For the past 30 years, Chilean unionism has been shrinking. Through a comparison of the membership trajectories of 26 unions in two firms between 1990 and 2004, this article explains why some unions defied this trend and how their success affected overall union density in their firms. It argues that the unions that experienced the most favorable membership outcomes were those that, at key junctures of firm restructuring, earliest or most aggressively established a partnership relationship with management. However, in a context of great labor weakness, these cases of union accommodation took the form of exclusive patron-client exchanges, which exacerbated collective action problems and further eroded union density.

A wave of massive, at times violent, protests raged in Chile from October to December of 2019, opening new possibilities for the country's politics. This paper investigates to what extent these events affected the organization, identity, and strategies of a pivotal actor in the cycle and, for the past two decades, an important driver of domestic political change: the student movement. Based on a qualitative analysis of media coverage and in-depth interviews with key student movement figures, it argues that, although the events in question were a national turning point, they did not necessarily constitute a critical juncture for the student movement. In explaining this somewhat paradoxical outcome, the paper supports the established view that the transformative impact of protest events on social movements depends on the strength of the movement's organization and the character of its protest repertoires. In addition, it also highlights that some factors overlooked by the broader social movement literature-including the eventfulness of antecedent mobilization and the locus of protest-mediate the consequences of protest events on the movements involved.

Chile's Nueva Mayoría government (2014–2018) responded more forcefully to student demands for a more assertive public role in education than any of its post‐authoritarian predecessors. Existing scholarship suggests that this change reflected the success of the 2011 student protests in tapping into latent public discontent with neoliberalism and the politics of consensus. This article argues that it is also crucial to understand how the wave of protest interacted with the dynamics of party politics at the elite level. Public support translated into substantive policy and institutional changes because it contributed to a coalition and platform shift that favoured more extensive reform.

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This article seeks to understand the impressive scale of recent student protests in Chile. It underscores how relative institutional closure to student demands created, in the late 1990s and early 2000s, a growing cleavage between the movement and the political establishment, leading to major innovations in movement identity and organisation. These innovations rendered the movement more attractive to non-activists, helping in later years to diffuse contention from traditional hotbeds of student activism to schools and universities with little history of it.