This is an interesting book that engages a debate situated in the American tradition of political analysis. Using a sophisticated combination of quantitative and qualitative methods, Holzner criticises rational-choice explanations of why the ‘poor’ participate politically less than the ‘rich’ in Mexico after the transition to democracy, or, stated otherwise, why the political participation of the poor has diminished in the last decade or so. It seems, given the construction of the argument, that this diagnosis can claim some validity for Latin America more generally. The author contends that this process has been caused by institutional changes derived from both the adoption of neoliberal economic policies and the effects of the very transitions to democracy.

The hypothesis is the first problem of this book. Given the multiple forms of democratic experimentation that are going on in most countries of Latin America, and the magnitude of popular mobilisations, it is difficult to accept that the poor participate less than before in the political life of the region. Certainly, the Mexican case is the less optimistic, but even here there's more political action than there appears to be. The problem lies in a conceptual restriction imposed by a very narrow idea of the political. The concept (taken as given and not problematised in the book) inherits the limits of a model that assumes that the individual citizen is the only carrier of political action, which means only voting, campaigning, contacting politicians and protesting. These are the forms contemplated in the survey of the international academic network called Comparative Studies on Electoral Systems (CSES). CSES's survey (especially 2003) is the main source of data for Holzner's book. The survey assumes that citizens of all types share a common understanding of the meaning of the concepts they are asked about. However, that's not the case in very unequal societies. The concept of ‘protest’ would be a good example of this.

A survey like this cannot capture the different forms of political action people use in countries in which the individual citizen only exists as such occasionally, given the weakness of the rule of law and the informal character of most markets. In Latin America most people have to develop some kind of political action (usually collective action) in order to call the attention of the authorities and get problems resolved. The Indian political scientist Partha Chattarjee calls this kind of action ‘the politics of the governed’. In Mexico City there are hundreds of demonstrations every year, and in virtually all the regions of Central and Southern Mexico there are thousands of collective actions of all types each day, including the blocking of highways and roads, the seizure (toma) of both city streets and official buildings, and all sorts of mass mobilisations. There have been many more actions of this type in recent years than before. Hyper-mobilisation is one of the responses to the loss of corporations' intermediary functions and one indicator of the fact that people now have more political space to protest (and the need to do it), given the historical incapacity of formal state institutions to deliver goods and services to people.

Holzner states correctly that the neoliberal transformation weakened the corporatist regime and that electoral democratisation created a new set of rules of access to the political system through which emerging political elites compete with each other using new forms of decentralised clientelistic public policies. But this does not mean that in the authoritarian regime citizens had more voice than nowadays. Corporations had more power, but they had a limited, politically privileged clientele and were not in any way a channel of popular political participation, even less so for the underprivileged. Most people remained outside of the political arena, whether formal or informal. Now the channels of contact between politicians and citizens have multiplied, fragmenting the political arena and making it impossible for any given group to influence decisively the national political scenario. Yet this does not mean that poor people participate less than before in politics, but rather that the forms and spaces they use for that purpose have changed. Certainly, old forms of political control remain as well. The process varies from region to region and over time, but overall there are more protests and more actors involved in them than before.

Holzner did his fieldwork in Oaxaca, the ‘Mexican Bolivia’ in political terms. It is striking that he never mentions in his book the impressive popular mobilisations that took place there in 2006. The ‘Oaxaca Commune’, the massive toma of Oaxaca City's historical downtown by thousands of teachers and poor residents for several months, was the outcome of two years of mobilisations. The toma created a new public space and led to interesting experiments in self-government in some areas of the city. The movement was ultimately defeated, but for months represented a radical form of resistance to local authoritarianism. A few years later, in 2010, the PRI lost the elections for governor for the first time. The uprising had lasting consequences, even in defeat.

This book is a technically refined effort to deal with a tradition of political analysis that explains the apparent absenteeism of citizens from politics by taking the huge differences between citizens in income, knowledge and networking as causes of the ‘exit’ of the underprivileged: politics become a matter for elites, given the costs and complexity of intervening in formal politics. Holzner tries to demonstrate that such citizen exit is caused by economic and political structures more than by social inequality, and he does so in a creative way. My friendly critique is that in order to evaluate popular political participation in countries like Mexico it is necessary to open up the concept of the political, and therefore that of participation. Otherwise, the analyst will be trapped in a false problem.