Protest and social concertation after the Third Wave (Chile, Korea)

Why is protest more common in some Third Wave democracies than others? What is the relationship between protest and the consolidation of inclusive and participatory democracy? New democracies exhibit wide variations in their degree of stability and institutional consolidation. Particularly in the arena of labor relations, some new democracies have been characterized by recurrent instability; others have had more success in eliciting labor compliance. What explains this variation?; Institutions that incorporate unions and employers in policy making became a subject of theoretical and practical interest during the democratization of southern Europe in the mid 1970s. Attention shifted to Latin America in the 1980s as most countries in the region joined the Third Wave of democratization. In the 1990s, tripartite concertation became the institution of choice for policy makers in Eastern Europe concerned about reforms that could trigger major social unrest.; To date, no study has systematically investigated the political economy of labor compliance in Third Wave democracies. Through a combination of methodologies and sources, this dissertation demonstrates that social concertation provides organized labor an institutionalized voice, thereby mitigating levels of overall and particularly violent protest. The success of concertative frameworks in restraining protest activity, however, is negated by reforms that downgrade labor's collective standing or endanger workers' economic livelihood. The project traces the question through a comparison of the relationship between protest and social concertation in two Third Wave democracies---Chile and the Republic of Korea.; The study's main finding---that the exclusionary logic of labor market flexibilization is in conflict with the participatory logic of tripartite politics, holds true for countries with both center-left and conservative governments. Statistical analysis of a broader sample of countries validates the argument. What is different, if anything, about new democracies then?; This project demonstrates that flexible market reforms have had a very different impact on labor compliance in new vis-a-vis established democracies. When confronted with labor market deregulation, the same institutions that are supposed to incorporate labor in the formulation and execution of economic and social policies have increased protest in new democracies but mitigated it in their established counterparts.