No abstract

The article focuses on the supply-side of protest activity in Latin America in the post-neoliberal era. It argues that parties’ cohesive voting in Congress under different power constellations and parties’ linkage strategy to voters create institutional conditions of power collusion, inter-branch stalemate, or party erosion that delineates political terrain for social mobilization. First, the firm control of a single party or coalition over the executive and legislature with cohesive voting of party members in line with party leadership denotes power collusion and incites underrepresented actors to protest. Second, the dislocation in the executive-legislative relations (either with party members voting against the president’s proposals in a majority government or with cohesive opposition bloc(s) acting against the president’s will in a minority government) leads to policy immobilism and pushes legislative parties to ignite popular discontent. Third, more programmatic party linkages increase the degree of party institutionalization and predictability about policy commitment and mitigate struggles in extra-electoral arenas. The theoretical argument is tested with a battery of statistical tests that lends credence to the institutional explanations of mass mobilization and corroborated with empirical cases that show the plausibility of the statistical findings in particular contexts.

The article engages critically with the literature on the relationship between social movements and political parties. It traces the representation crisis in Chile with a dual focus on the meso-institutional supply side of partisan politics and the microfoundational demand side of protest activity (2006–2019). I argue that the dialectical relationship between political parties’ programmatic dealignment and realignment and social actors’ framing politics determined the magnitude, intensity, and ideational content of protest mobilization. Social actors’ perception of their position in polity structure determined the content of their demands. Savvy actors started with a realignment frame in 2006 to push through socioeconomic reforms from within the parameters of the existing system. They, however, afforded an anti-establishment frame with the ‘social outbreak’ in 2019 to weed out the vestiges of Pinochet’s regime. Social forces pushed political parties to reposition their policy programs, reset agenda priorities, and recast their linkages to society. I draw on interview data, archival works, and Observatory of Conflicts–Cumulative Dataset to substantiate my argument.