Both of these books are about the consequences of democratization on interest-group intermediation in Mexico (and one also analyzes the effects of regime change in Brazil). In 2000, the then-opposition Party of National Action (PAN) won the presidential elections. More than 70 years of authoritarianism led by the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) came to an end with the election of Vicente Fox (2000–2006) to the presidency. Kathleen Bruhn's book on urban protest movements in Mexico City (as well as in São Paulo and Brasilia) is a systematic effort to assess the effects of regime change on protest movements. The collection of essays edited by historians Elisa Servín, Leticia Reina, and John Tutino explores whether the political transition will lead to revolutionary change in the way that late-colonial-era reforms led to independence from Spain by 1821 or the end of Porfirio Diaz's dictatorship (1877–1910) triggered the Mexican revolution (1910–17).

How competitive elections change the behavior of street protestors is a topic that sheds light on whether policymaking will become more institutionalized, a topic of concern to many students of democratization and democratic consolidation. In rather different ways, these books suggest that the transition has changed little. Political protest did not fall with, for example, the Party of Democratic Revolution's (PRD's) 1997 municipal electoral victory, one that gave it control of the mayor's office of Mexico City. Indeed, the shift in partisan control of city hall is associated with an increase in protests, even if, as Bruhn shows, most marches, blockades, and rallies in Mexico City have little to do with politics. This is perhaps the most important finding of her well-researched book, Urban Protest in Mexico and Brazil. The essays in Cycles of Conflict, Centuries of Change seem to say that a revolution is unlikely to occur in Mexico, even if long-term demands for social justice remain unmet. The declining importance of rural communities—so central to revolutionary outbreaks of the past—and intensifying globalization undermine the ability of indigenous and national groups to bring down the government.

Bruhn is a longtime student of the Mexican Left and of Mexican politics. The increasing competitiveness of Mexican politics understandably caught her interest and sparked her curiosity about the impact of protest activity on partisan politics. She sheds important light on these dynamics during the 1990s through an impressive database of protest activities painstakingly assembled and based upon newspaper reports in La Jornada and La Reforma of protest activities in Mexico City between 1992 and 2004. Bruhn also studies protest, as revealed in Correio Brasiliense and Jornal de Brasilia for Brasilia (the capital city) and in O Estado de São Paulo and Folha de São Paulo for São Paulo (the largest city) between 1995 and 2002 and 1989 and 2003, respectively. Comparisons with two Brazilian cities allow her to assess the impact of left parties—the Worker's Party (PT) in Brazil—that have strong links with the union movement on protest activity. In Mexico, it was the PRI that allied and co-opted the union movement during the twentieth century. The leftist PRD (the topic of her first book on Mexican politics) could not avail itself of these links to influence labor when it won the mayoralty in the 1997 elections.

Bruhn notes that protest was much higher in Mexico City than in either Brasilia or São Paulo. Mexico City has averaged more than 375 protests, far exceeding the rate in Brasilia (213) or São Paulo (165). In Mexico, slightly more than a quarter of the protests involved unions and a bit more than a third witnessed the use of aggressive tactics. The corresponding figures for Brasilia and São Paulo are more than 40% and 42%, respectively. She also finds that the number of protests is a function of the involvement (not surprisingly) of unions, neighborhood associations, and transportation workers. If protesters identified with the Left—even with leftist parties in power in city hall—they were more likely to take to the streets. And regardless of the political affiliation of municipal governments, honeymoon years are associated with important increases in protest activities.

A limitation of Bruhn's analysis is the absence of an explanation of why protest is so much higher in Mexico City. She is aware of this weakness and commendably notes that her statistical models explain only a very small share of the variance in protest activity. The author defends herself by claiming that her objective is to track the relationship between partisan and social conflict (pp. 51–53), not to account for the ebb and flow of protest activity. Fair enough. Nevertheless, a more systematic effort to make sense of reports of protest activity would have uncovered long-term dynamics that shed light on why democratization has done little to change behavior on the street. Several tables summarizing, for example, types of protest activity would have helped the reader place Bruhn's focus on partisan links in perspective. The extent and disruptiveness of protest raises the importance of studying what we might call protest entrepreneurs—leaders who survive (perhaps even get rich) by mobilizing clients to blockade streets and thus extort benefits from urban and federal government agencies. This is a time-honored practice, one that Pablo González Casanova noted in his classic account of the Mexican political system during the heyday of one-party rule, Democracy in Mexico (1970). Under the long-term domination of the PRI, street protests were one of the few—and potentially dangerous—ways that unions, political groups, and neighborhood associations had to extract concessions from the regime. So while it is valuable to know that most protests were not directed against a one-party dictatorship, it is perhaps even more important to have charted the dynamics of long-term protest behavior and its relationship with state power.

Like so many edited collections, Cycles of Conflict covers too much territory. Not all of the essays even examine whether Mexico will witness another social revolution, even if this was the stated aim of the book. The strongest essays, written by Antonio Annino, Reina, and Eric Van Young, in fact, explore how peasant communities in different periods of the nineteenth century appropriated liberal discourse to challenge political authorities and local elites. Each of these chapters extend and refine arguments about how rural peoples, who comprised a majority of Mexicans until well into the 1960s, helped shape the Mexican political past and present.

Alan Knight's essay is the most suggestive effort to accomplish the book's central objective because he refers to evidence about economic and political developments before 1810, 1910, and 2000. He argues that each period witnessed “socioeconomic deterioration and political alienation,” but that this was not enough to spark a revolution at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Both the Spanish colonial regime and the Porfiriato refused to liberalize the political system. By the 1990s, the PRI had agreed to hold competitive elections that did lead to the watershed 2000 results. Individual chapters by book editors Tutino and Servín make much the same points. Servín, in particular, summarizes some of the political science literature to show how an outwardly monolithic one-party system has given way to a separation-of-powers system that fragments power and inhibits political change. That none of these chapters explains whether the PRI was forced or agreed to relinquish state power is a weakness.

Although the volume was published in 2007, several of its chapters have a dated feel to them. Several of the essays were finished before 2000 and first appeared in a book published in Mexico in 2002 that was edited by Reina and Servín. Though the editors tell us that the chapters were extensively revised, several barely mention Mexico's hotly contested 2006 presidential elections. In his chapter on the state of the Mexican Left, Enrique Semo, a vocal supporter of Andrés Manuel López Obrador's 2006 campaign for the presidency, does little more than repeat the PRD's line that López Obrador was fraudulently deprived of his victory, despite the mountain of evidence that he lost a remarkably close election. Surely the (illegal) street mobilization organized by the PRD in the aftermath of the elections might be interpreted as the start of a social revolution, one that fizzled out and that therefore raises interesting implications for this book's central questions.

In the aggregate, the books under review suggest that despite outward and important democratization, much remains unchanged in two important cases of regime change in the developing world. Even with the Left able to compete and win elections, Bruhn notes that protestors still take to the streets in Mexico City, Brasilia, and São Paulo. The contributors to the edited volume conclude that there is unlikely to be another revolution, even if poverty and inequality persist. Both books, by implication, suggest that we should turn our attention to understanding the political economy of social movements in order to explain why social protestors have not given up street marching to extract concessions from the state.