The Pink Tide is characterized by two key features. First, its base in the mass mobilizations that began roughly in the second half of the 1990s. As structural adjustment and austerity threw growing swaths into the economic insecurity of the informal sector, laboring classes were also severed from their established links to establishment parties. Facing an intensified instability and material insecurity and cut off from parties that once represented their interests vis-à-vis the state, the region’s “dis-incorporated” masses responded with increasingly militant protest. As traditional political institutions lost the ability to effectively represent the interest of working people, and basic living conditions deteriorated, mass defiance grew in waves. This characteristic — expanding mobilization amid political disintegration — is central to the rise of the Pink Tide. The present comparative analysis, therefore, relates to cases where it was prominent, chiefly Venezuela, Argentina, and Bolivia.