Patricio Silva, born in Santiago de Chile, Chile, in 1957. Assistant Professor of Political Sociology at the Institute of Social and Cultural Studies, Leiden University.
Fellow (1 September 1998 – 30 June 1999)
During my stay at NIAS I started a first comparative study on state-business relations in South Korea and Chile, as a part of the collective effort within the framework of the research group “East Asian and Latin American Developments Compared”. The title of my essay is “State Capacity, Technocratic Insulation, and Government-Business Relations in South Korea and Chile”.
I was particularly interested in finding out how exactly the military regimes in both countries (led by General Park-Chung Hee and General Augusto Pinochet respectively) managed to edify a kind of ‘relative autonomy’ vis-à-vis the business community in the formulation and application of their economic policies. For this purpose, I focussed on state capacity in both countries and on the ways the state technocracy became isolated from pressure groups in society.
The South Korean and Chilean cases show the existence of an ‘elected affinity’ between military men and civilian technocrats, as both actors shared similar ‘world visions’ as well as coinciding societal goals. Together with their common sense of mission, both actors also shared an almost innate rejection of party politics and a belief in technical and ‘apolitical’ solutions for the country’s problems.