Date: May 22, 2015 Time: 12：20-14：30 Venue: Building 8, Room 206, Komaba Campus, UTokyo Language: English Kayo Hoshino (Ph.D. Student, the Department of Area Studies, the University of Tokyo) Deepening Democracy? Sub-national Politics and Civic Participation in Chile  After transition to democracy in 1990, Chilean civil society has been called "invisible"; social movements have disappeared due to the increasing atomized and uninterested people. However, this view cannot explain recent protests such as student movements and against hydroelectric projects. The problem lies that the “invisible” view focuses only on a national level; within a county, a level of participation is various, particularly ones in municipal neighborhood councils that have historically united residents across class, gender and party affiliation as an important base for social movements. In this regard, this paper asks: why some municipalities in Chile still show active participation in neighborhood councils while others do not?This paper examines the effect of party politics on the level of participation in neighborhood councils at a municipal level. Previous studies focus mainly on the role of coalition of center-left and right-wing parties at a national level, and in municipal-level studies they tend to overlook the changes outside the coalition, such as revival of the Communist Party and the foundation of regionalist parties which encourage participation in neighborhood councils. This paper hypothesizes that where the regionalist and Left parties predominate, a higher level of participation in neighborhood councils is observed. |
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