We saw in the previous chapter that the imposition of free market policies in Chile brought with it dramatic social changes, particularly in rural areas. This chapter empirically examines the effects of these neoliberal reforms on the stocks of social capital and patterns of associational life in urban and rural areas, and across time. This is the intermediate step between the economic reforms and political outcomes, linking marketization to social transformations that inhibit peasant political participation. The results indicate that economic modernization has, in addition to engendering export growth, also raised the barriers to rural collective action and expression to near-insurmountable levels, provoking social atomization, heightening peasant dependence, and thereby limiting political competition. In the chapter that follows I examine electoral effects of this organizationally arid rural environment, demonstrating the crucial role that peasants – neoliberalism's clearest victims – have played in maintaining the viability of the political right and along with it the stability of the democratic regime.

In this chapter, however, the focus is on a critical intermediate step in the overall causal chain: the contention that as a consequence of free market reforms autonomous rural political participation is not merely absent, but rather largely precluded.