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The Nearness of Youth: Spatial and Temporal Effects of Protests on Political Attitudes in Chile

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 January 2021

Rodolfo Disi Pavlic Open the ORCID record for Rodolfo Disi Pavlic [Opens in a new window]
Rodolfo Disi Pavlic*
Affiliation:
Rodolfo Disi Pavlic is an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology and Political Science at Temuco Catholic University, Temuco, Chile. [email protected].
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Abstract

Social movement research indicates that mobilization can effect change in political attitudes, yet few works have systematically tested the effect of protests on public opinion. This article uses survey and protest event data to assess the spatial and temporal effect of mobilizations on political attitudes Chile. It combines the 2008, 2010, and 2012 LAPOP surveys and a dataset of college student protest events, mapping respondents and protests at the municipal level using Geographic Information Systems (GIS). Using regression analyses, it finds that proximity to college student protests has a significant effect on various political attitudes. The effect, however, tends to be substantively larger on “weak” attitudes and smaller on “strong” ones. The results highlight the importance of mobilizations in shaping individual political attitudes and the role that social movements play in the policy-making process.

Keywords

protestpolitical attitudesattitude changeChilean politicsstudent mobilization
Type
Research Article
Information
Latin American Politics and Society , Volume 63 , Issue 1 , February 2021 , pp. 72 - 94
Copyright
© The Author, 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the University of Miami

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Footnotes

Conflict of interest: The author declares none.

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