The Political Sources of Rights Consciousness and Claiming: Insights from Chile

• In Event: Promoting Human Rights: The Role of Law and Courts

Abstract

Rights claiming is a fundamental exercise of democratic citizenship, a form of political participation “by which the citizenry uses public authority on its own behalf” and “determine[s] the benefits that [they] actually receive from their government” (Zemans, 1983, p. 690 and p. 693). However, the understandings and capacities needed to claim rights are not shared equally across society. Much socio-legal scholarship has argued that individuals’ understandings and capacities to claim rights are structurally determined, such that those with higher socio-economic status, education, and/or racial and gender privilege will know what their legal rights are and how to navigate the justice system, while marginalized people will lack these capabilities (Zemans, 1982; Gloppen, 2006; Sandefur, 2008). Yet our previous comparative research, based on sixteen focus groups in Chile and Colombia in 2017, revealed that while wealthier men in both countries boasted the strongest capabilities vis-à-vis the justice system, there were also marked differences between the ways in which Chileans in less privileged groups talked about their rights and showed familiarity with institutional remedies as compared to their Colombian counterparts (Hilbink, et al. 2019; Hilbink & Salas, forthcoming 2021). This finding suggests that the political context shapes people’s identity and capacity as legal agents, especially among those in marginalized populations. However, we know little about what specific political factors, at the micro- and macro-levels, promote or inhibit people’s decisions to claim rights, and what mechanisms and actors are at play.

In this paper, we will report the results of a nationally-representative, telephone survey (N=1,067) that we are carrying out in Chile in March 2021 to test the findings generated by our focus groups regarding the relevance of rights consciousness and legal literacy to rights claiming behavior and to explore the effects of political variables and events on the willingness and ability of individuals to claim rights. The ongoing constitution making process in Chile, set off by the social uprising of late 2019, offers a unique opportunity to investigate if and how the changing political context has affected the identity and capacity of Chileans to claim rights. The survey will consist of questions probing participants’ political identity and participation before and after the social uprising, their perceptions and behavior about hypothetical scenarios of rights violations, their opinions about and experiences with political and justice institutions in the country, and socio-demographic characteristics. In addition to contributing to the literatures on political participation, legal mobilization and legal consciousness, this work will offer insights for policy debates on advancing access to justice and human rights.

Authors

• Lisa Hilbink, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities

• Valentina Salas, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities