Explaining the outcomes of the student protests in Chile. Hypotheses on social movements’ assertiveness

This article aims to identify mechanisms and processes that explain the assertiveness of social movements in the policy arena. The ways in which civil society organizations impact political institutions and achieve –even partially– their purposes, and to what extent such outcomes can be attributable to the actions of social movements, are issues that are increasingly attracting the attention of scholars in the contentious politics and social policy literature. The emergence of the student movement in Chile in 2011, and the events occurred since then, offers a privileged setting to study the mechanisms that produce reactions from politicians in terms of policy outcomes to grassroots activism. Chilean students configure an exemplary case of relatively strong, purposeful and continuous social movement. They reacted against a highly commodified higher education system, with their protests reaching a highpoint in 2011, in what would be known internationally as the ‘Chilean winter’. Both local and foreign analysts coincide that these protests prompted numerous effects, including the explicit commitment from the incoming Bachelet government (2014) to a comprehensive education reform that will restore education as a “social right”. The most significant changes to date include the tax reform, the creation of two new public universities and fifteen technical training centers, the end of public funding to private, for-profit providers and of co-payment and selective practices in school admission processes, and the tuition free university act. Drawing on recent studies that locate at the intersection between social movements and social policy literature, this articles proposes and analyse four mechanisms through which social movements achieve impacts on public policies: (a) gaining allies in decision-making instances; (b) threatening opponents with unaffordable costs; (c) evolving into political actors seeking access to decision-making instances; (d) changing social values that sustain prevailing policy paradigms and decision-makers preferences. The interaction between these four mechanisms over rather long periods, and their intensity, can configure scenarios of systemic, societal effects. Similarly, I argue that the various interactions among mechanism and the varying intensities in which they manifest, help to understand the potential mismatch between expected changes (movement aspirations), actual outputs (legislation), and ultimate impacts. This article relies on interviews with different stakeholders, public documents and previous research to provide evidence on the four mechanisms described and their interactions.