because the organizations they join become their new families and give them the chance that society denies them to live dignified, responsible lives. This occurs when activists have the opportunity to engage in routines associated with a respectable working-class lifestyle such as showing up on time for a job, foreswearing substance abuse, and caring for the vulnerable in the community. The result is an emphasis on the emotional and affective aspects of individual behavior in organizations. In Pérez’s view, these are more relevant explanatory factors than rational ones, despite the attention the latter receive.

Findings regarding the micro-level determinants of individual participation in picketing organizations, in particular the gender-specific ways in which activism manifests itself, form a solid foundation for scholars to investigate the economic and political consequences of the Argentine workfare movement. Political economists may wish to examine to what extent this model is economically viable and whether it can be exported to countries facing similar social, economic, and political decay. Political scientists can ask whether the civic participation picketing organizations engender also serves as a foundation for other, more conventional forms of political participation such as voting or joining a political party. If so, piquetero organizations could function as veritable “schools for democracy.”

The author did a remarkable job transcribing and interpreting the in-depth interviews he conducted. Except for a few clauses, the quotations and field notes gathered are clear in the meanings they convey. With this material at hand, however, the factors that explain continued as opposed to abandoned mobilization could have been more systematically examined. The study would also benefit from more attention to features of the organizations that make them successful. A flexible internal structure, for example, is mentioned several times (e.g., on pages 52 and 68). Organizational isomorphism also seems to be a helpful trait: we read that “most piquetero organizations operate internally and externally in relatively homogenous ways” (p. 55). But we are not told why exactly these traits are beneficial. This is important because Pérez remarks that piqueteros face little oversight of their day-to-day activities by the government (p. 117).

It would also help to have explained how tactics such as “contingent partnerships between different groups” (p. 56) keep activism going and organizations financially viable. While these tactics can increase the likelihood of goal attainment, they can also lead to free riding. The author hints at this possibility when he writes that “although the Kirschner administration privileged the relationship with allied groups, organizations that did not support the government still benefited from state resources” (p. 62). But Pérez doesn’t provide a sense of how big a problem free-riding is. Scholars of organizations representing marginalized or subaltern groups such as labor unions usually see encompassing and centralized organizations as better able to overcome their collective action problem than more fragmented ones. It would also have been useful to explore these themes in the case of unemployed workers’ movements. These quibbles aside, Marcos E. Pérez has authored an important book on social movements and protest that fills gaps in the literature, in particular on the interplay between individual motivations and group behavior. The book should be required reading for anyone interested in contentious politics, Latin America, and Argentine politics.