Nicolás Somma

Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile | UC · Instituto de Sociología

Starting in the early 2000s, Chile experienced a series of protest waves spearheaded by high school and university students, environmentalists, feminist activists, indigenous groups, and workers among others (Donoso and von Bülow2017). In contrast to previous years, the massive protests staged across the country in 2019 were not led by one social m...

En este artículo analizamos un proceso de renovación de los actores y las ideas en la arena políti­ca nacional que comenzó en Chile durante la última década, pero en particular desde 2019. Esta incipiente apertura fue acelerada con el estallido social de fines de 2019, que puso en marcha un proceso de cambio constitucional actualmente en curso, que...

This article analyses the renewal process of the actors and ideas in Chile’s political arena during the last decade, focusing mainly on the last three years. The 2019 social uprising accelerated this incipient opening of the political arena by igniting a process of constitutional change that is currently underway. The uprising activated previously...

With the case of contemporary Chile at hand, the article examines the institutional contradiction between neoliberalism and democracy as a source of social protests and popular rebellions. Chile transitioned in 1990 to a representative democracy, presumably encouraging political equality and participation. However, given the orientation of governme...

Resumen 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...

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 . B...

Document provides further details about measurement and additional empirical results not available in the article 'Social and Political Trust in a Low Trust Society'

We study the causal relationship between social and political trust in a low trust society, a setting where this topic has received very little attention. We focus on contemporary Chile, a relatively consolidated new democracy lacking many of the conditions that fosters trust such as high socioeconomic equality, weak social divisions, or universal...

This chapter will examine how the Covid-19 pandemic has impacted social movements and collective action in Chile. While the pandemic affected collective action everywhere, its impact was more dramatic in Chile because this country had experienced a major uprising in late 2019. During this uprising, massive protests took place displaying a wide arra...

Contrary to what is commonly established in the literature, Chile’s student movement became influential once it had detached itself from political parties and governments. Adopting a contentious politics approach, this chapter analyzes this empirical puzzle by highlighting three processes that the student movement has experienced since the 1990s: s...

Using social exchange theory, this article presents a new theory for understanding the strategic choices made by social movement leaders—the “movement exchanges” theory. It looks at how leaders engage in exchanges of valued rewards with constituencies, institutional political players, bystander publics, and voluntary organizations. Leaders receive...

This article studies the Chilean social uprising of 2019 using the power cages theory. By mobilizing enormous amounts of disruptive power in the streets through varied protest tactics, ordinary Chileans challenged the economic and political power cages that regulated their daily lives. The uprising also reshaped affective power, broadening horizont...

Este artículo analiza las emociones durante la participación en el movimiento por la igualdad de derechos de Lesbianas, Gays, Bisexuales, personas Transgénero, Intersexuales y Queer (LGTBIQ) en Argentina y Chile. En base a encuestas aplicadas in situ en su principal marcha anual, buscamos contribuir a la literatura sobre movimientos sociales especi...

En el presente artículo nos proponemos estudiar las maneras en que el Estado chileno responde a las huelgas laborales mediante la acción policial, analizando 552 huelgas entre 2010 y 2015 registradas por el Observatorio de Huelgas Laborales (uah-coes). Los resultados sugieren que la decisión sobre a qué huelgas enviar policías tiene un carácter pol...

Durante la última década, diversos movimientos sociales han tomado protagonismo en la discusión pública, determinando agendas noticiosas y, en ocasiones, legislativas. En tal sentido, se trata de movimientos que han menguado el protagonismo político de los partidos, al quebrar su monopolio (así como el de los medios de co- municación) sobre la fija...

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 differen...

Resumen: Este artículo estudia los determinantes de la participación en protestas de jóvenes chilenos a partir de encuestas nacionales (2006-2015), usando modelos logísticos que predicen dicha participación. Primero, se identifica que los jóvenes de mayor estatus socioeconómico tienden a protestar más. Además, los jóvenes de izquierda protestan más...

This handbook is currently in development, with individual articles publishing online in advance of print publication. At this time, we cannot add information about unpublished articles in this handbook, however the table of contents will continue to grow as additional articles pass through the review process and are added to the site. Please note...

The study of social movements is currently one of the most active research fields in Latin American sociology. This article maps the vast literature on Latin American social move ments (LASMs) from the late 1980s to the present. After briefly discussing how scholars have conceptualized LASMs, it presents seven influential approaches: structuralism,...

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 sam...

We analyse the Chilean Spring of 2019-2020 – the fiercest social outburst in Chile during the last three decades. After discussing the combined role of long-standing grievances, political attitudes, and cultural change in triggering the outburst, we study the interplay among peaceful and violent protests and criminal activity. We argue that brutal...

This chapter analyzes the interactive relationships between social movements, policies, and political opportunity structures throughout successive protest waves, and how these relationships, in turn, shape social movements’ political impact. We do so by focusing on the student movement in Chile. Since the mid-2000s, protest waves spearheaded by hig...

Focusing on LGBTIQ demonstrations in Argentina and Chile, we study protesters' attachment to institutional politics, defined as their emotional and attitudinal connection with the political system. We show that Argentine LGBTIQ demonstrators are on average more attached to institutional politics than Chilean ones. This can be explained neither by d...

¿Por qué protesta la gente? ¿Quiénes protestan? ¿Qué hay de particular en la forma de protestar en Argentina? ¿Y de la forma usada en Chile? Comparamos aquí datos de encuestas en protestas que recolectamos durante tres años en Argentina y Chile con el objetivo de comprender las características de las personas que se manifiestan políticamente en la...

Por medio de un análisis de edad-período-cohorte aplicado a datos de encuestas realizadas entre 1994 y 2015, buscamos comprender el declive de la participación electoral ocurrido en Chile. Nuestro análisis confirma algunas hipótesis previas, pero también ilumina algunas tendencias nuevas. Primero, encontramos efectos de cohorte que indican que las...

Scholars agree that institutional and non-institutional (i.e., protest) politics are increasingly interrelated. One expression of this phenomenon is party protest – when leaders, activists, or sympathizers of political parties participate in protest events and identify themselves as such. Yet we know little about how often parties partake in protes...

Massive demonstrations are the staple of powerful social movements, but research on the factors affecting the size of demonstrations (in terms of number of attendants) is almost nonexistent. Why do some demonstrations pack long avenues with masses of people while other ones barely fill a street corner? Combining resource mobilization, political opp...

¿Quiénes son los que reivindican las causas del movimiento de los derechos humanos en Chile? La respuesta a esta pregunta la podemos encontrar en una encuesta que realizamos a los participantes de la marcha conmemorativa por el 11 de septiembre del año 2017.

This article presents a “distributional” approach for the study of political inequality of voice (hereinafter PIV) which complements the prevailing “categorical” approach. It measures distributional PIV using a country-level political Gini index based on the 2004 ISSP survey applied to 38 countries. This measure indicates how evenly political voice...

Este análisis tiene un doble objetivo. En primer lugar, buscamos analizar en qué medida los chilenos valoran y/o prefieren la democracia versus otras formas de gobierno, así como la evaluación concreta que tienen del funcionamiento de la democracia en el país. Esta también es fundamental para Chile: uno de los procesos políticos más relevantes de l...

¿Cómo se relacionan los manifestantes con la política? Encontramos un público altamente politizado pero que recurre poco a los partidos políticos y canales institucionales. Por ejemplo, solo el 28% se siente cercano a un partido político, menos del 10% participa en uno, y menos de la mitad votó en las elecciones presidenciales de 2013.

This chapter explores relations between discontent, social movements, and collective protest in Chile. I define discontent broadly as a feeling of discomfort with some aspect of the world, a definition that encompasses dissatisfaction with one’s personal economic situation or distrust in political authorities through to the perception of abuse by a...

Desde el año 2011 el movimiento estudiantil y otros movimientos compuestos por ambientalistas, trabajadores, feministas y grupos en desacuerdo con el sistema de pensiones, han demandado reformas estructurales en un conjunto de ámbitos de política pública. Estas movilizaciones no solo han generado un debate sobre cómo reformar distintos ámbitos de p...

Using 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 on...

Political trust – of citizens in government, parliament or political parties – has been centre stage in political science for more than half a century, reflecting ongoing concerns about the legitimacy of representative democracy. This Handbook offers the first truly global perspective on political trust and integrates the conceptual, theoretical, m...

This chapter studies the changes in the relations between social movements and institutional politics in contemporary Chile. It is argued that the increase in collective protest during the last decade partially stems from an ongoing process of detachment of movements from political institutional actors. Disappointed by the absence of reforms that c...

Recent literature on the Chilean party system has noted that its characteristics changed under the impact of Pinochet’s long dictatorship. The right allegedly became a tool for maintaining his regime’s “legacies,” and this generated a binary pattern of electoral competition between “proauthoritarian” and “prodemocratic” forces after the return to d...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore the relationship between social media use and protest participation in Latin America. It advances two questions. First, does social media increase the chances of protest participation at the individual level, as prior research shows for advanced democracies? Second, in a region with glaring economic...

Trust is an essential ingredient of human relationships and economic exchanges among them. On the other hand, blindspots are harmful omissions in strategy implementation due to reasons such as corporate inertia or management obsessiveness in pursuing a certain vision mismatched with reality. This article outlines the main areas in which customer tr...

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 exclu...

CV English Nicolás Somma ---------------------------------------------------

La protesta colectiva creció recientemente en Chile, pero sabemos poco sobre las características y los determinantes de las tácticas empleadas. Analizando más de 2 300 eventos de protesta entre 2000 y 2012, exploramos los determinantes de la adopción de cuatro tipos de tácticas: convencionales, culturales, disruptivas y violentas. Las regresiones m...

Collective protest grew recently in Chile, yet we know little about the characteristics and determinants of the tactics employed. By examining more than 2300 protest events between 2000 and 2012, we explore the determinants of the adoption of four types of tactics: conventional, cultural, disruptive and violent. Multivariate regression models show...

Qué ocurre con la confianza cuando los gobiernos locales se vuelven virtuales? Explorando los determinantes de la confianza en sitios web municipales en Chile This article explores the formation of trust among local Chilean government websites (municipalities) and their stakeholders, as well as their relationship with the real local government. The...

This article explores the formation of trust among local Chilean government websites (municipalities) and their stakeholders, as well as their relationship with the real local government. The results show a prevalence in the trust of the virtual environment, the determining factors are therefore analyzed. The article is based on a mixed methodology...

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 s...

Este artículo plantea quince tesis sobre las protestas colectivas y el conflicto en el Chile contemporáneo, con énfasis en los últimos cinco años. El tema es importante debido a los altos e inesperados niveles de movilización social de dicho período y a su impacto en la clase política. Abordo varias preguntas relacionadas: ¿qué características tien...

Political 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 perspe...

Trust is an essential ingredient of constructive human relationships, including economic exchanges. Blindspots are harmful omissions in strategy implementation due to reasons such as corporate inertia or management obsession in pursuing a certain vision mismatched with reality. This article outlines the main areas in which customer trust is under s...

This essay explores the paradoxes of social cohesion in Latin America, with social cohesion being understood as the force that keep societies united and allow individuals to become integrated to them. We argue that social cohesion relies on three spheres: the market, the political community, and the civil society. We compare Latin America with the...

Este capítulo argumenta que durante las últimas dos décadas se ha producido en Chile un proceso de autonomización de la protesta, esto es, una creciente desconexión entre los movimientos sociales y la institucionalidad política formal, particularmente la de centro-izquierda. Rastreamos este proceso empíricamente en dos niveles. Por una parte, consi...

Este ensayo explora las paradojas de la cohesión social en América Latina, entendiendo por cohesión social aquello que permite “mantener unidas” a las sociedades e integrar a los individuos a las mismas. Planteamos que la cohesión social depende de tres ámbitos: el mercado, la comunidad política y la sociedad civil. Una comparación entre América La...

Este artículo sistematiza los hallazgos y reflexiones de la investigación social sobre la participación ciudadana y activismo digital en América Latina. Específicamente, explora las maneras en que un amplio abanico de movimientos sociales y organizaciones ciudadanas de diversos países de la región utilizan la internet para llevar adelante sus deman...

Although most empirical research on political trust has focused on the so called developed world, previous scholarly work regarding this topic within Latin American countries has provided some interesting insights. Most notably, Latin American societies show lower levels of political trust when compared to other regions of the world (Catterberg and...

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 re...

Resumen: Este capítulo argumenta que durante las últimas dos décadas se ha producido en Chile un proceso de autonomización de la protesta, esto es, una creciente desconexión entre los movimientos sociales y la institucionalidad política formal, particularmente la de centro-izquierda. Rastreamos este proceso empíricamente en dos niveles. Por una par...

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 s...

El objetivo del artículo es analizar el proceso de trabajo de una empresa uruguaya de soft-ware. El rasgo notable a señalar en esta empresa es que la innovación se instala en el proceso de trabajo. La empresa se ubica entre las empresas a nivel mundial, en las que se verifica un movimiento de retorno del trabajo al trabajador, contradictorio y de s...

I. Introducción Este artículo trata en términos generales sobre la situación de los egresados de las carreras terciarias –universitarias y no universitarias– en los departamentos de Uruguay, y específi camente sobre sus relaciones con el mercado laboral. En este marco, los objetivos centrales son tres: 1. estudiar la distribución de los egresados t...

In this essay I present three claims regarding the current (2011-2012) wave of student protest in Chile. The first one is that the student movement, despite its apparent discontinuity with Chilean neoliberalism, is actually its unintended byproduct. Specifically, the contradictions inherent in the rapid development of a system of higher education g...

Prior research shows that members of voluntary organizations are more likely to protest than nonmembers. But why, among members, do some protest while others do not? I explore whether organizational involvement-the extent in which members engage in the "life" of their organizations-affects protest. I identify four dimensions of involvement-time and...

Resumen En un contexto de elevada conflictividad laboral y un sindicalismo debilitado como el chileno, estudiamos cómo responde el Estado a las huelgas laborales mediante la acción policial. ¿Por qué en algunos casos la policía acude al lugar de la huelga y en otros no? ¿Y por qué, una vez presente, actúa con niveles variables de violencia? Utiliza...

Why do some individuals accept invitations to participate in protest events while others do not? Using the Citizen Participation Study, the author finds that targets invited by recruiters to whom they are strongly tied are more likely to protest than those invited by weak or absent ties. Such effect, however, is hypothesized to vary across the soci...

This paper provides an empirical examination of the effects of religiosity and of religious identities on a broad range of attitudes in seven Latin American countries. It is based on ECosociAl, a new national survey of large urban areas. The topics covered in the paper include the extent to which these religious variables affect levels of civic par...

Pinochet's dictatorship is widely believed to have changed Chilean politics by creating a new authoritarian/democratic political cleavage that reorganized the party system and voter alignments. However, religious and class differences have not lost their salience in determining political attitudes in Chile. An original survey focusing primarily on...