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Police repression and protest groups in Chile: A longitudinal study

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Vol. 37 No. 1 (2022): Dossier: Fighting the black legend about quantitative sociology
https://doi.org/10.5354/0719-529X.2022.68149

Abstract

Repression in the form of police action is an instrument used by governments to deal with a mobilized society. The phenomenon has been widely studied in Anglo-Saxon contexts, but less so in Chile and the rest of Latin America. This article explores whether some mobilized groups are more repressed than others, and whether center-right governments make greater or lesser use of repression than center-left governments do. We used a database of 4,856 street demonstrations that occurred in Chile between 2010 and 2019 in order to model police repression of protesters. We used mobilized group type and the ideology of the national government of the time as predictors, in addition to some control variables. Results reveal that center-right governments repress protesters more intensely than center-left governments do, with stronger action taken towards students and indigenous people. The results are discussed in terms of the strength of the links between social movements and institutional policy, complementing the theoretical approach that focuses on weaknesses—one of the most important in the literature on protest repression.

Keywords:

police repression, repression studies, protests, social movements

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Medel, R. M., & Somma, N. M. . (2022). Police repression and protest groups in Chile: A longitudinal study. Revista De Sociología, 37(1). https://doi.org/10.5354/0719-529X.2022.68149
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Revista de Sociología
Facultad de Ciencias Sociales
Universidad de Chile
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