The argument of this book has been that the success and consolidation of the Chilean democratic transition has hinged on the construction of an unlikely but stable base of electoral support for conservative, neoliberal parties in the countryside. As we saw previously, the rural social transformations induced by free market economic restructuring both undermined the previous foundations of mobilized and radicalized peasant political expression characteristic of the 1960s and early 1970s, and produced a level of fragmentation and dependence that engendered a new, market-based vulnerability to the influence of agrarian elites. Most crucially, the associational consequences of economic liberalization were so devastating for peasants as largely to preclude autonomous political participation. And thus, despite the striking and disproportionate increase in rural inequality and poverty during the course of the free market reforms, peasants in democratic Chile are among the strongest supporters of the parties identified with military neoliberalism. This in turn, however, has facilitated the consolidation of democracy.

In this chapter, I seek to demonstrate that a durable rural electoral base for the neoliberal right has been constructed that cannot be explained by the principal alternative approaches: the legacies of repression and authoritarianism, material self-interest, or even the oft-cited traditional conservatism of peasants. Instead, I have proposed that social atomization and collective action problems caused by free market policies are critical to understanding posttransition electoral outcomes in the countryside – and hence the nation.