The growth of civil society organizations in Mexico: a structural change analysis

ABSTRACT Understanding how citizens’ organizations arise and endure is one of the most challenging topics in civil society research of emerging democracies. This article aims to explain the causes of the growing number of civil society organizations in Mexico throughout the country’s democratization process. Drawing upon an institutionalist perspective, this analysis tests the hypothesis that a transformation in the political opportunities structure changed citizens’ incentives to create formal organizations. We use a linear regression analysis, which treats the probable dates of the breaks in a time series (1950–2014) as unknown variables to be estimated. The identification of specific breaking points is a necessary input for the elaboration of an appropriate explanans, which in this argument is associated with a process of institutional change. Our goal is to contribute to the understanding of the conditions that explain the emergence of a civil society sector in new democracies.