Paper short abstract:

Why are some civic advocacy campaigns able to achieve policy goals? Based on an evaluation of an assistance program to civic coalitions in Mexico, we argue that success depends on the developing institutions to overcome collective action problems, and fitting strategy to local context.

Paper long abstract:

Why are some civic associations able to achieve desired policy outcomes through advocacy campaigns while others are not? Development assistance often aims to assist civic associations in building capacity to achieve their policy goals. The determinants of advocacy success have important implications for the targeting, design, implementation, and evaluation of aid to civic associations. Based on original research conducted as part of an ex post evaluation of a United States Government (USG) assistance program to anti-corruption civic coalitions in Mexico, we argue that the success of anti-corruption advocacy campaigns depends on the strategic interactions and decisions of coalition members within a political and institutional context.

These contextual factors, including political opportunity structure, historical context, and organizational resource endowments affect campaign results by constraining the advocacy strategies that are available to associations. Given those constraints, campaign success depends upon association selection of a basket of advocacy strategies, and the capacity of the association to overcome collective action problems.

We demonstrate this argument through case studies of anti-corruption advocacy campaigns by coalitions of civic associations in three Mexican states - Nuevo León, Coahuila, and Querétaro. These case studies are based on review of primary and secondary sources, and field research, including semi-structured key informant interviews. We find that more successful anti-corruption coalitions in Nuevo León and Coahuila identified comparative advantages based on organizational resource endowments, leveraged information, expertise, and social networks to influence decision makers, and presented a credible threat of citizen mobilization beyond the key actors in the coalition.