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Technopols, Politicians in Govern? Strategies of Movement and Insertion in the Different Political Arenas in Postauthoritarian’ Chile


Abstract

With the beginning of political transitions, Latin-American sees how certain political actors lead the complex pass over from dictatorships to democracy governments. In the vast majority of these cases, the so called Tecnopols (Dominguez, 1996, p.3) would be the ones in charge of heading the way through the authoritarian regimes towards “the new” democracies, by making deep political, social and economic changes, using for this purpose their privileged position in the Government (Joignant, 2005; 2007). However, few analyses were put on the display of the tecnopolitics capitals of these actors (this is “Tec” for its riz technical and “Pols” for their political-party insertion and interest) in other arenas (Offerlé, 1997) of the political field as parliament or partisan life. In this context, our job pretends to show how these political actors move from one arena to the other through their tecnopolitic capitals mobilization. Focused in postautoritarian Chile (Garretón, 2007) our paper seeks to answer a series of questions related to the conception and the politic rol in Latin-Americans societies, namely: what is the relationship between party members, government benches and ministers of state, which are the traditional paths of bank of governments and ministers of state, what are the paths or the most successful models of these political or more general, as these "technocrats" manage to stay in power even if there is a change of government(Silva, 2009). To do this, we will take reference to the activity of the large group of Tecnopols that revolves around the “Concertacion” of Parties for Democracy (alliance in the Govern) taking three axes of analysis: government, parliament and political parties. Thus, we intend to give an idea of what the dynamics of insertion and mobilization of capital that characterizes this important political group, while some differences compared with other similar cases that may be relevant to the purpose here described.