Abstract

This chapter analyzes the interactive relationships between social movements, policies, and political opportunity structures throughout successive protest waves, and how this, in turn, shapes social movements’ political impact. We do so by focusing on the student movement in Chile. Since the mid-2000s, protest waves spearheaded by high school and university students have put education on top on the policy agenda. After massive protests in 2006, the first administration of President Michelle Bachelet (2006-2010) reformed the Constitutional Law of Education (LOCE), bequeathed by the military regime, and introduced new institutions to improve the quality of education. The pressure exerted by students in the 2011 nationwide protests then broadened the scope of the student movement’s demands. Regaining power in 2014, part of President Bachelet’s policy agenda, which was backed by a broad coalition of center-left political parties, included an overhaul of the education system, a tax reform to make it financially sustainable, and a new constitution to replace the one left by the military regime. The student movement in Chile sheds light on the processes of scale-shifts, which McAdam et al. (2001:331) define as the “change in the number and level of coordinated contentious actions to a different focal point, involving a new range of actors, different objects, and broadened claims”. For example, a scale-shift has occurred when an issue, tactic or frame that had its origins at the local level is adopted at the national level (Soule 2013:2). The case study under analysis in this chapter also invites us to think of the impact of social movements dialogically. Movements influence policies, and policy changes alter the conditions under which activists mobilize. As Schattschneider famously argued, “new policies create a new politics” (quoted in Pierson 1993:595).