Marketing Democracy: Power and Social Movements in Post-Dictatorship Chile

Latin American Politics and Society, Winter 2002 by Pessoa, Carlos

Paley, Julia. Marketing Democracy: Power and Social Movements in Past-Dictatorship Chile. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. Photographs, bibliography, index, 273 pp.; hardcover $50, paperback $19.95.

Recent research on Latin American democratic processes has shifted from studies of transition and consolidation to an inquiry into the type and quality of the democratic regimes established in the region. With the survival of democracy no longer an issue, one question is why the political discourse has shifted so clearly in a region that has known so many violent, military dictatorships. Julia Paley's book addresses this question in relation to Chile's democratic regime and its influence on the political strategies of numerous social and political actors, the most important being urban grassroots movements.

Paley's book is generally an ethnographic analysis of how a poor, urban poblacion, La Bandera, reorients its activism after the democratic transition. Paley explores how power is exercised in political democracy through the use of public opinion polls, cooptation of grassroots organizations to "participate" in the provision of social services, and technocratic decisions that exclude the genuine participation of the poor. In essence, the book's focus is on how the transition to democracy in Chile has affected political grassroots mobilization.

In part 1, the first two chapters give a historical account of the birth of the La Bandera neighborhood and its political activism during the Augusto Pinochet regime. Chapter 3 recounts the democratic transition and its effects on political activism in La Bandera, seeking to understand how that activism was demobilized in the postdictatorial period. The second part of the book moves into the contemporary democratic period. Chapter 4 points to the main issue of the book by exploring the various meanings attributed to democracy, and chapter 5 discusses the discourse of democratic participation as practiced by the political elite and contested by the local grassroots movements. Chapter 6 demonstrates how these local groups manage to appropriate a dominant discourse, a process akin to the professionalization of knowledge, for their own political ends.

Many scholars have noted that the mobilization of social movements is unique to "transition politics"; that, lacking a focus for mobilizing grassroots opposition, social movements will demobilize and fragment in the democratic period. The specific reasons for this outcome, however, have not received much in-depth analysis. Paley addresses this question through her careful ethnographic work. She asks what kind of democratic political regime has been installed that has actually reduced social interaction and political activities, especially when the basic economic model and its consequences have survived the transition (p. 90). This is a significant question, one that requires more careful comparative assessment.

Yet if Paley poses the question well, some of her responses disappoint. She points, for example, to how parties of the left that maintained close relations with grassroots movements from the 1960s to the 1980s later detached themselves from any genuine link with popular movements. For Paley, such detachment undermined the political activism of the social movements of the 1990s. This argument, however, glosses over one of the distinguishing features of social movements: their disassociation from state political institutions, including political parties. One might therefore ask if the measure the author uses to evaluate the health of these movements is entirely applicable.

Other salient aspects of Paley's study are more compelling. Most important are the reasons offered for what she calls the "retreat to the house" nature of activism in the late 1980s; namely, the "revindicative" tendency of "placing demands on the state and denouncing it for not meeting those demands." Given the focus of these movements on removing dictatorial regimes, "the purpose of continuing activism in organizations became unclear" in the democratic period (pp. 103-4). Of course, this explanation has some shortcomings. For example, the social consequences of the economic model in Chile remained intact. The concrete reasons for socially motivated protest remained; therefore the absence of a regime focus cannot explain all subsequent demobilization. The process of delegitimating a regime, moveover, can be refocused on social problems.

The book's most important contribution is its analysis of how democratic consolidation was based on a process in which various actors, according to their political ends, attributed various meanings to democracy. In her description of the "NO campaign" for the plebiscite of 1988, for instance, Paley points to three different such meanings: one linked to economic improvement, one associated with the unity and identity of the nation, and one representing the end of dictatorial violence (p. 124). She correctly points out how the postdictatorial regime used democratic discourse to legitimate economic restructuring and propagandize political stability as a good environment for investment. In that sense, Paley reveals how democracy has interwoven itself with a neoliberal economic model. At the same time, she describes how local health groups contested the narrowing of the meaning of democracy and created in the process their own definition, one that required broader participation in the formation and implementation of public policies (chapter 4).