This paper analyzes the semantic aspect of the effect of populism in power on parliamentarism. The research focuses on the case of Serbia between 2001 and 2022, which corresponds to the post-Milošević era of contemporary Serbian political history and includes a decade before and after the populist Serbian Progressive Party (SNS) took power in 2012. Drawing on the traditions of conceptual history and rhetorical political analysis, this paper reconstructs the debate over the concept of parliamentarism in Serbian parliamentary debates during the period under observation in order to analyze how populist agents’ interpretation and use of the concept of parliamentarism related to and affected established conceptual conventions. The paper argues that the excessive centralization of power in the hands of the populist executive, which marked the first decade of SNS rule, was accompanied by SNS deputies’ attempt to redefine the concept of parliamentarism through the rhetorical reconstruction of its internal morphology. This attempt was manifested in SNS deputies’ contestation of the established conventions of articulating the concept of parliamentarism with the concepts of parliamentary sovereignty, which implied the superiority of parliament in the institutional system of the polity, and ministerial responsibility, understood as the effective scrutiny of the executive by the institution of parliament as a whole.

This article analyzes the processes shaping the emergence of a professionalized legal academia in Chile. Through a case study informed by quantitative and qualitative evidence, the study shows that the control and orientation of a professional school is a contested space, where the interactions between the profession, the market, and the state shape the trajectory of the legal education field. The article argues that the neoliberal remaking of higher education of the 1980s created a regime that increasingly relies on performance indicators modeled on the paradigm of the research university, which have been used as an opportunity by law schools seeking elite status to increase their academic reputation through the formation of bodies of full-time legal scholars. This new institutional environment has produced, however, an important degree of malaise among the new professional legal academics, the majority of whom resent that their research is increasingly swayed by the standards imposed by governmental or university-wide bureaucratic structures rather than by the needs of legal practice.

This chapter charts talk about “democracy” in Chile, a country that came to be notable, and admired in its day, for its sustained commitment to making representative government work. That success owed much to its endorsement from the late 1820s by a relatively conservatively minded elite, who managed to maintain a top-down governmental system on a limited (though not very limited) franchise. “Democracy” won endorsement as a characterization of this system, though the term was also critically deployed by opponents of the regime, who favored a broadening of its base. In the 1840s and 1850s, government and opposition competed to own the term, but competed on relatively narrow terrain inasmuch as both sides favored some moderate form of representative democracy which did not concede too much agency to the mass of the people.

To improve the quality of education, one can either directly reward performance or introduce school choice, private provision, and demand subsidies. The Chilean voucher scheme combines both approaches: an attendance-related subsidy favors school choice and creates incentives for schools to promote attendance throughout the year. With imperfect monitoring, however, institutions may respond by manipulating performance indicators. By analyzing audit data, we find evidence that a large fraction of Chilean schools – including public schools – over-report attendance, with a higher prevalence among for-profit and under-achieving institutions. Expenditure data suggest that manipulation among for-profit schools seems to follow rent extraction purposes rather than educational goals.

The very nature of large-scale infrastructure projects—long design and construction periods, high investment, and impact on social and natural spaces—makes them prone to socioecological and technical conflicts. These conflicts materialize in stories that become keystones in the making of infrastructure. In this article, we analyze the infrastructuring power of stories by drawing on the case of the Chacao Bridge on Chiloé Island in southern Chile, a controversial infrastructure project that has been in the making over the last six decades. We argue that the “absence” of the bridge creates a space for the production of stories on the island's inherited past and imagined future that keeps recurring and growing in the form of myths. Thus, we propose the concept of “mythical infrastructuring” to capture this process. We then conclude by arguing that the Chacao Bridge project develops its infrastructuring presence over landscape and culture in contradictory ways that cannot be solved technically or symbolically.

Freud completed his last book, on Moses and Monotheism, in 1939, while in his London exile. Its publication was deemed untimely, as its two main theses could be construed as a form of Jewish self-hatred. The first claim questions Moses’ Jewish origins and contends that the founder of the Jews was in fact an Egyptian; the second suggests that the Jews killed Moses and then created his myth as a coping mechanism for concealing their terrible deed. In this article, I contend that Moses and Monotheism can be read as Freud’s intervention in debates on the ‘Jewish Question’. After revisiting Freud’s original argument (I), I assess its reception among leading Jewish intellectuals of the 20th century (II). I then use Freud’s arguments to look at the two key themes of the Jewish Question: understanding the defining features of Jewish identity (III) and the pervasiveness of antisemitism in Western culture (IV).

This essay proposes to change the current manner by which religion is taught within the Chilean school system. Currently, all schools are legally compelled to offer a particular religious teaching in a confessional fashion, although exemptions are offered on an individual basis; whilst state-owned or private secular schools must choose a religion from a list of alternatives (usually Catholicism), private faith schools only teach about the religious belief that defines their educational project. As it stands, this scheme generates problems of exclusivism (students only learn about one faith), confessionalism (they are directed to believe in said faith), and religious illiteracy (in cases where they are allowed to opt-out from the religion class). After characterising religious learning as an educational good for anthropological, cultural, existential, and civic reasons, we propose a move towards a scheme of universal (all faiths), mandatory (no exemptions), and non-confessional (non-directive) religious teaching for state schooling (UMNC). Finally, we propose extending UMNC to faith schools, for reasons related to the epistemic and axiological place of the religion class within the curriculum, and a shift from concerns about parental rights to a child-centred approach.

Since Locke, the concept of person has been closely linked to the idea of a subjective natural right and, later, to the concept of human rights. In this article we attempt to trouble this connection between humanity and personhood. For personhood is also an apparatus or dispositive of power. In the first half of the article, we identify a fundamental problem in the usual way human rights are connected to legal personhood by making use of insights drawn from Roberto Esposito’s discourse on biopolitics and critical race theory. While human rights are intended to offer protection to the “precarious” reality of human embodied life, we hypothesize that the fiction of legal personality generates a dis-embodiment whereby this human life is left exposed and defenseless. In the second half, we propose reconstructing the idea of legal personhood so that it may be more adequate to the required conception of human rights with insights drawn from Helmuth Plessner’s political anthropology of embodied life and from the analysis of disembodiment recently articulated by Ta-Nehisi Coates.

While punishment is a longstanding object of philosophical scrutiny, other controversial aspects of the justice system, such as policing, have flown under the radar. In this paper, we consider possible reasons why philosophers interested in crime and punishment have neglected policing. We make the case for a broader account of the political morality of the justice system, with a particular emphasis on policing. We sketch the outlines of an egalitarian version of such a theory, highlighting parallels between policing and the welfare state. Finally, we turn to recent calls for police abolition. Evaluating such radical claims requires, we argue, going beyond the traditional confines of the philosophy of punishment and considering a more holistic and interdisciplinary theory of criminal justice.

This article builds a developmental model of probation evolution based on the dynamics generated by its feedback effects, illustrating its claims through a case study of Chile's recent probation politics. The article posits that probation emerges out of the negative infrastructural and political feedback effects of the prison. As probation generalises, it creates its own growing negative political feedback. In time, the field can enter a state that we label the politics of probation, providing for substantial political conflict and fluctuance. The article shows how different actors mediate in the conflict around the politics of probation.

The philosopher Akeel Bilgrami’s notion of identity is original and challenging to liberal political theory, but still largely unaddressed by it. In a nutshell, Bilgrami characterizes identity as holding certain values and commitments with a crucial addendum: as we want to continue living by those values and commitments in the future, we erect some social and legal barriers to prevent them from change. Liberals of a Millian and/or Rawlsian cast of mind, in turn, arrange political institutions to enable such change, as they assume that we are the kind of creatures that change their minds. In this sense, the identitarian and the liberal mindset are, as the philosopher claims, “mirror opposites”. This article engages with Bilgrami’s view in two senses: on the one hand, it highlights some potentially problematic areas that may call for further clarification and reinterpretation of the liberal canon, as well as offering other set of tensions …

This work joins the debate on the relation between the categories of antagonism and politics, as it tackles the question of whether politics is to be seen as intrinsically antagonistic, or we could speak of non-antagonistic forms of thinking and acting politically. In doing so, it critically engages with the argument of Laclau by revisiting his stance on the centrality of antagonism for politics, which is seen as a result of his conflation of populism with politics and the consequent difficulty to anticipate the possibility of a non-populist political logic. Against the backdrop of Laclau’s argument, this paper asks the question of whether there can exist a non-populist political logic, or a form of democratic politics which, together with populism, would beopposed to the apolitical forms of administration. Drawing on the intellectual project of Kari Palonen, this work portrays parliamentarism as a non-populist political logic based on a non-antagonistic form of the construction of the “people” as the democratic subject. Lastly, differentiating between the notions of democratic politics and politics of democracy, the paper ends by highlighting the contingent nature of the effect that populist and parliamentary forms of democratic politics have upon what is often constructed and perceived as the quality of democracy.

The rapid development of salmon aquaculture worldwide and the growing criticism of the activity in recent decades have raised doubts about the capacity of the sector to learn from its own crises. In this article, we assess the discursive, behavioral and outcome performance dimensions of the industry to identify actual learning and lessons to be learned. We focus on the case of Chiloé Island, Chile, a global center of salmon production since 1990 that has gone through two severe crises in the last 15 years (2007–2009 ISAV crisis and 2016 red tide crisis). On the basis of a multi-method approach combining qualitative analysis of interviews and statistical data analysis, we observe that the industry has discursively learned the relevance of both self-regulation and the well-being of communities. However, at the behavioral and outcome performance levels, the data show a highly heterogeneous conduct that questions the ability of the sector as a whole to learn from crises. We conclude that detrimental effects for ecosystems and society will increase if learning remains at the level of discourses. Without significant changes in operational practices and market performance there are no real perspectives for the sustainability of the industry. This intensifies when considering the uneven responses to governance mechanisms. The sector needs to adapt its factual performance to sustainable goals and reflexively monitor this process. The first step for achieving this is to produce reliable data to make evidence-based decisions that align the operational dynamics of the entire sector with a more sustainable trajectory in the near future, as well as advancing towards hybrid and more reflexive governance arrangements.

Drawing conceptual boundaries is one of the defining features of constitution-making processes. These historically situated operations of boundary making are central to the definition of what counts as “constitutional” in a political community. In this article, we study the operations of conceptual delimitation performed by the Constitutional Commission (1973–1978) that drafted the 1980 Chilean Constitution, the trademark of Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship. Using the eleven volumes of the Commission’s Official Records as our textual material (10,915 pages and 80,005 distinct words), we apply vector semantics, spectral clustering and bigram graph-based analysis to explore conceptual boundaries and the behavior of specific keywords shaping the space of constitutional meanings. Our results identify the ways in which the Commission defines the normative horizon of the new social and political order by transforming old semantic references into a renewed conceptual framework. This analysis shows the immanent relations between political action and conceptual elaboration that underlie the creation of constitutional texts, as well as the potential of computational methods for the study of constitutional history and constitution-making processes.

This article puts Arendt’s conception of non-human animal appearance into a productive dialogue with recent developments in critical animal studies (CAS) and animal rights theory (ART) within which notions such as (dependent) agency, zoopolis, and animal agora play an important role. By reinterpreting the animal condition in Arendt’s account of the human condition, it demonstrates her potential contribution to political theory in a world where non-human-animals and nature are seen as making claims of entry into the political community. By emphasizing Arendt’s later work, in which she expresses an openness towards the possibility that non-human animals are drawn to appear (and not just for appetite satisfaction), the article indicates how Arendt might help us, both to rethink the boundaries of the political community beyond the human species, and to recognize the political agency of non-human animals.

Most debates surrounding the teaching of creationism in the science classroom have been addressed under a standard frame: whether creationism is science or religion. As creationism suggests supernatural causation, it has been understood as beyond the purview of science, and therefore as religion. This argument for methodological naturalism has been increasingly challenged by philosophers of science as a demarcation criterion. The disaggregation approach introduced by Cecile Laborde provides an alternative framework to address this debate. It suggests that the problem with creationism lies in its epistemic inaccessibility, as it is a theory with weak explanatory capacity that has been superseded by Darwinian evolution. Thus, the exclusion of creationism from the science classroom is not grounded in its religious character, but rather in a set of epistemic shortcomings, which are shared by other fully secular pseudoscientific theories. In the same way that religion is not special as a legal-political category under Laborde’s analysis, creationism in the curriculum should not be treated as special either.

En A Theory of Justice, Rawls articula una teoría contractualista de justicia. El artículo indaga en la metodología justificativa de los principios de justicia que caracterizan su concepción de justicia como equidad (fairness). Esta metodología recurre a dos mecanismos distintos: la posición original y el equilibrio reflexivo. El artículo sostiene que el primer mecanismo se retrotrae al segundo, y que ambos mecanismos expresan el carácter contractualista específico de la teoría rawlsiana, como una que refiere tanto al interés propio como a la imparcialidad.

Indigenous conservation through patrimonialization is the product of political and legal decisions made by a non-indigenous agent: the liberal state, using the law to retain a form of bios. We propose that patrimonialization is the device by which liberal states have processed and integrated indigenous claims into a form of bios ultimately designed to safeguard state legal structures. We argue that, to uphold the rule of law in contexts of struggle and resistance that challenge the very understanding of the law, states respond by wielding the law in the form of the rule by law, that is, pushing the law to the limit to give normative content to the criteria by which the state conducts its affairs, without straying from the individual rights framework. We hold that the rule by law is an operation that defines the patrimonialization of indigenous peoples. It increases their visibility while imposing limits on political action to keep them from becoming sui juris subjects capable of breaching the distinction between zoe and bios. In this article, we try to understand the political–ideological intent of these decisions, the intentions beyond the letter of the law of patrimonialized peoples.

Empirical evidence shows that lack of resources during infancy and the process of accumulating disadvantages throughout childhood have important consequences for cognitive and socio-emotional development. This paper examines socioeconomic gradients across language and socio-emotional measures. Using longitudinal data from 7-year, three-wave panel data, we study the patterns of socioeconomic status and child development in Chile and estimate how much of the wealth gap can be explained by different mediators like maternal educational and skills, child attendance of preschool and school, possession of books, or domestic violence indicators. We show that there are strong associations between household wealth and child development, and that, as the child grows, the gap between the most extreme quintiles of the distribution, both in cognitive and socio-emotional skills, persists but decreases in magnitude. Taking advantage of the longitudinal nature of the data, we calculate a permanent skill for each child and each skill dimension in this 7-year period. The analysis for the permanent component shows that wealth gaps are important to determine language, but not socio-emotional skills, and that the gap is larger for girls than for boys in the early childhood period. While mediators account for some of the associations, there is still a large socioeconomic gap that persists in receptive language among children. The most important factors that mediate the wealth gaps are inherited from maternal characteristics. By understanding the dynamism of social and cognitive vulnerability experienced during childhood and employing longitudinal data and methods, this study contributes to and extends the existing literature on socioeconomic gaps and child development in the Latin American context.

In Latin America, there is scarce comparative research on variables associated with the perception of climate change. This hinders the ability of governments to take mitigation and adaptation measures in the face of the phenomenon, as well as the ability of the population to cope with its effects. In order to fill that void, this research studies the relationship between climate change perception, vulnerability, and readiness in 17 countries of the region. To that end, perception indicators included in the Latinobarómetro 2017 survey are analyzed, contrasted with vulnerability and readiness indexes provided by the University of Notre Dame’s Global Adaptation Index. The analytical strategy includes the statistical description of the variables associated with the perception of climate change in countries of the region, clustering together those countries that display similar behavioral patterns in relation to their vulnerability and readiness indicators, as well as crosstabs with climate change indicators. The key findings indicate that it is possible to identify 3 patterns of behavior regarding the countries’ vulnerability and readiness, which account for high, intermediate, and low levels in those variables. These patterns indicate cross-cutting trends concerning variables such as the level of education and affinity for the market economy, as well as particularities differentiating each country from the rest. The main conclusion is the existence of a negative association between the affinity people express for the market economy and their acknowledgment of climate change as a relevant problem.

Este trabajo revisa algunas de las objeciones más frecuentes contra la versión que Nozick ofrece de la estipulación lockeana. Se detiene especialmente en dos de ellas: aquella que afirma que la estipulación es contraproducente y aquella que, por el contrario, sostiene que es insuficiente. Se rechazarán ambas críticas. La primera porque pasa por alto la distinción que Nozick hace entre no disminuir las oportunidades de usar un bien y las oportunidades de apropiárselo; la segunda porque asume erróneamente que la línea de base de la estipulación se encuentra siempre en el estado de naturaleza. Finalmente se ofrece una formulación del principio de justicia en la adquisición que recoge las restricciones de estipulación.

In 2017, the National Prosecution Bureau of Chile created the Special Unit for Human Rights, Gender-Based Violence, and Sex Crimes, becoming a milestone for criminal prosecution policies as the first time a state institution in Chile used the term ‘gender-based violence’ explicitly in its title. There was no law in the country that addressed and sanctioned this behaviour—recognising it as a social phenomenon—at the time of the Unit's creation. What does the creation of this new Unit mean for access to justice from a gender perspective? To answer this question, we have critically analysed the creation of this Unit as a case study from a feminist institutionalist standpoint. We found that this institutional change might bring a broadening in access to justice for women, girls and LGBTQI+ persons by implementing a gender perspective.

En este artículo se desarrolla una reflexión acerca del suicidio hetero-referido o no-personal. Se lo analiza en tanto forma de voluntad e instrumento de presión política que tensiona críticamente los modos en que se organiza la vida en nuestras sociedades. Se indaga en el potencial de contra-soberanía que supone en tanto intenta desactivar el poder al que se enfrenta. Se tematiza cierta ética de la pasividad que surge en esta acción y se examina la lógica que recorre el acto de darse muerte. Finalmente, el artículo contribuye a complejizar el debate en torno al suicidio hetero-referido en tanto se destacan sus límites y potencialidades, así como las paradojas que plantean a nuestras democracias liberales las diversas demandas de grupos minorizados.

For Victoria Kahn, Hobbes' argument that fear of violent death is “the passion to be reckoned upon” in explaining what inclines men to peace must be interpreted as a mimetic argument. However, Kahn then notes a paradox that makes Hobbes' thinking problematic: whereas love and the desires are appetites that produce an imitative effect, fear is different. Though also a passion, fear lacks that capacity to produce a mimetic effect or, therefore, to generate a contract. My hypothesis is that resolving the dilemma presented in Kahn's interpretation of Hobbes requires a shift in attention from mimesis to rhetoric and, more specifically, to biological rhetoric as defined by Nancy Struever. This approach to Hobbes makes it possible to understand the rhetorical role of fear in generating and maintaining the social contract, and how the problem that Kahn signals—the impotence of fear in relation to mimesis—can be resolved.

My goal in this article is to reconsider current ideas of globalisation, and of the relations between nature and society, by looking at two theoretical programmes of the past four decades. I start by reconsidering Ulrich Beck’s theory of risk society and highlight some of its core strengths and weaknesses. I then revisit more recent debates on the Anthropocene and unpack some key dimensions. There, I contend that arguments on the Anthropocene allow us to develop a more robust concept of globalisation than those currently available: an idea of globalisation that is the inescapable condition of what humans are as a species. Finally, I offer some preliminary reflections on the new stage of globalisation that seems to have started with the Covid-19 pandemic.

This paper studies the role of cognitive skills, socioemotional skills, aspirations and expectations on the likelihood of being NEET (not in education, employment or training) using a novel sample of 15 to 24 year old residents of seven Latin American and Caribbean countries. After controlling for sociodemographic household conditions, we find that numeracy and literacy skills, core self‐evaluation, extraversion and educational aspirations are robust correlates of being NEET. We also find cross country heterogeneity. That is, in some countries, passion and perseverance for long‐term goals, neuroticism and labour market information biases are additional factors associated with being NEET. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

During the last decade, the Chilean government introduced a corporate income tax credit for construction companies installing Solar Water Heating (SWH) systems in new housing developments. The credit aims to provide hot-water solutions to the residential sector with a cheaper and more environmentally-friendly than fossil fuels. The tax benefits were initially granted from 2010 to 2013, during which time a total of 40,705 SWHs were installed. The credits were renewed for the 2016–2020 period, and SWH installations surpassed 100,000. The main objective of this paper is to evaluate the public perception regarding the use of SWH systems and the specific role of the tax credit program in the diffusion of SWHs during the initial period. Moreover, the analysis discusses the incentive mechanism applied in Chile and highlights several of the challenges regarding its implementation. Data was gathered using a face-to-face survey of households in three regions of Chile: Metropolitan Santiago, Valparaíso and Coquimbo, where most of the SWH were installed. The results showed that an average of 76% of the beneficiaries were highly satisfied with the SWH installations and operation, nearly 99% of respondents believed that this type of energy should be expanded to more households in Chile, and most agreed that the Government should play a significant role in such expansion.

Following the general rise of incarceration rates in Latin America, two general frameworks have been influential in attempting to explain the phenomenon: the neoliberal and the state transformation theses. The article takes the case of Chile, the Latin American model of neoliberal governance, to test the broad explanatory power of both frameworks. By doing so, it shows that the connection with a narrative of substitution has distortive potential. Although the Chilean case does show that investment in state capacity augmentation and output maximization mechanisms did have direct effects on incarceration rates, no change in the project of control through criminal justice can be appreciated. Rather than changing its orientation towards the type of social control it provides for, the system still stands for the traditional Latin American project of control of a large, marginalized population through confinement.

This article studies the life and work of the Chilean letrado Manuel de Salas between the years 1795 and 1810 mainly through the written reports he prepared in his position as síndico of the Santiago tribunal del consulado (merchant guild). Salas played a key role in developing a sophisticated program of political and economic reforms based on his eclectic readings of the different European schools of the Enlightenment. Reading widely and without favoring one intellectual tradition over another, Salas’s views on political economy did not follow a unique, but rather a pragmatic path. He was influenced by the Spanish Enlightenment, but he was also an admirer of the physiocrats. More important, his political and intellectual commitments during the colonial period did not aim to break the links with the Spain, but to improve the affairs of the empire from a marginal territory such as Chile. This article argues that Salas’s loyalty to the imprisoned king during the 1808–1810 biennium is to be explained by his actions during the decades immediately preceding the collapse of the monarchy, not least in his capacity as síndico of Santiago’s consulado.