Cinco nuevos artículos de investigación han publicado en los últimos meses docentes del ICP-UC en destacadas revistas internaciones de nuestra disciplina. El primer artículo, "Can political alignment reduce crime? Evidence from Chile", fue escrito por nuestra profesora Carla Alberti junto a Diego Díaz–Rioseco y Giancarlo Visconti y publicado en el mes de septiembre en el Political Science Research and Methods (Cambridge University Press). En el mes de octubre se publicó en el Journal of Peace Research, el artículo "Who leads peace operations? A new dataset on leadership positions in UN peace operations, 1948–2019", escrito por nuestra profesora y Directora del Centro de Estudios Asiáticos UC, Nicole Jenne. Por su parte, en el mes de noviembre se publicaron los artículos de la profesora Julieta Suárez-Cao "Blessing in Disguise? How the Gendered Division of Labor in Political Science Helped Achieved Gender Parity in the Chilean Constitutional Assembly", en Politics & Gender, en European Journal of International Relations, se publicó el artículo “Enforcing peoples’ right to democracy: transnational activism and regional powers in contemporary Inter-American relations”, escrito por nuestro profesor Stefano Palestini junto a Erica Martinelli, ex-estudiante del ICP UC. Y el último artículo publicado en el mes de enero en Politics & Gender fue escrito por nuestras profesoras Catherine Reyes-Housholder y Julieta Suárez-Cao, en conjunto con Carmen Le Foulon, y lleva por título "Unpacking the Gendered Consequences of Protest-Driven Crises"
A continuación acceda a los artículos:
- Can political alignment reduce crime? Evidence from Chile
Carla Alberti, Diego Díaz–Rioseco y Giancarlo Visconti
ABSTRACT
Research has shown that presidents tend to benefit local level copartisans when distributing resources, which can improve the provision of public goods, such as security. Considering that fear of crime is among the main concerns of citizens worldwide, we examine whether alignment affects criminality. Drawing on rich administrative data from Chile and a regression discontinuity design in close electoral races, we study the impact of alignment on a broad set of crimes against the person and property-related. We show that aligned municipalities experience a significant reduction in crimes that both affect property and occur in public. As a potential mechanism, we find that aligned municipalities receive more projects to improve urban infrastructure, thus making public spaces less vulnerable to crime.
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- Who leads peace operations? A new dataset on leadership positions in UN peace operations, 1948–2019
Nicole Jenne
ABSTRACT
It is widely recognized that UN peace operations have been critically influenced by their leadership personnel in the field since the first UN peacekeepers were deployed in 1948. But who exactly are the people that lead peace operations and decide how these are implemented on the ground? This special data feature introduces a new dataset on leadership positions in UN peace operations from its interception in 1948 up to 2019. The relevance of different authorities in peace operations is discussed, followed by an examination of general trends in the data with regards to the duration of term in different leadership positions, the national and regional origin of peace operations authorities, and the distribution of gender. It is shown that scholars studying a variety of topics, including policymaking at the UN, the use of force in peace operations, international responsibilities, and the role of the global south in international politics, can benefit from paying closer attention to the question of who occupies leadership positions in UN peace operations.
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- Blessing in Disguise? How the Gendered Division of Labor in Political Science Helped Achieved Gender Parity in the Chilean Constitutional Assembly
Julieta Suárez-Cao
ABSTRACT
On October 18, 2019, a social uprising in Chile took many national and foreign analysts by surprise. Protests, demonstrations, arson, looting, and rioting occurred in the streets of major cities across the country, sparked by a modest rise in subway fares and a police crackdown on high school students hopping over turnstiles. Demonstrators’ violence and police abuse, intertwined with large-scale peaceful rallies, exposed structural conditions of social and economic inequality and a profound crisis of political representation.
The demonstrators’ motto, “Until Dignity Becomes a Habit!,” brought together the demands of several groups of protesters (Suárez-Cao Reference Suárez-Cao2021). Their many demands exposed the limitations of dictator Augusto Pinochet’s constitution as an “institutional straitjacket” that had blocked many widely urged reforms (Piscopo and Siavelis Reference Piscopo and Siavelis2021). The idea that a new constitution could set a path to rewriting the broken social pact, at the same time that it could advance the addressing of social grievances, gained strength amid disoriented elites. Late at night on November 15, 2019, party leaders from the left and the right signed an agreement to organize a referendum in which voters would decide on whether the constitution should be changed and, if so, what the replacement mechanism should be.
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- Enforcing peoples’ right to democracy: transnational activism and regional powers in contemporary Inter-American relations
Stefano Palestini y Erica Martinelli
ABSTRACT
The Inter-American Democratic Charter (IADC) is the most comprehensive multilateral framework for dealing with democratic breakdowns and backslidings in the Western Hemisphere. In such cases, the Organisation of American States (OAS) is supposed to defend democracy by suspending states, imposing sanctions or taking other multilateral measures. Oftentimes, however, the OAS has looked the other way. The question, then, is what makes the difference. In this comparative case study, we use cross-cases comparisons and process-tracing to identify the actors and causal mechanisms that determine when and whether the IADC is actually enforced. We explain inconsistent enforcement by analysing interactions among three sets of actors – the governments of powerful member states, OAS secretaries general and civil society organisations – during coups, executive takeovers and electoral frauds in OAS member states between 2001 and 2020. Our analysis reveals that cooperation between an activist secretary general and civil society actors was neither sufficient nor necessary for IADC enforcement. By contrast, US support for enforcement was a necessary but insufficient condition for the OAS to act. To get it to do so, the United States required the support of two leading regional powers: Mexico and Brazil. These findings suggest that the ‘right to democracy’ enshrined in the IADC hinges upon the volatile preferences of the executives of the OAS’s three most powerful member states. The resulting lack of institutional autonomy leads to inconsistent enforcement of the IADC, jeopardising the credibility of the region’s formally declared right to democracy.
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ABSTRACT
Citizen protests are common political phenomena, ranging in size, kind, and impact. This essay focuses on a unique kind of citizen protest that reaches a crisis threshold: massive uprisings accompanied by violence and system-level critiques, expressed in phrases such as “It is not 30 cents, it is 30 years,” used by protesters in Chile in 2019–20. Crises meeting this definition have occurred in countries as diverse as Iceland in 2009, Hong Kong in 2019, Chile, and Colombia in 2019–21. In contrast with economic crises (Strolovitch 2013), protesters—not necessarily elites—perform the discursive work of (re)interpreting material and political conditions. Protesters’ framing of their grievances may overwhelm elite attempts to reinterpret these crises for their benefit. We argue that protest-driven crises can alter gendered opportunity structures, but outcomes are likely multifaceted and potentially contradictory.
