Sistema Regional de Información
en línea para Revistas Científicas de América Latina,
el Caribe, España y Portugal

Political science, like the other social sciences in Chile, is in debt with its history. While there have been some specific and descriptive reflections, an analytical reflection about its development as a discipline and profession is necessary. Despite the relative youth of political science in Chile, such a task can help usmake sense its role and nature. Using an internalist approach and interviews with Chilean political scientists, the article examines perceptions and images about issues related to political science as a vocation, how the study of politics has been conceptualized historically, its references, its function and social relevance,its strengths and possibilities. The result is an account which may serve as a first step towards the creation of an increased sensibility for the past and the future of the discipline in Chile.

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This paper reports a study which analyzes attitudes and orientations of a group with growing significance in Chilean politics: people who do not ide~ify with political parties or coalitions. Toe study was organized around a set of hypotheses derived from Social ldentity Theory and previous research on generalizedpolitical attitudes. Participants of the study were universitY students in Santiago (N=1460), who answered a self-administered questionnaire. Results confirmed that those who are politically disengaged tend not to identify with other collective referents: the nation or religion. Their political attitudes are also distinctive: in comparison with people who identify with political parties ar coalitions, their political cynicism is higher and their sense of political efficacy is lower. The political tolerance and authoritarianism of this group was significantly different from the levels exhibited by participants identified with right-wing parties and coalitions. Their support for democracy was intermediate as compared to that showed by left-wing and right-wing participants. In general, this group exhibits a ele ar retraction from basic referents of social identity and social integration. The paper concludes recommending longitudinal studies which can help establishing and characterizing the identity transitions that lead to political disaffection in Chilean politics.

While non-state terrorism has grown substantially in many parts of the world since the mid 1990s in Latin America, the insurgent continent par excellence, where radical non-state actors at both end~ of the political spectrum have historically resorted to terror to attain political goals, this scourge has dwindled.Drawing _on the seminal work of Timothy Wickham-Crowley, this article posits that this baffling trend can be expla1ned as a result of a shift in the cultural repertoires of Latín American revolutionary and other antisystemic groups in the 1990s. The traumatic experiences associated with authoritarian backlash andrepression; a more pragmatic attitude that values democracy, accommodation, and dialogue as political strateg1es; and the rejection by vast sectors of the population of wanton violence as a tool to attain political objectives have subtracted terror from the range of activities (stock) of collective action of formerand_ new radical groups. Groups fighting for change have thus internalized that terror ultimately constitutes an 1neffectual and de-legitimized strategy. Colombia constitutes the exception to this regional trend. There, 1t 1s argued_, terror is widely used as and informed by the perverse logic of armed conflict, whereby armed part1es dehberately target civilians to advance military and political objectives.

During the democratic post-transitions the Latín-American party systems faced the need of selftransformation, including new axes and dimensions to the inter-partisan competition in order to adapt to the demands established bythe traditional representative system deficits. As a consequence, new oppositionparties (challenging parties) emerged which presented themselves as alternatives to the traditional parties. The successfully established challenging parties (EP-FA, PAN, PRD, and PT) established clear patterns of competition against the political status quo, acquired strong social support, and presented organic andnewly institutional characteristics, while those that failed (AD-Ml9, FREPASO, LCR and MAS) did not achieve competition strategies that were consistent with the alternative represéntation that raised them, and they ended up dissolving away. Lastly I argue that the level of institutionalization of the party systemis related to the successes and failures of the challenging parties.

The requirement of assuming a given category of the true far the determination of the ideological -thecondition of true knowledge- has always been a basic premise of the classic theory of ideology. Theemergence of a "poststructuralist ethos", however, has meant the explicit denying of such condition,becoming the main theoretical challenge to those authors who insist in using the notion of ideology in"post moi:lern" times. This work assesses the classic answers given to the determination of the ideologicalas well as the contemporary theories elaborated in response to the challenge posed by post-structuralism, ,within the descriptive and negative research program on ideology distinguished by Geuss (1981). Thepaper finally propases a re-conceptualisation of the notion of ideology which, acknowledging the permanenceof the 'necessity' of the true, places the praxis of the individuals as the main "locus" for both the ideological

The New Public Management (NPM) is a worldwide administrative phenomenon that is well–exemplified in the United States experience. Nurtured in the Reagan years with “get government off our backs” rhetoric, it matured under President Clinton’s National Performance Review and the subsequent Republican approach under President Bush. Both the Democratic and Republican leadership provided a vision of business–like government that is less intrusive yet responsive to citizens. The rate of growth of government programs was to be curtailed. However, the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon gave rise to a “War on Terror” that changed priorities. Traditional public administration values of centralized control, coordination, and inter–governmental cooperation were emphasized. Shrinking of the administrative state was limited to non–Defense, non–Homeland Security arenas.

We show how the electoral map for the Chamber of Deputies in Chile was designed to over-represent the electoral support for conservative parties alter the 1988 plebiscite. Alter discussing the way the electoral map was designed, we identify a positive correlation between the vote against Pinochet and the size of the electoral districts. In addition, we underline how the changes in population pattems that took place between 1988 and 2002 have worsened the initial distortions in the size of the different districts. Then, we analyze the effect of the distortion in the size of the electoral districts on the 1999 presidential and 2001 parliamentary elections. We show that, unlike 1988, there is no longer a positive correlation between the size of the districts and the electoral strength of the Concertación. We argue that there persists an. unequal representation in the electoral map since there are drastic variations in the population of the 60electoral districts.

In Uruguay, social sciences have developed later than in other countries in the region. Political science, as an independent discipline, was only institutionalized at the end of the 1980s when, within the University of the Republic, a specialized institute of research was established and began to offer undergraduate coursesin the discipline. It is undeniable that during the 1990’s political science experienced an intensive growth both in the number of students and research activities. At the same time, political scientists started to play an important role in the political analysis and public debate. Nevertheless, currently, Uruguayan politicalscience faces the challenges of correcting some important asymmetries.