The processes of university democratization:

the cases of UNR and USACH

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to apply the comparative methodology to the analysis of internal and external democratization processes of the National University of Rosario (UNR) and the University of Santiago de Chile (USACH). Taking into account that both institutions belong to neighboring Latin American countries, Argentina and Chile, whose political histories find important differences, the challenge that we proposed as graduates of both houses of studies was to create indicators that allowed us to compare their processes of democratization and to serve us for Go beyond the analysis of our realities as unique cases.

The effort is to operationalize the concepts of internal and external democratization through the creation of variables and indicators and subject them to control in the scenario included, in the case of the UNR, by the reform of the Statute of the University in 1998 and 2015, and in the case of USACH for the years 2008 and 2015.

In this sense, we talk about the conformation of decision-making structures of the institution and the characteristics of the university population.  It will be considered that greater democratization will be, in the first case, guaranteeing to all levels the capacity of voice and vote, and in the second, that its population composition is as close as possible to the global one of each country.