Indira Palacios-Valladares, Ph.D.

indirapalacios@missouristate.edu

Missouri State University

Country: United States (Missouri)

Research Interests

Latin American And Caribbean Politics

Social Movements

Mass Protests

Protest

Protest Success Variation

Protest Onset

Protest Politics

Young People Protest

Chilean Student Movement

Feminist Movements

Social Movement Studies

Youth Political Activism

Youth Politics

Labor

Young People

Countries of Interest

Argentina

Chile

Uruguay

Publications:

Journal Articles:

(2018) Student Protest and the Nueva Mayoría Reforms in Chile, Student Protest and the Nueva Mayoría Reforms in Chile

Chile’s Nueva Mayoría government (2014–2018) responded more forcefully to student demands for a more assertive public role in education than any of its post-authoritarian predecessors. Existing scholarship suggests that this change reflected the success of the 2011 student protests in tapping into latent public discontent with neoliberalism and the politics of consensus. This article argues that it is also crucial to understand how the wave of protest interacted with the dynamics of party politics at the elite level. Public support translated into substantive policy and institutional changes because it contributed to a coalition and platform shift that favoured more extensive reform.

(2017) Internal Movement Transformation and the Diffusion of Student Protest in Chile, Journal of Latin American Studies

This paper seeks to understand the impressive scale of recent student protests in Chile. It underscores how relative institutional closure to student demands created, in the late 1990s and early 2000s, a growing cleavage between the movement and the political establishment, leading to major innovations in movement identity and organisation. These innovations rendered the movement more attractive to non-activists, helping in later years to diffuse contention from traditional hotbeds of student activism to schools and universities with little history of it.

(2016) Protest Communities and Activist Enthusiasm: Student Occupations in Contemporary Argentina, Chile and Uruguay, Interface

This paper examines how occupation communities shape activist enthusiasm. Based on the analysis of more than sixty interviews with student participants in recent high school and university occupations in Argentina, Chile and Uruguay, the paper argues that occupations have complex and contradictory effects on participants due to the relatively long time spans involved and the consequent heightening of risk, intimacy, and community building efforts. On the one hand, they offer exhilarating experiences that foster strong feelings of being a community bound together by affect, moral political commitment, and feelings of collective empowerment and freedom. On the other hand, protracted conflict breeds equally strong feelings of uncertainty, fear, boredom, and/or alienation that put into question the validity of the occupation community. Thus, occupations enthuse activists but can also exhaust and disillusion them, generating some strategic challenges for social movements.

(2016) With or Without Them: Contemporary Student Movements and Parties in the Southern Cone, The Latinamericanist

This paper examines shifts in social movement ties to political parties. It does so by focusing on three important contemporary Latin American movements: the student movements of Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay. Drawing on in-depth interviews with secondary and university activists in each country, the paper addresses two questions: First, why during the 1990s did student activists in all three countries increasingly organize outside and in opposition to parties? Second, why after 2000 did this autonomist trend partially fade in Argentina and Uruguay, but deepen in Chile? For both periods the paper seeks not only to identify key causal variables, but also to elucidate the causal mechanisms linking those variables to trends in movement ties to parties.

(2010) From Militancy to Clientelism: Labor Union Strategies and Membership Trajectories in ContemporaryChile, Latin American Politics and Society

For the past 30 years, Chilean unionism has been shrinking. Through a comparison of the membership trajectories of 26 unions in two firms between 1990 and 2004, this article explains why some unions defied this trend and how their success affected overall union density in their firms. It argues that the unions that experienced the most favorable membership outcomes were those that, at key junctures of firm restructuring, earliest or most aggressively established a partnership relationship with management. However, in a context of great labor weakness, these cases of union accommodation took the form of exclusive patron-client exchanges, which exacerbated collective action problems and further eroded union density.

Books Written:

(2011) Industrial Relations after Pinochet: Firm-Level Unionism and Collective Bargaining Outcomes in Chile., Peter Lang

In recent decades many countries have implemented neoliberal reforms that have had adverse consequences for unions. In Chile this process was particularly sweeping, having occurred under the right-wing dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet. Despite the transition to democracy in 1990, the labor relations system implanted by the Pinochet regime is still largely in place. Although a number of works have assessed the conditions of unionism in post-dictatorship Chile, little attention has been paid to the firm level, which is where most of the collective bargaining now takes place. This book takes a qualitative approach to examine the dynamics of collective bargaining at the firm level in democratic Chile by investigating the causes of variation in the bargaining outcomes of fifty-three unions in four firms in the banking, manufacturing, retail and telecommunications sectors, respectively. It explains both variation in individual union bargaining outcomes within firms and aggregate differences in outcomes between firms. The book also provides a systematic explanation of the decline of collective bargaining results among Chilean unions in general during the 1990s and early 2000s.