questions to get at this puzzle. How does NGO activity influence participation at the local level
in weakly democratic settings? Do international NGOs and local NGOs have the same impact?
The bulk of work on NGOs in the developing world is based on case study analyses of
the NGO scene in single countries. While rich in detail and context, existing case studies do not
systematically evaluate the effects of NGOs. Because of serious obstacles to data collection at
the local level, there has been very little systematic statistical work on these questions. This
paper provides an empirical test of these questions using new municipal-level data from Bolivia.
The data collection for this project was an involved project in itself. I compiled data on NGOs in
each municipality from a Bolivian government registry of NGOs published in 2004 (VIPFE
2003). Data on protests were coded from newspaper wire stories according to the coding
conventions of the Latin American Protest Project (Garrison 2001). Various control variables
were found in the 2001 census provided by the Instituto Nacional de Etadisticas (INE 2006).
Comparing across municipalities has several advantages over country level studies,
which until recently have been the norm in political science research. First, existing theories
expect the effects of NGOs to be primarily local. Thus it makes sense to try to observe these
effects at the local level. Second, there is a great deal more variation on all the variables of
interest at the local level than at the national level. And third, a large-N analysis within a single
country helps control for many of the factors that can confound cross-national studies, including
cultural differences and other country-specific issues.
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Convention