Suchergebnisse

This essay reviews the following works:
Anatomía de la derecha chilena: Estado, mercado y valores en tiempos de cambio. Edited by Stéphanie Alenda. Santiago: Fondo de Cultura Económica and Universidad Andrés Bello, 2020. Pp. 380. $19.04 paperback. ISBN: 9789562892025.Presidencialismo a la chilena: Coaliciones y cooperación política, 1990–2018. By Mireya Dávila Avendaño. Santiago: Editorial Universitaria, 2020. Pp. 312. $20.36 paperback. ISBN: 9789561126923.La transición inacabada: El proceso político chileno 1990–2020. By Claudio Fuentes S. Santiago: Catalonia, 2021. Pp. 392. $22.64 paperback. ISBN: 9789563248388.Política y movimientos sociales en Chile: Antecedentes y proyecciones del estallido social de octubre 2019. Edited by Manuel Antonio Garretón. Santiago: LOM Ediciones, 2021. Pp. 308. $17.97 paperback. ISBN: 9789560014061.La democracia semisoberana: Chile después de Pinochet. By Carlos Huneeus. Santiago: Taurus, 2014. Pp. 614. $32.34 paperback. ISBN: 9789563477832.The Left Hand of Capital: Neoliberalism and the Left in Chile. By Fernando Ignacio Leiva. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2021. Pp. viii + 391. $33.95 paperback. ISBN: 9781438483610.En vez del optimismo: Crisis de representación política en el Chile actual. By Juan Pablo Luna. Santiago: Catalonia, 2017. Pp. 151. $12.58 paperback. ISBN: 9789563245431.La chusma inconsciente: La crisis de un país atendido por sus propios dueños. By Juan Pablo Luna. Santiago: Catalonia, 2021. Pp. 377. $14.02 paperback. ISBN: 9789563248999.Neoliberal Resilience: Lessons in Democracy and Development from Latin America and Eastern Europe. By Aldo Madariaga. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020. Pp. vii + 348. $43.81 hardcover. ISBN: 9780691182599.Octubre chileno: La irrupción de un nuevo pueblo. By Carlos Ruiz Encina. Santiago: Penguin Random House, 2020. Pp. 117. $10.78. ISBN: 9789566042259.

Once upon a time, pluralist (Dahl 1961) and modernization theories (Lipset 1959) described liberal democracy as a political regime that tended to exclude violence, insurgency, and corruption. A few decades later, Francis Fukuyama (1992) argued that in the long run, liberal democracy would triumph over other political alternatives, and about the same time Samuel Huntington (1991) revealed a massive wave of democratization (or redemocratization) in different parts of the world.

This article explores how variations in party systems shape the intensity of insurgency against national authorities in nineteenth-century Latin America. I argue that, under certain conditions, two-party systems may polarize and lead to intense insurgency because they simplify the process of blame attribution, encourage the incumbent party to exclude its opponent from power positions, and motivate leaders to emphasize extreme ideological positions. Conversely, multiparty systems may encourage flexible electoral and congressional alliances among parties, resulting in lower insurgency. I test the argument in four nineteenth-century Latin American republics with different insurgency levels. While in Colombia and Uruguay two-party systems polarized and fueled intense insurgency across the century, Chile and Costa Rica developed flexible multiparty systems that prevented polarization and favored low insurgency.

AbstractPolitical sociologists often assume that widespread grievances require a long legacy of intergroup oppression. Yet in nineteenth‐century Uruguay, supporters of the White and Red political parties developed intense grievances against each other even though a legacy of oppression was missing. For explaining this puzzle I present an alternative perspective. It states that grievances first originate among political elites, which mobilize the masses through selective incentives in order to impose their will. If elites and masses are bound by close ties, sustained mobilization facilitates cross‐class group identification and allows grievances to "trickle down" from the top to the bottom of the social structure.

Although social movement organizations (SMOs) are often depicted as mobilizing intensive resources from their individual members, we lack a systematic assessment of this issue. Based on the notion of 'modern social movements' I argue that SMOs mobilize fewer human and monetary resources from their members than other voluntary organizations do. A regression model using a survey representative of American adults shows that, when compared to other organization members, SMO members generally contribute significantly lower amounts of money and time. They are also less likely to attend, plan or chair meetings, and give speeches on behalf of the organization. The only exception to this pattern is that SMO members are more likely to write letters for the organization than other members do.

There is abundant research on how social cleavages shape political preferences in developed countries with uninterrupted democracies, but we know less about this topic for middle income countries with recently restored democracies. In this analysis of the Chilean case, we examine with Latinobarometer survey data from 1995 to 2009 the evolution of social cleavages as shapers of political preferences (measured with a left–right self-placement scale). We find a general process of dealignment across time, indicated by the decreasing association between political preferences on the one hand, and class, religion and regime preferences on the other. We tentatively link dealignment at the mass level to the strategies pursued by political parties operating in a political and economic context that encourages ideological moderation and convergence to the centre. These strategies weaken the differentiated signals needed for sustaining an aligned citizenry.

La represión es el resultado de acciones policiales y una herramienta de poder del gobierno para relacionarse con la sociedad movilizada. Ésta ha sido bastante estudiada en contextos anglosajones, pero menos en América Latina y Chile. Por ello, este artículo buscó responder si algunos grupos movilizados son más reprimidos que otros y si los gobiernos de centro-derecha reprimen más o menos que los gobiernos de centro-izquierda. Para esto, se usó una base de datos de 4,856 marchas callejeras ocurridas en Chile entre 2010 y 2019 y se modeló la represión policial hacia los manifestantes usando como predictores los grupos movilizados y la ideología del gobierno nacional, además de algunas variables control. Los resultados revelan que los gobiernos de centro-derecha reprimen con mayor intensidad a los manifestantes que los gobiernos de centro-izquierda, donde la represión es particularmente más fuerte hacia a estudiantes e indígenas. Los resultados se discuten en función de la fortaleza de los vínculos entre movimientos sociales y la política institucional complementando el enfoque teórico de las debilidades, uno de los más importantes en la literatura sobre represión de la protesta.

Many studies reveal that socioeconomic resources increase protest participation, lending more political voice to the affluent and reinforcing preexisting political inequality. But existing studies ignore whether this holds across different protest issues. We argue that some issues reinforce political inequality, while other ones do not. We differentiate between survival protests—in which people react to direct threats to their material and social survival—and furtherance protests—which press authorities to make policy changes that seek to improve some aspect of society. Regression models with Latin American survey data show that people with higher socioeconomic status are overrepresented in furtherance protests, by implication reinforcing preexisting political inequality. However, survival protests attract people socioeconomically similar to national averages, contributing to a more balanced political field. Our results emphasize the need to reconsider the place of issues in the study of protest participation, political inequality, and political behavior in general.

AbstractUsing Latinobarometer survey data, we study the evolution of religious identities among the adult populations of 17 Latin American countries between 1996 and 2013. We find several interesting patterns. First, the current religious landscape is highly dynamic and is becoming increasingly pluralist among a majority of countries. Changes derive not only from the growth of Evangelicals, as commonly assumed, but also from the sharp rise in irreligious individuals. Second, religious change cannot be convincingly explained by important theories such as secularization, religious economies, and anomie. However, the predictions derived from anomie theory seem more useful for understanding Evangelical growth. Finally, our cohort analysis indicates that aggregate religious change largely results from individual-level change across time—religious conversion and apostasy—rather than from generational replacement. Still, there are interesting variations across countries in that respect.