Research

Academic Articles

WoS Publications

2024. "PROFILE: understanding the 2022-23 Peruvian uprising." Social Movement Studies. Coauthored with Nicolás Somma and Rodrigo Medel.

This profile examines Peru’s unexpected popular uprising of 2022–23, which is distinct from its neighbors due to decades of relative calm. We combine three concepts emphasizing time-varying processes: deep-rooted societal inequality across class, ethnicity, and regions resulting in a fragmented civil society (long term); a mounting crisis in political representation (medium term); and the immediate trigger, namely, the removal of President Pedro Castillo (short term), which incited his supporters and sparked widespread protests.

2024. "Indigenous Voices and Votes: Assessing the Dynamics of Indigenous Politics in Chile’s Constitutional Referendum of 2022." PS: Political Science & Politics.

This article analyzes the paradoxical outcome of Chile’s 2022 constitutional referendum, where a draft recognizing indigenous rights was rejected despite inclusive efforts. By employing a mixed-methods approach, the research juxtaposes statements from indigenous public figures with a statistical analysis of municipal-level data to assess indigenous political dynamics and their influence on the plebiscite's results. The Constitutional Convention’s unprecedented inclusion of indigenous seats and advocacy for a plurinational state contrasts starkly with the majority vote against it in highly indigenous municipalities. The article sheds light on the broader implications of indigenous participation in national political processes and their impact on constitutional outcomes.

2023. "Predictors of perceptions of human rights violations during the Chilean social outburst of 2019." Frontiers in Psychology, 14. Coauthored with Fabiola Carrasco.

2023. "Social policy expansion from below? The case of Chile’s student movement and free tuition higher education." World Development, 167. Coauthored with Sofía Donoso and Belén Cumsille.

Scholars have long sought to establish the strategies through which social movements can impact policy adoption. Yet, there is little evidence on the role they may play in policy expansion. We study the role of social movements in broadening the scope of social policies by analyzing whether Chile’s student movement impacted the expansion of the free college tuition policy between 2015 and 2020. We evaluate three mechanisms to assess the student movement’s influence on free tuition expansion. First, movements may use protests to affect the expansion process through disruption. Second, they can make use of their connections with and presence in parties and the bureaucracy to channel their demands and influence decision-making instances. Finally, movements may also try to shape public opinion to affect the scope of the policy through mobilizations and other forms of influence. We use a process tracing design to examine these mechanisms. We collect and analyze evidence from 32 elite interviews, congressional and administrative records, web scraped news, and public opinion and protest event data. Our results show that students influenced the implementation of the free tuition policy through all mechanisms using different strategies. First, students used protests to set free tuition in the public agenda. Second,
and the most important strategy, by means of connections with incumbent parties and the presence of former student activists in the Education Ministry and in Congress, they indirectly influenced policy expansion. Finally, and indirectly, they shaped public opinion in favor of free tuition. Students played a role in defining the pace and scope of the policy but could not imprint all their demands. Overall, our analysis sheds light over the ways in which social movement can influence the implementation of policies, thus, expanding the scope of equity-enhancing social policies in Latin America and beyond.

2022. "Implementing Local Participatory Institutions: Evidence from the Chilean Communes." Local Government Studies, 48(1): 107-128. Coauthored with Edgar Rebolledo.

2021. "The Nearness of Youth: Spatial and Temporal Effects of Protests on Political Attitudes in Chile." Latin American Politics and Society, 63(1): 72-94.

Social movement research indicates that mobilization can effect change on political attitudes, yet few works have systematically tested the effect of protests on public opinion. This article uses survey and protest event data to assess the spatial and temporal effect of mobilizations on political attitudes in Chile. 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 analyses, it finds that proximity to college student protests has a significant effect on various political attitudes. The effect, however, tends to be substantively larger on “weak” attitudes, while it tends to be smaller on “strong” ones. The results highlight the importance of mobilizations in shaping individual political attitudes, and the role that social movements play in the policymaking process.

2021. "No water in the oasis: the Chilean Spring of 2019–2020." Social Movement Studies, 20(4): 495-502. Coauthored with Nicolás M. Somma, Rodrigo Medel, and Matías Bargsted.

We analyze 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 police repression and governmental mismanagement contributed to deepening the crisis once it exploded. We conclude by describing the attempts of the political class to cope with the crisis and speculate about its potential political consequences, especially for the Chilean party system.

2020. “Policies, Parties, and Protests: Explaining Student Protest Events in Latin America.” Social Movement Studies, 19(2): 183-200.

What explains variation in the emergence of college student protests in Latin America? This study uses an original dataset of 4,700 college student protests to carry out a systematic analysis of student mobilization in the region. This article tests three hypotheses based on two distinct but complementary explanations. The political explanation argues that stronger organizational linkages with ruling parties have a demobilizing effect, while the explanation based on grievances claims that increases in enrollments and private expenditures promote mobilization. Regression analyses are used to tests these claims. Increased private spending does not affect mobilization, while expanded access to college does increase the frequency of protests. To gauge the effect of party linkages, two student party linkages scores, based on an expert survey, are used. The findings show that stronger linkages with ruling parties lower protest frequency whereas linkages with the opposition do not have a significant effect.

2019. “Chile 2010: la desafección política y su impacto en la participación política convencional y no convencional.” Revista del CLAD Reforma y Democracia, 73: 189-226. Coauthored with Roberto Mardones.

The decline in political participation in Chile since the 1990s gave rise, beginning in the early 2000s, to a discussion about political disaffection. To what extent does political disaffection influence decreased political participation? Previous studies have generally been theoretical and descriptive, and have only associated disaffection with electoral participation. This study argues that higher levels of political disaffection are associated with decreased conventional and nonconventional political participation. To support our claim, we use the Auditoría a la Democracia (2010) survey to carry out statistical analyses of political disaffection on different types of political participation. The results show that political disaffection is a compound and internally consistent concept, consisting of attitudes of distrust towards political actors and institutions, disinterest in politics, internal and external inefficacy, and dissatisfaction with democracy. Regression analyses using participation indexes as the dependent variable also conclude that disaffection has a negative effect on both conventional and nonconventional political participation.

2018. “Sentenced to Debt: Explaining Student Mobilization in Latin America.” Latin American Research Review, 53(3): 448-465.

In 2011, Chilean students mobilized in the largest demonstrations since the country’s return to democracy. Students in some other Latin American countries have also carried out mass demonstrations in recent years. What explains students’ participation in mobilizations in Latin America? This article argues that financial grievances generated by neoliberal education policies and the massification of higher education are major causes of student protest participation. In addition, it shows how weak organizational linkages with ruling political parties increase the likelihood of mobilization. The theory is explored through a case study of higher education policy, student-party linkages, and student mobilization in Chile from 1990 to 2011. A statistical analysis of a survey of Chilean students demonstrates that a working-class background, using debt to finance education, and weak programmatic connections to parties in power are associated with higher levels of protest participation.