28/02/2024
PhD Defence
On Tuesday 27 February 2024 Camilo Fernández Carrozza successfully defended his PhD dissertation entitled ‘Ideología y clivajes partidarios en la conformación del socialismo como expresión política en Chile, 1891-1938’.
This historical study examines the ideological creation of socialism as a form of political expression within the party system in Chile. To do so, it uses the cleavage model as an explanatory framework for the political-party development of Chilean socialism since the 1891 civil war until the creation of the Popular Front in 1938. In general, academic debate considers that, to a great extent, the insertion of new groups into the political system depends on their degree of openness to or exclusion from this. Going against this however, the study shows that the ideological factor is important in this process, since institutional insertion is also a political decision interceded by the strategic principles and organisational conventions of a determined political setup. In this sense, the ability to adapt to the opportunities presented by the political system has been key to Chilean socialism, since this was an area in which the institutional pathway was more flexible and viable that the extra-institutional one.
The thesis was supervised by Prof. Patricio Silva and Dr Pablo Isla Monsalve from the Latin American programme (LAS). The PhD Committee was chaired by Prof. W.J. Heiser (Faculty of Social Sciences). Prof. Damian Pargas (Institute of History) was the Committee’s Secretary. The PhD Committee was further conformed by Prof. Javier Couso (Universidad Diego Portales), Prof. Cristóbal Kay (Erasmus University / ISS), Prof. Willem Adelaar and Dr Soledad Valdivia Rivera, both from the Faculty of Humanities of Leiden University.
