Explaining variation in social mobilization has been a main goal of all strands of social movement theory. Different theories have offered political, social, and cultural accounts to explain variation in the levels of mobilization across time, space, and social groups. Most explanations nevertheless do not problematize a key issue: what do we mean by more or less mobilization? Many studies equate social mobilization with the frequency of protests, foregoing the opportunity to explain variation in the number of participants, duration, state repression, disruption, and other dimensions of protest. This is an important issue in social movement theory, as I claim that one independent variable may have different effects on different dimensions of social mobilization. More specifically, I assess the effect of party linkages-the connections between society and political parties-and grievances associated to college enrollment and funding on the frequency, size, and presence of state repression of protest events. Using an original dataset of more than 4,700 college student protest events in Latin America, this study analyzes the effect of linkages with incumbent parties and higher education enrollment levels and funding on these three distinct dimensions of social mobilization. The results of negative binomial, linear and tobit regressions show that stronger linkages with parties in power decrease protest frequency, the number of protest participants and the use of state repression in mobilizations, but that the size of the effect are markedly different and at different levels of statistical. The same occurs with the effect of college enrollment and finance. This study, therefore, emphasizes the importance of carefully defining social mobilization as a dependent variable, and contributes to our understanding of the relationship between party politics and social movements.
