Political Incorporation: What It Is, How It Happens, and Why It Matters

• In Event: Political Incorporation: Conceptualization, Measurement, and Implications

Abstract

Democracies experience episodes of expansion of rights and representation of excluded groups in society. These are episodes of political incorporation. Although it is a concept central to the stability and legitimacy of democracies, it has yet to be developed systematically in its core components, subtypes, and implications. Different forms of political incorporation can have long or short-term effects and different consequences for the incorporated, the incorporator, and the political system overall. At a moment when the gap between politics and society is widening in democracies worldwide, studying political incorporation is critical.

This paper uses examples of Latin American episodes of political incorporation to advance a conceptualization that can travel through time and space and identify subtype variation that can be used for causal analysis. First, we use a mixed conceptual structure that combines necessary and substitutable constitutive attributes for the core concept. Second, we propose a series of subtypes based on the kind of representation the excluded actors are granted (partisan, corporatist, or personalistic), how the process is initiated (from above or from below), and whether the process mobilizes or demobilizes the incorporated actor.

Authors

• Rodrigo Barrenechea, Universidad Católica del Uruguay

• Isabel Castillo, Universidad de Chile