Assessing the effect of activists and their legislative allies in the amendment of bills in Chile

ABSTRACT

Under which conditions do movement actors have influence over legislation? Theory suggests that allies are important, but research findings are mixed. This study argues that if allies are conceptualized following an interactionist approach, they can be crucial. This study develops a new operationalization of movement allies and appraises it by examining the influence of LGBT and labor activists and their legislative allies on the approval of bill amendments in Chile. Using logistic regressions with clustered errors on 1,669 bill amendments, complemented with archival data and interviews with activists and members of congress, findings show that legislative allies have a positive effect on the passage of amendments. Moreover, their profile as social movement supporters gives legislative allies the influence to modify the content of bills when political conditions expand. These findings highlight the advantage of using an interactionist approach to identify legislative allies for movements and the value of analyzing amendments.

KEYWORDS:

• Social movement consequences
• elite allies
• congress
• Latin America

Acknowledgments

I thank Ann Hironaka, Edwin Amenta, Charles Ragin and the journal’s editors and reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions. I also thank the support from the Center for Social Conflict and Cohesion Studies (COES) [CONICYT/FONDAP/15130009]. All errors are my own.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. The ideological scale ranges from 1 (left) to 7 (right). It is based on the Survey of Parliamentary Elites in Latin America from the University of Salamanca: PCCh:1, PS:2, PPD:3, PRSD:4, DC:5, RN:6, UDI:7. Albeit not entirely homogenous, Chilean parties are programmatically stable and ideologically congruent (Luna and Zechmeister 2005), which allows to estimate the overall ideological standings of legislators based on partisanship.

2. Other allies introduced related bills but were out of congress during the discussion of the government’s bill.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Fondo de Financiamiento de Centros de Investigación en Áreas Prioritarias[15130009]; Center for Organizational Research, University of California, Irvine.

Notes on contributors

Rodolfo López

Rodolfo López (PhD, University of California, Irvine) is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Center for Social Conflict and Cohesion Studies (COES). His research interests include political sociology, social movements, and political participation.