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First published online May 1, 2008

The Chilean Socialist Party (PSCh): Constructing Consent and Disarticulating Dissent to Neo-Liberal Hegemony in Chile

Sara C. MottaView all authors and affiliations
Volume 10, Issue 2
https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-856x.2007.00294.x

Abstract

Adopting a neo-Gramscian framework, I argue that the Chilean Socialist Party (PSCh), as part of the governing Concertación coalition, has played a key role in constructing consent and disarticulating dissent to neo-liberal hegemony in Chile. This is the result of its co-optation into the neo-liberal historic bloc formed during the Pinochet dictatorship, of which the Concertación is the democratic political face. This process occurs in relation to the popular classes within, and outside, the PSCh, actualised by a series of intra-party, extra-party, policy-making and policy-discourse mediations. The analysis of the PSCh's role in (re)producing neo-liberal hegemony in Chile helps to unlock the black box of empirical and theoretical investigation as regards the construction of consent to neo-liberalism in the subordinated. In doing so it highlights the conflictual, contradictory and therefore contingent nature of this process.

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Volume 10, Issue 2
Pages: 303 - 327
Article first published online: May 1, 2008
Issue published: May 2008

Keywords

  1. Neo-liberalism
  2. hegemony
  3. Chilean Socialist Party (PSCh)
  4. contingency

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Sara C. Motta, Lecturer in Latin American and Comparative Politics, Department of Government, London School of Economics and Political Science, Houghton Street, London WC2A 2EA, email: [email protected]

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