| I assess the extent to which political support is an indicator of democratic collapse and resurrection, specifically in terms of the relationship between political support and regime stability. To do this, I use public opinion survey data from Santiago, Chile, covering the pre-authoritarian (1958--1973) and post-authoritarian (1988--1995) periods. I examine the evolution of four indicators of political support that lie on a continuum from most specific to most diffuse support, support for the incumbent president and government, the party system and for military intervention, in these two periods. I also conduct multivariate analyses to test the impact of specific support on diffuse support, together with that of theoretically important variables such as ideology, party identification and economic evaluations.;I find that there is scope for refining the political support paradigm. Assessing system stability in terms of levels of aggregate support for political objects can be misleading since the distribution of such support across cleavages (ideological and partisan in the Chilean case) can be equally important. I also find that, during transitions from and toward democracy, specific support has a strong impact on diffuse support. More generally, this research suggests, first, that the collapse of democracy in Chile in 1973 was preceded by a growing incongruence between political support and structure (i.e., regime) owing to the policies implemented by the Allende government. Second, there is also incongruence between political support and political structure in the post-authoritarian period: the institutional transition to democracy in Chile is not matched by mass support for democracy. Third, such incongruence may be attributed in part to the impact of political structure on Chileans' regime principles, that is, the effects of policies implemented under the Allende and Pinochet governments on the way Chileans view and evaluate democracy. |
