Browsing by Author "Somma, Nicolas M."

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    HOW DO VOLUNTARY ORGANIZATIONS FOSTER PROTEST? THE ROLE OF ORGANIZATIONAL INVOLVEMENT ON INDIVIDUAL PROTEST PARTICIPATION
    (WILEY-BLACKWELL, 2010) Somma, Nicolas M.
    Prior research shows that members of voluntary organizations are more likely to protest than nonmembers. But why, among members, do some protest while others do not? I explore whether organizational involvement-the extent in which members engage in the "life" of their organizations-affects protest. I identify four dimensions of involvement-time and money contributions, participation in activities, psychological attachment, and embeddedness in interpersonal communication networks. Only the first dimension has robust effects on protest, and they are nonlinear: intermediate contributors have the highest protest rates. The three other dimensions substantially increase protest only under specific "involvement profiles.".
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    Pluralización del campo religioso y su impacto en la cohesión social en América Latina
    (2024) Cáceres Draper, Ignacio; Somma, Nicolas M.; Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. Instituto de Sociología
    América Latina ha experimentado modificaciones sustantivas en los principales componentes de su matriz histórico-cultural, sobre la cual descansa su capacidad de mantener unidas a sus sociedades (Sorj y Martuccelli, 2008; Tironi, 2008). El panorama religioso, pasando de un monopolio del catolicismo a dinámicas pluralistas, constituye uno de estos cambios profundos en las sociedades del continente. Si bien este proceso -no explicado cabalmente por las teorías de la secularización- se fue desarrollando paulatinamente a lo largo de todo el siglo XX, durante las últimas dos décadas se ha dinamizado, cambiando sustantivamente el panorama religioso en los países de la región (PEW, 2014), aunque con diferencias importantes entre ellos (Somma et al., 2017). Esta transformación puede implicar una erosión de las creencias y vínculos en los que se basa la cohesión en estas sociedades, pero al mismo tiempo puede dinamizar la sociedad civil y el involucramiento político, integrando nuevos sectores de la población e incorporando mayores niveles de pluralidad.Este trabajo busca generar evidencia sobre el impacto que este cambio en la matriz religiosa latinoamericana tiene sobre las distintas dimensiones de la cohesión social. En particular la presente tesis aborda la pregunta ¿cómo este cambio religioso ocurrido en Latinoamérica durante las últimas dos décadas permite aportar evidencia para una mejor comprensión de la relación entre religiosidad y cohesión social? Para ello se analizará la religiosidad a través de una estructura multinivel, observando la afiliación y participación religiosa a nivel individual, pero contextualizándola dentro de la estructura cultural e institucional que cada país representa. Adoptando una estructura que conceptualiza la cohesión social en un eje vertical y otro horizontal (Chan et al., 2006) se busca testear la hipótesis de que la diversidad religiosa moderará el efecto a nivel individual que la religiosidad tiene sobre la confianza social y confianza política.Se plantea un análisis cuantitativo a partir de un acercamiento multinivel, apropiado para vincular las dimensiones de cohesión social que pueden ser medidas a nivel individual (variables dependientes), con factores religiosos individuales (identificación religiosa y participación en organizaciones religiosas) y agregados (índice de pluralidad religiosa). Para ello se utiliza los datos de la encuesta Barómetro de las Américas LAPOP, incluyendo 132 encuestas para 18 países, en el período 2004 a 2018.Los resultados muestran que la religiosidad se relaciona positivamente tanto con la confianza en los otros como con la confianza en las principales instituciones políticas. Identificarse con alguna religión, así como participar con frecuencia de organizaciones religiosas, son dos dimensiones que aumentan la disposición a confiar. Por su parte, el aumento de la diversidad religiosa en cada país, pareciera no tener un impacto directo significativo en la propensión a confiar. Sin embargo, a medida que un país se vuelve diverso en términos religiosos, ciertas relaciones entre religiosidad y confianza social y política se diluyen. En particular, a medida que un país se vuelve más diverso, la identificación religiosa deja de tener un impacto significativo con las probabilidades individuales de confiar en el resto. Asimismo, este aumento de diversidad modera negativamente los niveles de mayor confianza política que presentan los católicos a lo largo del continente. Se presenta una descripción de una agenda para estudiar el cambio religioso y su impacto en la cohesión social que busca ordenar estos hallazgos y proyectar nuevas propuestas de investigación.Los resultados ayudan a comprender la relación entre religiosidad y cohesión social, a través de una interpretación situada. La religiosidad influye en cómo las personas nos enfrentamos a los otros y al orden institucional, pero esta influencia se puede ver reforzada o atenuada según el contexto religioso a nivel país. Esta dinámica ofrece directrices para una mejor comprensión de los desafíos que implica el tránsito a sociedades más diversas y la forma en que ello se relaciona con la cohesión social.
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    Power cages and the October 2019 uprising in Chile
    (2021) Somma, Nicolas M.
    This article studies the Chilean social uprising of 2019 using the power cages theory. By mobilizing enormous amounts of disruptive power in the streets through varied protest tactics, ordinary Chileans challenged the economic and political power cages that regulated their daily lives. The uprising also reshaped affective power, broadening horizontal identities and solidarity feelings among popular sectors, women, and protestors, and eroding affective ties between elites and non-elites. The interactions between disruptive and affective power forced political elites to enter in a constitutional process now underway that may reorder power cages in the decades to come.
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    PROFILE: understanding the 2022-23 Peruvian uprising
    (2024) Somma, Nicolas M.; Disi, Rodolfo; Medel, Rodrigo M.
    This profile examines Peru's unexpected popular uprising of 2022-23, which is distinct from its neighbors due to decades of relative calm. We combine three concepts emphasizing time-varying processes: deep-rooted societal inequality across class, ethnicity, and regions resulting in a fragmented civil society (long term); a mounting crisis in political representation (medium term); and the immediate trigger, namely, the removal of President Pedro Castillo (short term), which incited his supporters and sparked widespread protests.
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    Social and Political Trust in a Low Trust Society
    (2023) Bargsted, Matias; Ortiz, Camila; Caceres, Ignacio; Somma, Nicolas M.
    We study the causal relationship between social and political trust in a low trust society, a setting where this topic has received very little attention. We focus on contemporary Chile, a relatively consolidated new democracy lacking many of the conditions that fosters trust such as high socioeconomic equality, weak social divisions, or universal welfare policies. Our empirical analysis is based on a 4-wave panel survey applied to a representative sample of 2000 Chilean adults interviewed face to face each year between 2016 and 2019. Based on statistical models with varying specifications and assumptions, we find support for the institutionalist view that claims that political trust exercises a positive influence over social trust. However, contrary to recent findings for some European democracies (Sonderskov & Dinesen 2016, Seifert 2018), we also find that social trust positively affects political trust. Our results suggest that the positive relationship between both types of trust travels to different political settings, and that there is no minimum threshold required in levels of trust for this relationship to emerge.
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    Social movements and exchanges: Sketch of a theory
    (2021) Somma, Nicolas M.
    Using social exchange theory, this article presents a new theory for understanding the strategic choices made by social movement leaders-the "movement exchanges" theory. It looks at how leaders engage in exchanges of valued rewards with constituencies, institutional political players, bystander publics, and voluntary organizations. Leaders receive from these players important rewards (like committed activists, political leverage, and resources) for achieving movement goals. In turn, leaders make strategic choices (expressed in frames, tactics, targets, and claims) that other players find rewarding, favoring persistent exchanges across time. By considering movements' simultaneous exchanges with several players, the theory makes sense of choices that remain puzzling for major movement theories. It also blends strategic behavior with culture (in the form of utopias, ideology, and emotions) but does not require the maximizing assumption of the homo economicus. I use the case of the contemporary Chilean student movement to illustrate the theory.
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    Social protests, neoliberalism and democratic institutions in Chile
    (2022) Somma, Nicolas M.
    With the case of contemporary Chile at hand, the article examines the institutional contradiction between neoliberalism and democracy as a source of social protests and popular rebellions. Chile transitioned in 1990 to a representative democracy, presumably encouraging political equality and participation. However, given the orientation of governments toward fostering capitalist accumulation, Chile did not develop mechanisms for fully incorporating into the political arena the emerging and increasingly resourceful civil society. After decades of incubation, this contradiction produced collective grievances that activated social movements and popular revolts. This coalesced in 2019 when a national-scale social uprising opened a process of constitutional change and democratic innovation. I illustrate this argument by examining contemporary student, indigenous, women and labor mobilizations. Democratic governments responded differently to the demands of these four movements depending on the extent they threatened capital accumulation and state sovereignty. I also pay special attention to the 2019 social uprising and the ongoing constitutional change process (until March 2022), which brings exciting innovations to deliberation and democracy.
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    The Attachment of Demonstrators to Institutional Politics: Comparing LGBTIQ Pride Marches in Argentina and Chile
    (2020) Somma, Nicolas M.; Rossi, Federico M.; Donoso, Sofia
    Focusing on LGBTIQ demonstrations in Argentina and Chile, we study protesters' attachment to institutional politics, defined as their emotional and attitudinal connection with the political system. We show that Argentine LGBTIQ demonstrators are on average more attached to institutional politics than Chilean ones. This can be explained neither by differences between Argentines and Chileans in general, nor by demonstrators' individual characteristics. Instead, expanding the political process model, we argue that achieving a substantial part of the LGBTIQ agenda in Argentina, and limited success in Chile, contributed to build a stronger attachment to the political system among Argentine LGBTIQ demonstrators than their Chilean counterparts.
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    The Nexus between Protest and Electoral Participation: Explaining Chile's Exceptionalism
    (2023) Medel, Rodrigo M.; Somma, Nicolas M.; Donoso, Sofia
    The literature on political participation has consistently found that protest positively and significantly correlates with voting. However, Chile can be considered a deviant case to this pattern. During the last decade, Chileans who participated in street demonstrations were unlikely to participate in elections. What explains this anomaly? We argue that this rupture between participation in protest and in elections results from an effective distancing between social-movement organisations (SMOs) and institutional politics. However, this distancing of SMOs from party politics has not been homogeneous. To examine this heterogeneity, we conduct a comparative design of two cases: the labour and student movements. Based on a mixed-methods study that combines interviews with movement leaders and surveys of protest participants in marches, we seek to highlight the mediating role of SMOs in the promotion of different forms of political participation.
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    The Paradoxes of Social Cohesion in Latin America
    (CLAD-LATINOAMERICANO ADMINISTRACION DESARROLLO, 2015) Somma, Nicolas M.; Valenzuela, Eduardo
    This essay explores the paradoxes of social cohesion in Latin America, with social cohesion being understood as the force that keep societies united and allow individuals to become integrated to them. We argue that social cohesion relies on three spheres: the market, the political community, and the civil society. We compare Latin America with the developed democracies of the North and suggest that the former has problems for producing social cohesion -and yet Latin American societies do not disintegrate.
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    What Role Do Political Parties Play in Social Protests? Recent Trends in Argentina and Chile
    (2023) Donoso, Sofia; Somma, Nicolas M.; Rossi, Federico M.
    There is a growing consensus about the complementary nature of institutional and non institutional politics as means to push forward policy agendas. However, the bulk of research tends to concentrate on one aspect of this relationship, namely, how social movements influence the political arena, for example by impacting different stages of the policy making process and creating new political parties. There is comparatively less understanding of the reverse dynamics: the degree to which political parties also influence the protest arena by adopting and utilizing strategies and tactics commonly associated with social movements and by connecting to demonstrators. Focusing on Argentina and Chile, two countries that have experienced massive protest waves in recent years, this article examines the presence of political parties in the organization, staging, and channeling of demonstrations. Given that the reception of political parties in demonstrations is closely tied to whether they are welcome in the protest arena or not, we also analyze how Argentine and Chilean protesters perceive political parties and the level of identification they feel with them. Our primary data source comes from 1935 surveys conducted as part of the Caught in the Act of Protest: Contextualizing Contestation (CCC) network between 2015 and 2017. We found that political parties in Argentina exhibit stronger ties to social movements compared to those in Chile. We seek to link this outcome to divergent and historically rooted patterns of protest dynamics in both countries and discuss the implications of our findings in the conclusion.