One of the central issues raised by Mexico's late entry in achieving an electoral democracy in 2000 is who the most influential actors were and how that transition came about. Dolores Trevizo, a sociologist, spent the last two decades researching Mexico's political transformation, including extensive field research there in the 1990s, drawing together a wide range of qualitative and quantitative sources to sort out the impact of social movements on democratic change. She focuses her explanation on the understudied role of rural groups in political change, arguing that rural actors dominated the protest movements against Mexico's long-standing, semiauthoritarian model under the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI).

Treviso's exploration is distinguished by two original components. First, the author demonstrates that the interaction among social movements over time determines subsequent reactions from other groups and the state, often determining the larger political setting. She argues that the steady movement toward electoral democracy can be traced through such linkages since 1968. As she suggests, “my research illustrates that movements operate in a multi-organizational environment within civil society that includes supporters, political opponents, and, of course, bystander audiences. I show that the short- and long-term outcomes of a movement depend not only on its political allies and state responses but also on what its political opponents do” (p. 53). Second, and perhaps even more originally, Treviso demonstrates that rural peasants and agrarian capitalists, as a result of these interactions, complemented one another in demanding democratic change through the electoral arena. As she concludes, “The leaderships of these movements and countermovements then mobilized their social bases, forming the opposition political parties that weakened the PRI by shaming it in postelectoral mass rallies protesting electoral fraud” (p. 13).

The author recognizes the importance of international neoliberal economic influences that contributed to increased pressures favoring democratic change, but makes the case that the groups she analyzes set in motion other, more influential consequences leading to electoral reforms in Mexico in 1977, long before external economic trends exerted an impact. Indeed, much of her analysis focuses on the 1970s and early 1980s. Trevizo explores three groups—students, peasants, and businessman—during this era, establishing an important link between student activists in the late 1960s and peasant protest movements in the following decade. Some scholarly studies exist about the student movement of 1968, as well as about individual peasant movements in the 1970s, but scholarship overall neglects the linkage between these two sets of actors, as well as that between peasants and capitalists. Thus, not only does the author examine a larger political picture than what exists previously, but she also has combined two ideological group portraits representing the Left and the Right in the same analysis. She also believes that in unexpected ways, nonviolent social movements can produce electoral and structural reforms over time.

The historical catalyst selected by Trevizo to begin her analysis is the 1968 student rebellion, an event that initially resulted from narrow student demands centered on academic issues. The state's well-publicized massacre of a student demonstration in Mexico City, and its repressive measures following the killing of hundreds of students and bystanders, turned a student protest into the benchmark of Mexican presidential authoritarianism in the minds of many political, intellectual, and economic leaders, as well as among the general, educated public. Numerous student leaders who eluded authorities fled to the countryside where they helped organize peasant groups, contributing to a rise in rural protests in the 1970s. While some students joined guerrilla groups, others sought out small leftist parties, including the Mexican Communist Party (PCM), which maintained ties to unarmed peasant organizations. The growth and activity of these parties, in addition to provoking state repression, led to electoral reforms that increased opposition seats in the legislative branch through a proportional representation system.

While the author correctly argues that the 1977 electoral reforms were the most significant in that era, at least some recognition should be given to the earlier 1964 legislation, which, for the first time, established seats for members of congress from opposition parties based on their party's national percentage of the vote. An important conclusion about the peasant movement reached by the author is that President Luis Echeverría (1970–76), whose policies have been viewed as representing a pro-peasant populist posture, was far more repressive of these actual movements than has been previously acknowledged.

The mobilization of rural protest in the 1970s, often by ex-student radicals, went beyond confrontations with the state, and as Trevizo clearly demonstrates, forced agricultural capitalists also to challenge the state. The business community in the 1970s and 1980s began to organize independently of the corporatist business organizations long controlled by the Mexican government. These organizations, notably the Mexican Association of Employers (COPARMEX), initiated political protests and demonstrations, strengthening civil society. The peasants, by initiating large-scale land invasions in the last years of the Echeverría administration, pressured the president to expropriate agricultural properties, setting in motion businessmen's protests against economic intervention by the government. The independent business organizations formed political alliances with the leading opposition party, the National Action Party (PAN), supporting it financially and, even more importantly, becoming candidates for local, state, and national offices. Specifically, agrarian capitalists played a decisive role in rebuilding the PAN, creating a leadership group known as neo-Panistas. Many of these businessmen, who were sympathetic to economic neoliberalism, also helped to undermine Mexico's traditional corporatist system.

Trevizo carries her argument into the contemporary period, suggesting that Mexico's left-of-center Democratic Revolutionary Party (PRD), which lost the 2006 presidential election by less than one-half of 1% of the vote, has been sustained consistently by rural voters, many of whom were products of rural social movements. Analysts typically have pointed to urban popular movements as essential to the democratization process, but the author is suggesting that the rural source of partisan support has been undervalued. It should be mentioned, however, that poor Mexicans, both rural and urban, who were beneficiaries of government antipoverty programs, voted in large numbers for the PAN candidate in 2006. From long-term data collated on protest movements, she discovers that the majority of rural protest groups were affiliated with the PCM.

Although the author devotes too much space to setting forth her research goals, a major strength of this book is that throughout her analysis, she describes multiple models to shed light on the behavior of each of the three groups examined in detail. Trevizo raises fresh insights into the evolution of Mexico's democratic transition and on the role of these groups in generating electoral change, opposition party growth, and the establishment of human rights organizations. The author's broader theoretical findings on actions and reactions among social movements, and between those movements and the state, offer valuable comparative material for studies of past or ongoing change in other political systems.