Disillusioned in Democracy : Labour and the state in post-transitional Chile and Uruguay

Sammanfattning: This dissertation focuses on how social movements change their identity and strategies during a transition from dictatorship to democracy, and how this affects politics in general. More specifically, the involvement of labour centrals in three different areas of economic policy formation is studied in a comparison between Chile and Uruguay. In Chile, it was possible to reach a relative consensus around these questions. In Uruguay, on the contrary, state-labour relations deteriorated rapidly after democratisation. These outcomes are traced back to differences between the two labour centrals with regard to both identity and strategy. When accounting for these, the interplay between social movements and political parties is stressed. The critical question is whether labour's integration into the political framework is achieved through the mediation of a political party or not. In the absence of such actors, a labour movement is pushed into articulating its own political project at the expense of negotiation and concertation in its capacity as a sectoral actor. In both countries, this was what occurred during the protests against the authoritarian regimes in the beginning of the 1980s. In Chile, however, the prolonged transition brought the political parties back in place and this contributed to the orderliness that has characterised this country after the return of democracy. But that was not the case in Uruguay, where the labour central continued to stress its political role after transition and shunned being part to any compromises on more corporate themes. Finally, I associate these cases with the opposing concepts of "movement politics" and "partyarchy". While movement politics (where social movements take a politically prominent position) is associated with the situation during the struggle against an authoritarian regime, partyarchy (where political parties monopolise politics) is the system most suited to the representative democracy that such a struggle may eventually lead to.