Content uploaded by Nicolás Somma
Author content
All content in this area was uploaded by Nicolás Somma on Oct 19, 2018
Content may be subject to copyright.
A preview of the PDF is not available
When Do Political Parties Move to the Streets? Party Protest in Chile
Abstract
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 protests, which ones do so, and under which conditions. Using data on more than 2,300 protest events in Chile between 2000 and 2012, I show that party protest takes place in only 6% of all protest events, and that it is essentially monopolized by leftist parties. Additionally, by combining several strands of the literature on political parties and collective action, I derive hypotheses about the impact of the features of protest events and the broader national context on the chances of party protest. Multivariate regression models show that party protest is more likely in events which take place in highly visible locations and are coordinated by other civil society organizations. Additionally, party protest occurs when the center-left coalition is in power and when collective protest at the national-level is less intense and less transgressive.
... Sin embargo, como afirma Borbáth, la tesis sobre la normalización de la protesta "se centró principalmente en el grado en que las formas no institucionales se convencionalizaron" (Borbáth, 2023, p. 1). Se sabe menos sobre el uso que los actores institucionales, como los partidos políticos, hacen de las protestas (pero véase, Semenov et al., 2016;Somma, 2018;Borbáth & Hutter, 2021;Lewis, 2021). De hecho, como sostienen Borbáth y Hutter: "las fuerzas impulsoras clave [de la transformación del sistema de partidos] pueden no solo haber cambiado en términos programáticos sino también en la forma organizativa y el repertorio de acción" (Borbáth & Hutter, 2021, p. 896). ...
... La única excepción fue la manifestación del Primero de Mayo, en la que se pudieron ver banderas de los partidos Socialista y (especialmente) Comunista de Chile. Estas impresiones para Chile son consistentes con investigaciones anteriores, que encontraron que la participación de los partidos en protestas callejeras solo estuvo presente en el 6 % de todos los eventos de protesta entre 2000 y 2012 (Somma, 2018). ...
Existe un consenso cada vez mayor sobre la naturaleza complementaria de la política institucional y no institucional como medio para impulsar las agendas políticas. Sin embargo, la mayor parte de la investigación tiende a concentrarse en un aspecto de esta relación, a saber, cómo los movimientos sociales influyen en la arena política, por ejemplo, impactando diferentes etapas del proceso de formulación de políticas y creando nuevos partidos políticos. Hay comparativamente menos comprensión de la dinámica inversa: el grado en que los partidos políticos también influyen en el ámbito de la protesta al adoptar y utilizar estrategias y tácticas —comúnmente asociadas con los movimientos sociales— y al conectarse con los manifestantes. Centrándose en Argentina y Chile, dos países que han experimentado oleadas masivas de protestas en los últimos años, este artículo examina la presencia de los partidos políticos en la organización, realización y canalización de manifestaciones. La recepción de los partidos políticos en las manifestaciones está estrechamente ligada a si son bienvenidos o no en el ámbito de la protesta. También analizamos cómo los manifestantes argentinos y chilenos perciben a los partidos políticos y el nivel de identificación que sienten con ellos. Nuestra principal fuente de datos proviene de 1 935 encuestas realizadas como parte de la red Caught in the Act of Protest: Contextualizing Contestation (CCC) entre 2015 y 2017. Encontramos que los partidos políticos en Argentina exhiben vínculos más fuertes con los movimientos sociales en comparación con los de Chile. Buscamos vincular este resultado con patrones divergentes e históricamente arraigados de dinámicas de protesta en ambos países y discutimos las implicaciones de nuestros hallazgos en la conclusión.
... However, as most of them did not become professional politicians, political science considers them outsider parties (see Barr 2009;McDonnel and Newell 2011). They never considered themselves traditional parties and that their political strategy, activism and participation fall into the category of non-conventional (see Pitti 2018;Somma 2018). ...
Political humour, lampooning of political figures and political satire have been part of political life since ancient times. Political parties that used humour as a means to an end in the political process emerged in the second half of the twentieth century criticizing the political elite and the electorate. This comparative paper analyses the phenomenon of modern joke/satirical parties and their use of political humour, focusing on the second generation of centrist anti-establishment joke parties that emerged and boomed amidst the 2007–2008 financial and economic crisis. This group includes the German Die PARTEI, which sends representatives to the European Parliament, and the Hungarian Two-Tailed Dog Party (MKKP), which is present in local governments. Both of these successful joke parties are characterised by their mockery of the political elite and its messages, criticising the whole establishment, using the tools of satire, irony and humour. In the case of the second generation of joke parties, the joke is no longer just an end but also a means of drawing attention to corruption and political anomalies.
... The local districts that belong to the three metropolitan areas of the country (Santiago, Valparaiso, and Concepción) were excluded from the dataset following the definition of metropolitan areas provided by INE & MINVU (2017). Such exclusion looks to diminish the effect of multi-district cities for purposes of demographic comparison and also to control the relevant number of social protests that take place in those areas for visibility reasons (Somma, 2018). Table 1 provides some descriptive statistics of the variables used to cluster districts regarding the influence of mining. ...
The territorial turn in the research agenda about extractive industries and development has remarked the uneven and entangled processes through which industries anchor across space. Whereas the uneven developmental performance of mining areas has been largely discussed, this turn offers fertile ground to interact with the literature about contentious politics and examine how the spatial distinction of mining territories also shapes local unrest and social mobilization. This paper examines social protest dynamics at mining districts by exploring four dimensions of contentious politics and comparing its prevalence between mining and non-mining districts. For such a purpose, the paper distinguishes between mining and non-mining districts through a cluster analysis based on a set of mining-related variables. Afterward, it analyses four relevant dimensions of social protests related to extractive industries (labor, public services, local politics, and environmental) based on a database of protest actions registered between 2009 and 2019 in 18 newspapers. The results show that mining districts are distinguished by social protests related to public services and labor demands, while social protest related to local politics and environmental issues does not exhibit a significant difference between mining and non-mining districts. Thereby, the districts in which mining exerts a larger influence face higher rates of social protest only regarding labor and public services.
... On the contrary, it assumes that the connection is more complex and that it can adopt distinct forms of overlap that mean, for example, that social movements can utilize traditional political arenas for their own benefit without demobilizing their social organizations or abandoning the streets (Van Dyke 2003;Almeida 2010;Silva and Rossi 2018). For their part, political parties may strategically decide to participate in collective protests according to their position in the power structure (Disi 2019), the visibility of the demands promoted by social organizations or to maintain a vibrant relationship with their bases (Anria 2018;Borbáth & Hutter 2020;Heaney & Rojas 2015;Hutter 2012;Somma 2018). ...
How has the relationship between social movements and political parties evolved in post-transition Chile? Why and when do some social movements in Chile break their ties with political parties and others do not? On the one hand, this chapter argues that the progressive weakening between social and institutional political actors resulted in a more complex interaction and less dependent forms of articulation of their collective strategies and objectives. In some cases, social movements achieve political autonomy from parties and other formal members of politics. In others, social organizations transform their links with political institutions. These transformations mean that social movements can strategically adjust their repertoires of strategies and decide when and how to engage with polity members. On the other hand, this chapter made an analysis of historical events as a strategy to understand when social movements in Chile become autonomous. The main finding suggests that the probability of a social movement becoming autonomous increases significantly when social protest is systematically reproduced in multiple territorial expressions to shape a broader day of mobilization. These results show that the transformation of the links between organized social actors and institutional politics is more complex than conventional wisdom assumes. In particular, the new cycle of social protests in Chile took place in a more complex scenario where social movements have articulated their strategies autonomously and have found in the streets a new political arena more effective for achieving their collective goals.
... Parties not only decide whether to avoid or to participate in a protest but in the former case, they also need to settle what form their participation should take. Differentiation leads us to expect that party-sponsored protest events are systematically different than protest events organized by social movements or other organizations for two reasons (Somma, 2018). Firstly, from the perspective of parties as vote-or policy-seeking organizations, their fortune is determined by the dynamics in the electoral arena. ...
The article provides the first large-scale study of protest activities by political parties. The empirical analysis draws on original protest event data for 30 European countries based on semi-automated coding of news agencies. The article innovates by (a) proposing a standardized indicator for the extent to which protest and electoral politics relate to each other, (b) showing that parties’ involvement in protests differs across political contexts, and (c) mapping the profile of a typical party-sponsored event and a typical protesting party. Despite long-term trends toward differentiated modes of interest intermediation, the results indicate that a wide range of parties does protest. However, in highly differentiated contexts, the typical protesting party mirrors the outsider image of movement parties: it does not belong to a mainstream party family and has no government experience. By contrast, more strategic factors, such as opposition status, drive parties to the streets in less differentiated contexts.
... The evidence suggests, for example, that the type of tactic (conventional, cultural, disruptive or violent) depends on the targets, the presence of formal organizations, and the number of participants in the demonstrations. Other characteristics explored by the literature include state repression (Medel, 2016), the number of participants (Disi Pavlic, 2016;Somma & Medel, 2019), internal organization (Palacios-Valladares, 2016a), and the relationship with political parties (Palacios-Valladares, 2016b;Somma, 2018). ...
Social movement research indicates that mobilization can effect change on public opinion, yet few works have systematically tested the effect of protests on individual attitudes. This article uses survey and protest event data to assess the spatial and temporal effect of mobilizations on public opinion in Chile. More specifically, it combines the 2008, 2010, and 2012 LAPOP surveys and a dataset of college student protest events, mapping respondents and protests at the municipal level using Geographic Information Systems (GIS). Using regression analysis, it finds that proximity to college student protests has a significant effect on various political attitudes. The effect, however, tends to be larger on latent attitudes rather than on preformed ones. The results highlight the importance of social movements in shaping individual political attitudes, and the role that mobilizations play in the policymaking process.
Obwohl kaum jemand an der Bedeutung politischer Parteien als Hauptakteure der politischen Mobilisierung zweifelt, werden Parteien fast ausschließlich im Rahmen von Wahlen und institutionalisierten politischen Prozessen untersucht.
How and why do political parties, seemingly focused on electoral politics, also mobilise within contentious arenas? Drawing on qualitative research with a centre‐left Argentine party called Nuevo Encuentro (NE) in the city of Buenos Aires this paper demonstrates the importance of a geographical reading of “movement parties” for responding to this question. Specifically, the paper analyses NE’s territorialisation, understood as a strategy for organisation building via the political appropriation of space, typically by opening branches and mobilising activists in neighbourhoods. Between 2007 and 2019 NE’s strategy of territorialisation mobilised across multiple scales—the neighbourhood, city and national—yet in so doing its organisation became overstretched and struggled to engage across both contentious and electoral arenas. Through an analysis of NE’s territorialisation, grounded in the historical and geographical context of contemporary Argentina, the paper provides an original attempt to spatialise the concept of movement party.
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 opportunity, and framing theories, we argue that mobilization strategies – the sequence of decisions and actions taken by protest organizers before staging a protest – shape demonstration size. Multivariate models with 937 Chilean demonstrations between 2000 and 2012 show that demonstrations are larger when they display more demands (especially uiversalistic demands), target the national government, attract more organizations (especially umbrella organizations), and mobilize cohesive groups with broad public support. We reinforce the internal validity of our argument using interviews with movement leaders and secondary research on Chilean society.
This article offers a review of the most salient studies on Latin American social movements published in the last 25 years. It not only assesses the questions and empirical implications that these studies have uncovered, but it also points out theoretical and empirical puzzles that are currently investigated or are yet to be examined. In doing so, this article reviews two type of studies: those that in the author’s opinion cover the most salient movements in the region and those that offer us most promising propositions for the development of the subfield in the future. With this review, the author hopes to open the debate and help include Latin American social movements within the systematic study of comparative social mobilization in sociology and comparative politics. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Sociology Volume 44 is July 30, 2018. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.
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 las últimas décadas en el país ha sido la transición y consolidación de la democracia (Linz y Stepan, 1996). Si bien algunos estudios comparados a nivel regional destacan la trayectoria exitosa de la democracia chilena, otros identifican serias limitaciones en su diseño institucional y las acciones subsecuentes de las élites políticas (Huneeus, 2014; Garretón y Garretón, 2010). En segundo término, también interesa saber cómo se orientan los chilenos hacia la esfera política; esto es, cuánto apego sienten hacia la política, en qué medida la política les atrae e interesa y forma parte de sus vidas cotidianas, y hasta qué punto confían y se identifican con los actores políticos e institucionales. Lo anterior es relevante porque durante los últimos años la literatura y la discusión pública han enfatizado el escaso y decreciente apego de los chilenos hacia la política (Huneeus, 1998; Joignant, 2003; Silva, 2004; Madrid, 2006; Carlin, 2006; Luna y Altman, 2011). Aquí se presenta un diagnóstico bastante más complejo.
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.
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 challenge the structures of Chile’s market society, activists have mobilized resources with little help from institutional actors and reacted to the perceived deficiencies of government policies. The chapter then goes on to compare the influential student movement and the less influential Mapuche movement. It is showed that movements are more likely to shape political outcomes if they can launch massive protest campaigns in visible locations with a predominance of disruptive yet peaceful tactics.
The problem of collective action is that each member of a group wants other members to make necessary sacrifices while he or she 'free rides', reaping the benefits of collective action without doing the work. Inevitably the end result is that no one does the work and the common interest is not realized. This book analyses the social pressure whereby groups solve the problem of collective action. The authors show that the problem of collective action requires a model of group process and cannot be deduced from simple models of individual behaviour. They employ formal mathematical models to emphasize the role of small subgroups of especially motivated individuals who form the 'critical mass' that sets collective action in motion. The book will be read with special interest by sociologists, social psychologists, economists and political scientists. It will also be of concern to those in industrial relations and communications research working on issues in collective action and rational choice.
Provides a detailed treatment of an important topic that has received no scholarly attention: the surprising transformation of indigenous peoples' movements into viable political parties in the 1990s in four Latin American countries (Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Venezuela) and their failure to succeed in two others (Argentina, Peru). The parties studied are crucial components of major trends in the region. By providing to voters clear programs for governing, and reaching out in particular to under-represented social groups, they have enhanced the quality of democracy and representative government. Based on extensive original research and detailed historical case studies, the book links historical institutional analysis and social movement theory to a study of the political systems in which the new ethnic cleavages emerged. The book concludes with a discussion of the implications for democracy of the emergence of this phenomenon in the context of declining public support for parties.
Unlike political or economic institutions, social movements have an elusive power, but one that is no less real. From the French and American revolutions through the democratic and workers' movements of the nineteenth century to the totalitarian movements of today, movements exercise a fleeting but powerful influence on politics and society. This study surveys the history of the social movement, puts forward a theory of collective action to explain its surges and declines, and offers an interpretation of the power of movement that emphasises its effects on personal lives, policy reforms and political culture. While covering cultural, organisational and personal sources of movements' power, the book emphasises the rise and fall of social movements as part of political struggle and as the outcome of changes in political opportunity structure.
