Squeezed from the top: “Social Outburst” (2019) and elite overproduction. A study of the dynamics of Chilean political instability from the approach of Structural Demographic Theory

Manuel Muñoz-Rodríguez, Rosana Ferrero, Juan Pablo Luna and Mauricio Lima

PLOS ONE, 2024, vol. 19, issue 6, 1-16

Abstract: On October 18, 2019, Chile experienced the most important social upheaval since the country regained democracy in the late 1980s. The “Social Outbreak” surprised economic and political elites and seemed paradoxical to the international community who had often praised Chile as a model of successful development. In this paper, we used structural-demographic theory to analyze the interaction between the overproduction of elites and the stagnation in the relative income of the population as the underlying structural cause of Chilean political instability. This theory was able to predict the three most significant instances of political tension in the recent history of Chile: the crisis of the late 1960s that culminated in the coup d’état of 1973, popular mobilizations during the 1980s, and the recent student mobilizations and social upheaval. Our results suggest that, at least during the period 1938–2019, Chilean sociopolitical dynamics is determined by the same structural drivers.

Date: 2024
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0299063 (text/html)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id= ... 99063&type=printable (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pone00:0299063

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0299063

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in PLOS ONE from Public Library of Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by plosone ().