6. Broadening the Scope: Advocacy Coalitions and Media Reforms in Chile and Uruguay

Having analyzed the experiences in Argentina and Brazil in depth, it is worth having a look at the smaller neighbors Chile and Uruguay. Naturally the analysis of these two complementary cases cannot be as detailed as for the two main cases, but they nonetheless add considerably to our understanding of the possibility of media democratization. I will thus focus explicitly on the structure of the Coalitions for Democratization and their belief systems (class-based perspective vs. communication rights), as well as on the prospects of policy-oriented learning. The case of Chile shows that a fragmented Coalition for Democratization without any institutional base can hardly develop a common agenda, let alone brokerage capacities. Some limited success was visible only in one sector reform that featured an open, focused network (part of the Coalition for Democratization) indirectly based on a rights perspective. Uruguay’s Coalition for Democratization resembles its Argentinean counterpart (open, focused network, communication rights) and was, interestingly, able to initiate a series of incremental reform steps, which significantly democratized media regulation.