Main Seminar: CHILEAN PERSPECTIVES UNDER KAST: A ROUND TABLE

Convener(s): Eduardo Posada-Carbó

Speaker(s): Belén Villegas Plá, LAC/ODID, Oxford; Javier Sajuria, Queen Mary University of London; Fernando Rosenblatt, University of Manchester

Current Chilean President, Gabriel Boric, welcomes the newly elected President, José Antonio Kast, at the Palacio de la Moneda. Source: Prensa Presidencia Chile

Belén Villegas Plá is a Departmental Lecturer in the Political Economy of Latin America at the Oxford Department of International Development and at the Oxford School of Global and Area Studies (Latin American Centre). She is also a Research Associate at the TIDE Centre. She has developed two main interconnected lines of research. The first examines the political economy of distributive policies in developing countries, while the second explores social reproduction and the care economy. Her work has been published in top-tier academic journals, including New Political Economy, Competition & Change, Development and Change, Review of International Political Economy, Finance and Space, Third World Quarterly, Global Social Policy, and The International Journal of Care and Caring, among others. Additionally, she has published chapters and articles with numerous prestigious Spanish-language publishers, including Siglo XXI Editores and CLACSO, and has contributed many opinion pieces to the media and reports for international organizations. She regularly advises international institutions on inequality and social policies, including ECLAC, UN Women, ODI Global, FCDO (UK), among others

Javier Sajuria is a Professor of Comparative Politics at the Department of Politics and International Relations at the School of Society and Environment, Queen Mary, University of London. He is also the Dean for Education at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences. His research agenda lies in the intersection political behaviour, comparative politics, and political methodology. His current focus is on electoral politics, democratic attitudes, far-right politics, and populism, with a geographical interest in Europe and Latin America. His work has been widely published in journals such as Party Politics, Electoral Politics, West European Politics, among others. Javier is a regular columnist in La Tercera (Chile) and co-hosts Bicameral, the longest standing podcast on Chilean legislative politics. He is a member of the board of Espacio Público and former President of the Chilean Political Science Association (ACCP). Currently, he is the co-editor (alongside the great Simona Guerra) of Representation, and the co-convenor of the ECPR Standing Group on Extremism and & Democracy.

Fernando Rosenblatt is Senior Lecturer in Comparative Politics at the University of Manchester. His teaching and research interests include comparative politics, Latin American politics, democratic representation, parties and party systems. Rosenblatt is the author of Party Vibrancy and Democracy in Latin America, published in 2018 by Oxford University Press. In collaboration with Verónica Pérez and Rafael Piñeiro, he has coauthored How Party Activism Survives: Uruguay´s Frente Amplio, published in 2020 by Cambridge University Press. In collaboration with Juan Pablo Luna, Rafael Piñeiro Rodríguez and Gabriel Vommaro, he coedited Diminished Parties. Democratic Representation in Contemporary Latin America, published in 2021 by Cambridge University Press. In collaboration with Rafael Piñeiro-Rodríguez, Gabriel Vommaro, and Laura Wills-Otero he has coauthored Parties and New Technologies in Latin America, published in 2024 by Cambridge University Press.