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By Arturo Valenzuela and J. Samuel Valenzuela

Abstract

The thesis of the paper is that the overt political strategy of the Chilean military and its indirect efforts at political change through a transformation of the economy and society will not succeed in destroying the Chilean party system and the partisan attachments in the electorate. The thesis is supported by empirical studies of Chilean voting behavior before the coup, which show that Chile had developed a durable "political landscape"; by evidence of the way preexisting parties and organized groups, despite repression, have moved into new organizational spaces created, ironically, to thwart them; and by comparative references to France and Spain. The paper notes that analysis of authoritarian regimes must take into account the dialectic of interaction between state and opposition, and must consider the preexisting party and political system in any comparative analysis.

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