Nonviolent Resistance and Democratic Consolidation by Daniel Lambach & Markus Bayer & Felix S. Bethke & Matteo Dressler & Véronique Dudouet

Author:Daniel Lambach & Markus Bayer & Felix S. Bethke & Matteo Dressler & Véronique Dudouet
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030393717
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Furthermore, as the previous sections have shown, civil society was unable to mitigate this deficiency of political representation because it was to a large extent demobilized and fragmented, but also split between those who joined the political ranks and those who stayed outside of formal politics. Civil society could thus not act as an intermediary between the social and political spheres. This estrangement is well expressed by a top Socialist Party leader talking about his relation to former comrades in the pro-democracy NGO he left behind when he joined the government after the 1989 election: ‘Informally we met once a month to talk, […] certain sorts of relationship remained, but definitely, when you change jobs, you create other groups and other ties’ (quoted in Delamaza 2015, p. 238). A prominent human rights activist presents another side to the story: ‘the parties have captured some people who came from the resistance movement and the rest of us became marginalized even though we remained motivated, but left out…’ (interview with human rights activist, Santiago de Chile, February 2017). The latter depicts a trend examined in a large empirical study by Gonzalo Delamaza that demonstrated that civil society activism and representativeness of particular segments of society were not decisive criteria in recruitment for positions in the Concertación after the transition. Rather, prior political commitment, party colour and technocratic knowledge were regarded as more important (Delamaza 2015, p. 233).

This trend of detachment between citizens and institutionalized politics seemed to take a turn with the 2006 elections won by Michelle Bachelet Martínez, a socialist party leader with a background in the anti-Pinochet resistance who had campaigned for more participatory democracy (Navia 2008; Weeks and Borzutzky 2012). However, she largely failed to implement her participation agenda due to a lack of support from within the Concertación coalition and in the face of a number of political crises. This dashed renewed hopes for meaningful democratic reform and led to increasing political discontent and magnified emerging student protest at the time (Cummings 2015). This notwithstanding, since the mid-2000s various welfare and education reforms have been implemented or discussed which aim at moderating the strongly neoliberal economic model (Bertelsmann Stiftung 2016, 2018).

In sum, Chilean society displays a general belief in democracy as the best system, more so than its neighbours and particularly since the mid-2000s, but Chileans’ overall attitudes towards democracy have remained remarkably stable over decades and across regime types. Therefore, it is difficult to establish a link between NVR and political attitudes. Furthermore, we find no evidence that the capacity of post-transition civil society to threaten the regime with NVR leads to higher government responsiveness, or that close links between political parties and civil society allows for participatory politics. A crisis of representation has been haunting Chile for many years, which can be explained by the outcome of a partially pacted transition which led to institutional restraints, elite detachment from society, and the politics of stability rather than participation.

Initially launched by middle school students in 2006 and

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