After seventeen years as dictator of Chile, in 1990 Augusto Pinochet ceremoniously handed the presidential sash to the leader of his legal opposition to formalize the peaceful transition to civilian ...rule in that country. Among the many idiosyncrasies of this extraordinary transfer of political power, the most memorable is the month-long, nationally televised campaign of uncensored political advertising known as the Franja de Propaganda Electoral—the “Official Space for Electoral Propaganda.” Produced by Pinochet’s supporters and the legal opposition, the 1988 Franja campaign set out to encourage voters to participate in a plebiscite that would define the democratic future of Chile. Harry L. Simón Salazar presents a valuable historical account, new empirical research, and a unique theoretical analysis of the televised Franja campaign to examine how it helped the Chilean people reconcile the irreconcilable and stabilize a contradictory relationship between what was politically implausible and what was represented as true and viable in a space of mediated political culture. This contribution to the field of political communication research will be useful for scholars, students, and a general public interested in Latin American history and democracy, as well as researchers of media, communication theory, and cultural studies. Television, Democracy, and the Mediatization of Chilean Politics also helps inform a more critical understanding of contemporary hyper-mediated political movements such as the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, and the particularly germane phenomenon of Trumpism.
My dissertation examines the context and content of the Franja de Propaganda Electoral of 1988. What loosely translates as “official space for electoral propaganda” — was a nationally televised, ...largely uncensored, 30-minute political program, representing the two sides of the 1988 Plebiscito; the NO campaign in opposition to the military regime, and the pro-Pinochet SÍ campaign. The Franja Electoral became a mediated space of Chilean politics, just beyond the repressive reach of the Pinochetista regime, within which a seemingly impossible transition was not only articulated, but also, through which, a transformation of Chilean political culture was engendered. To help explain this transformation, I draw from a conceptual framework known as mediatization theory, to examine the Franja Electoral as a sample case for the mediatization of Chilean politics. I propose that this case is best understood as an historical, political, and theoretical process, rooted in the cultural assimilation of an imagined political configuration. The mediatization of Chilean politics was a process that would ultimately help reconcile a contradictory relationship between what was politically viable as a social and historical course of action, with what was represented as acceptable in a mediated, televisual space of political culture. Furthermore, this project helps in the recovery of an exceptionally rare, complete collection of the 1988 Franja Electoral, and includes one of only a handful of content analyses performed on this important audio-visual material. Finally, my use of mediatization theory involves the incorporation of Cultural Historical Activity Theory (CHAT), to analyze the Franja Electoral as an artifact of Chilean political culture — a mediated representation of an enduring qualitative alteration in the meaning of Democracy in Chile.
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