RETHINKING THE LIAISONS BETWEEN SOCIAL MOBILISATION AND POLITICAL REPRESENTATION IN THE 21ST CENTURY: A Conceptual Proposal

In recent decades, South America has experienced strong changes at the political level, with institutional coups, early departures from power and political instability. However, there are two participatory mechanisms that have shown a great degree of vitality: social mobilisation and formal elections. Our argument is that the historical relationship between mobilisation and representation is changing. Understanding these changes is the required first step to interpret broader socio-political consequences in the form of what we call a post-dominant polity. The starting point of this chapter is that we lack a common language, and therefore we must refine our conceptual tools in order to understand what is going on. In order to build this perspective, we review the cases of Argentina, Chile and Brazil. In this context, theorising is taken as the action of developing theory as suggestive analytical reading, rather than creating a theory, a noun that implies a systemic understanding of socio-political rules (Bertilsson, 2016). Thus, the aim of this chapter is to study the nature of the relationship between mobilisation and representation in these different countries.