How did governance in Kirchner's Argentina and Chávez's Venezuela interact with popular mobilisation? How have popular sectors engaged with and participated in Left-of-centre governance? Using ethnographic data, we argue that the answers to these questions lie in three social mechanisms that we call recognition, incorporation and selective mobilisation. We analyse how activists and participants interpreted and contested these mechanisms, paying attention to how they informed the everyday life of activism and the situated actions of participants. Underscoring their socially embedded and path-dependent nature, we argue that these mechanisms shaped mobilisation differently in each country.

Under the Chávez government, the incorporation and participation of popular sectors, which is the essence of ‘social-based democracy’, has been quantitatively and qualitatively different from socialist government and welfare-state strategies of the past. Venezuela's social-based democracy focuses on education, job skills, ideology, transformation of values and empowerment, achievements which Chavista leaders consider to be imperatives for socialist development. However, Chavista social programmes have been undermined by institutional weakness, are sometimes not cost-effective, and are politicised. Conflicting views among the Chavistas on the role of the state hinge on the issue of whether initiatives from above in favour of social-based democracy represent a viable strategy for far-reaching change. The Venezuelan government's changing priorities after 2007 have detracted from the primacy of social programmes.