Abstract
This chapter seeks to map family ties in Chile’s political elite, looking first at the cases of these eight families which have wielded great political influence since the country’s Independence from Spanish rule in the early nineteenth century—the so-called traditional families—and then as individuals belonging to the nucleus of the party elite that governed Chile between 1990 and 2015 (including former presidents, ministers, undersecretaries, heads of government divisions and chiefs of staff and senior managers of state companies). In this context, this chapter seeks to provide an empirical insight into how this species of capital operates within these select groups. The purpose here is to display a network with all the family ties of the members of the political elite that responded the survey. Starting with 386 cases, numerous analyses of family networks and relationships were carried out but, since new individuals were included after the tracing ties based on family connections, the numbers of persons considered increased to 588 cases as networks of relationship were discovered.
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- 1.
This definition relies on the concept of social capital formulated by Bourdieu: “social capital is the sum of the resources, actual or virtual, that accrue to an individual or a group by virtue of possessing a durable network of more or less institutionalized relationships of mutual acquaintance and recognition.”
(Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992, p. 119).
- 2.
In this case, family ties were considered until 2015.
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Garrido-Vergara, L. (2020). The Importance of Family Ties in the Chilean Political Elite. In: Species of Capital in the Political Elite. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41172-5_8
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