The Familial Foundations of the Liberal and Conservative Parties in Nineteenth Century Chile

Naim Bro, Adolfo Ibañez University

I map the kinship ties among all 1,449 members of the political elites of Chile in the period 1828-1894. This network includes all parliamentarians, ministers, and presidents holding office in said period. I use community detection algorithms to identify family clusters. I match the kinship data with secondary sources on the birth of political parties in Chile. The stylised facts emerging from such combination are as follows. The key antecedent was the civil war of 1829, which involved three large kinship clusters. Two family clusters founded the Liberal party in 1849. The first cluster were families defeated in the 1829 civil war. The second cluster were families that had won the civil war but were then marginalised. The third 1829 cluster formed the core of the Conservative party at the time of its foundation in 1857.

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 Presented in Session 202. States and Their Elites, or Elites and Their States