The Social Outburst and Political Representation in Chile (Latin American Societies) 3030703193, 9783030703196

Table of contents :
Contents
Contributors
Chapter 1: Introduction: Social Outbreak and Political Representation in Latin America
1.1 Theories of Representation and the Place of Parties
References
Part I: The Collapse of the Political Party System in Chile
Chapter 2: Party System Crisis: The Exhaustion of Chile’s Spine
2.1 Parties in the “Old Democracy” (1925–1973)
2.1.1 Features of the Party System Between 1960 and 1973
2.2 The Party System Under the Authoritarian Regime
2.2.1 Changes in the Party System
2.3 The Party System After the Return to Democracy (1990–2020)
2.4 The Changes in the Party System (2010–2020)
2.5 The Party System After October 2019
References
Chapter 3: Opportunities and Constraints of a Stagnate System. A Time of Representation Crisis or Political Innovation?
3.1 Introduction
3.2 Theory
3.3 Data and Methodology
3.4 Analysis
3.5 Conclusions
References
Part II: The Moment of the Street: Mobilization and Political Representation from the Social Movements
Chapter 4: Political Parties and Social Movements in Post-transition Chile: Between Mistrust and Reconfiguration
4.1 Introduction
4.2 The Interaction Between Social Movements and Institutional Politics: Between Autonomy and Reconfiguration
4.3 The Relation Between Social Movements and Institutional Political Actors in Post-transitional Chile
4.3.1 The Relation Between Social Movements and Institutional Actors Post 2011
4.4 Data and Methods
4.4.1 Variables
4.5 Empirical Evidence
4.6 Conclusions
References
Chapter 5: Please Mind the Gap: Autonomization and Street Politics
5.1 Introduction
5.2 Autonomization and Detachment from Political Parties
5.3 Understanding Chilean October
5.4 Street Politics Since the Outburst
5.5 Conclusion
References
Part III: Case Studies
Chapter 6: Indigenous Movements in Chile: Toward Self-Determination or Recognition?
6.1 Introduction
6.2 Indigenous Movements, their Demands and Strategies
6.2.1 Elements to Understand the Emergence of Indigenous Movements
6.2.2 Indigenous Movements in Latin America
6.2.3 Indigenous Movements in Chile
6.3 The Current Demands of Indigenous Movements in Chile
6.4 Conclusions
References
Chapter 7: Collective Action and Political Strategy of the University Movement: From the Struggle for Education to the Social Outbreak in Chile
7.1 Introduction
7.2 Social Movement: Theoretical Synthesis and Political Strategy
7.3 From Crisis to Rearticulation of the Student Movement in the Transitional Context
7.4 The Students’ Offensive for Public, Free, and Quality Education
7.5 The Feminist Student Movement in 2018
7.6 The Student Movement in the Social Outbreak
7.7 Conclusion
References
Chapter 8: Feminist Movements and the Social Outburst in Chile: The Time of Women?
8.1 Introduction
8.2 Feminist Movements During the Twentieth Century: Waves and Silences, Visibility, and Latency
8.3 Social Movements, from the Post-dictatorship Period to the 2018 Feminist May: Women, Sexual, and Gender Diversity
8.4 From the 2018 Feminist May to the October 2019 Social Outburst
8.5 From the Feminist Movements to the Constitutional Debate
8.6 Conclusion
References
Chapter 9: The Decade of Contentious Politics: The Rise of Social Movements Around Water in Post-transitional Chile
9.1 Introduction: A Decade Marked by Growing Water Resource Demands in a ‘Megadrought’ Context
9.2 The Fight for Water Rights in Chile Since the Democratic Transition
9.2.1 Institutionalization of Rights: The 1981 Código de Aguas
9.3 Social Movements and Territorial Contentious Processes around Natural Resources
9.3.1 Social Movements, Local Demands and Political Opportunities
9.3.2 Territory and Power
9.4 Decentralizing Reforms and Nationalization of Politics at a Subnational Level
9.5 Process and Situation: The Interrelationship Between Actors and the Institutional Response
9.5.1 Legislative Process
9.5.2 Situation
9.6 The Case of Petorca (Valparaiso Region)
9.7 Conclusions
References
Chapter 10: From the Dance of Those Left Out to a New Constitution: Channeling the Chilean Social Unrest
10.1 Introduction
10.2 Background on Constitution-making Processes in Democracy
10.3 Social Mobilization as Pressure for the Constitution-making Process
10.4 Social Mobilization in Chile: The Constitution as Problem
10.5 Political Pact and Social Reaction: Citizen Pressure for Inclusion
10.6 Conclusions
References
Chapter 11: Conclusion: “We Didn’t See It Coming”: Chile’s 2019 Social Outburst
11.1 The Adaptive Reaction of the Party System in Post-transition Chile
11.2 The Disruptive Reaction of the Social Movements in Post-transition Chile
11.3 Elements of Continuity and Tension: The Constituent Process as an Institutional Exit, Human Rights Violations, and Indigenous Peoples
References
Index

Citation preview

Latin American Societies Current Challenges in Social Sciences

Bernardo Navarrete Victor Tricot  Editors

The Social Outburst and Political Representation in Chile

Latin American Societies Current Challenges in Social Sciences Series Editors Adrián Albala Institute of Political Science (IPOL) University of Brasília Brasilia, Brasília, Brazil María José Álvarez Rivadulla School of Social Sciences Universidad de los Andes Bogotá, Colombia Alejandro Natal Department of Social Processes Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana Lerma de Villada, Estado de México, Mexico

This series aims at presenting to the international community original contributions by scholars working on Latin America. Such contributions will address the challenges that Latin American societies currently face as well as the ways they deal with these challenges. The series will be methodologically agnostic, that is: it welcomes case studies, small-N comparative studies or studies covering the whole region, as well as studies using qualitative or quantitative data (or a mix of both), as long as they are empirically rigorous and based on high-quality research. Besides exploring Latin American challenges, the series attempts to provide concepts, findings and theories that may shed light on other regions. The series will focus on seven axes of challenges: 1) Classes and inequalities 2) Crime, security and violence 3) Environmental threats 4) Collective action 5) Cultural change and resistance 6) Migrations 7) Political inclusion and representation Both solicited and unsolicited proposals will be considered for publication in the series.

More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/16592

Bernardo Navarrete  •  Victor Tricot Editors

The Social Outburst and Political Representation in Chile

Editors Bernardo Navarrete University of Santiago Chile Santiago, RM - Santiago, Chile

Victor Tricot University of Girona Girona, Gerona, Spain

ISSN 2730-5538     ISSN 2730-5546 (electronic) Latin American Societies ISBN 978-3-030-70319-6    ISBN 978-3-030-70320-2 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70320-2 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Contents

1 Introduction: Social Outbreak and Political Representation in Latin America��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������    1 Bernardo Navarrete and Victor Tricot Part I The Collapse of the Political Party System in Chile 2 Party System Crisis: The Exhaustion of Chile’s Spine������������������������   13 Bernardo Navarrete Yáñez 3 Opportunities and Constraints of a Stagnate System. A Time of Representation Crisis or Political Innovation? ������������������   37 Mario Herrera Part II The Moment of the Street: Mobilization and Political Representation from the Social Movements 4 Political Parties and Social Movements in Post-transition Chile: Between Mistrust and Reconfiguration ������������������������������������������������   51 Gonzalo Parra Coray 5 Please Mind the Gap: Autonomization and Street Politics������������������   75 Victor Tricot Part III Case Studies 6 Indigenous Movements in Chile: Toward Self-Determination or Recognition?����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   93 Verónica Figueroa Huencho 7 Collective Action and Political Strategy of the University Movement: From the Struggle for Education to the Social Outbreak in Chile������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  109 Leandro Sanhueza Huenupi v

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Contents

8 Feminist Movements and the Social Outburst in Chile: The Time of Women?������������������������������������������������������������������������������  131 Paulina Vergara-Saavedra and Carolina Muñoz-Rojas 9 The Decade of Contentious Politics: The Rise of Social Movements Around Water in Post-transitional Chile��������������������������  151 María Esther del Campo García and Manuel Sánchez Reinón 10 From the Dance of Those Left Out to a New Constitution: Channeling the Chilean Social Unrest ��������������������������������������������������  173 María Cristina Escudero and Alejandro Olivares L. 11 Conclusion: “We Didn’t See It Coming”: Chile’s 2019 Social Outburst����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  193 Gonzalo Parra Coray Index������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  201

Contributors

Gonzalo Parra Coray  Pontifical Catholic University of Chile, Santiago, Chile Maria  Esther  del  Campo  García  Complutense University of Madrid, Madrid, Spain Verónica  Figueroa  Huencho  Institute for Public Affairs (INAP) University of Chile, Santiago, Chile Leandro Sanhueza Huenupi  University of Chile, Santiago, Chile María Cristina Escudero  Institute for Public Affairs (INAP) University of Chile, Santiago, Chile Alejandro Olivares L.  Catholic University of Temuco, Temuco, Chile Mario Herrera  University of Talca, Talca, Maule, Chile Manuel Sánchez Reinón  Complutense University of Madrid, Madrid, Spain Carolina Muñoz-Rojas  University of Chile, Santiago, Chile Paulina Vergara-Saavedra  University of Chile, Santiago, Chile University Alberto Hurtado, Santiago, Chile Victor Tricot  University of Girona, Girona, Spain SIT Study Abroad, Brattleboro, VT, USA Bernardo Navarrete Yáñez  University of Santiago, Santiago, Chile

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Chapter 1

Introduction: Social Outbreak and Political Representation in Latin America Bernardo Navarrete and Victor Tricot

The concepts of crisis, democracy, and representation as “conceptual connections between political problems” (Nohlen 2013: 59) share certain characteristics that are relevant when reading this book, even when there is little consensus on their meaning. Following Sen and Foster (2001: 145), if a concept has some basic ambiguity, then an accurate representation of that concept should preserve that ambiguity, rather than try to eliminate it by some arbitrarily completed ordering. If we force an order, it is logical to argue that crises are addressed and resolved in a democratic regime, by those who were elected as representatives by the citizens. However, the concept of crisis is the one most frequently used to explain the current state of democracy and representation. The actors of the crisis are no longer only part of party democracy or “partitocracy.” The available literature tells us that there are multiple actors in the management of a crisis and one to which we should pay more attention is bureaucracy (bureau-politics) (Rosenthal et al. 1991), as the State and its capacity for problem-­ solving generates or resolves crises (Lodge 2013), a relevant aspect given that perceptions of the effectiveness of a government influence civil society actors (Giugni and Grasso 2016). We are, then, facing a crisis of justification for democracy, as citizens do not necessarily understand decisions as being “theirs”; even less do they assume them to be binding (Milstein 2020). In a sentence: who speaks for whom and with what authority? (Saward 2010).

B. Navarrete (*) University of Santiago, Santiago, Chile e-mail: [email protected] V. Tricot University of Girona, Girona, Spain e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 B. Navarrete, V. Tricot (eds.), The Social Outburst and Political Representation in Chile, Latin American Societies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70320-2_1

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This reminds us – as Dahl (1976: 6) maintains – that after “twenty-five centuries” of studies on politics we have many opposing hypotheses, which are supported by the common sense of those who hold them and which we can continue to discuss until the end of time. Contributing to this discussion, it is worth asking why three concepts so intertwined, when analyzed separately, are so complex to address? Perhaps the answer lies in the fact that “modernity [is] in crisis” (Touraine 2006: 92), in assuming the ambiguity of concepts, in the sense of Sen and Foster, or in acknowledging that we do not have a simple explanation that arises from a generally accepted theory. Analyzed separately, we observe that democracy is a “semantic chaos” (Sartori 1974: 15) with a strong tendency toward its “definitional manipulation” (Levitsky and Collier 1998), which is reflected in the Latin American context (Alcántara 1991). Representation, by its way, has generated its own taxonomic industry (Childs and Lovenduski 2013) and is deceptively simple: everyone seems to know what it is but few can agree on any particular definition (Dovi 2018) and although the “representative system is a discovery of the moderns” (Constant 2019: 52), its discussion is evident from the Athenian government (Sabine 2009; Mansbridge 2020) and “not little ink and blood has been spilled to establish the exact definition, specify who had the right to represent others and what should be done when the representatives passed over those whom they were supposed to represent”(Keane 2018: 31). In this context, decreeing the death and resurrection of representation (Abal 2004), beyond the rhetorical resource, ignores the “democratic rediscovery of representation” that has come from normative scholars (Disch 2015). The same occurs with the concept of “crisis”, which in rhetoric is constantly used by presidents to define a problem as threatening, focusing the public’s attention on it, even when the leaders assume that it will be resolved quickly and with limited political cost (Bostdorff and O’Rourke 1997). In this sense, it is not surprising that it is the concept most frequently used to describe the state of institutions and their norms at national and international levels (Schmidt 2017). The problem is that “modern democracy” is complex, as it is both a “principle of legitimacy,” a “political system” where power is exercised, and an “ideal” (Sartori 1992: 27). The problem is that legitimacy in a democratic system based on elected representatives increasingly depends on the judgment of experts and their forecasts (Tetlock 2016), who delegate and are influenced by think tanks that are increasingly powerful in managing and processing information or, in simple terms, in transforming political problems into public policies (Dahl 1992). But expert judgment and think tanks face no costs for their bad suggestions, even though there are no politically neutral technical issues (Innerarity 2017). The problems of a State and a given society belong to the parties and part of them are resolved in the legislative power, whose distinctive attribute is its representative “character” (Cotta 1988: 267), as well as the executive; the government in democracy is sustained because they are representative, because they are elected (Manin et al. 2002). Moreover, representation crosses the three powers of the State, to the extent that each of them incorporates the totality of the general will that is exercised in an articulated way, in the specificity of its various functions (Rametta 2005). And particularly in the executive

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and legislative power, there is a dual relationship between representative and represented because an identification between them is presumed (Cotta 1988). A growing body of literature on the meaning of concepts has been generated and has led to a renewed analysis of political reality, specifically under the question: can representation empower citizens from their silent positions? This is relevant because it is forgotten that silence is a way of doing politics that expresses the absence or failure of public institutions (Brito 2020), questioning the discourse of resistance of the heroes who speak or break the silence and who have generated an idealized, voluntaristic vision and focused on the virtuous action of heroes creating national myths (Mihai 2020). In this sense, for Hobbes (1651) a representative is a person who takes the “artificial” role of speaking or acting on behalf of another man, where his words or actions can be attributed to the represented (Duso 2005). The problem lies – following Mill (2000: 74) – in two dangers of the representative system: ignorance and incapacity or intellectual deficiencies of those who represent us or who are under the influence of “dark interests… in contradiction with the general welfare of the community.” But representation implies separation and distance (Balandier 1994). The latter is studied in Political Science through “congruence”; that is, the distance between the preferences of the elites and the citizens, and if the congruence is strong in the issues that really concern the public (Traber et al. 2018). In these times, both are persistent criticisms of the representatives, but seen the other way around, what has impoverished our democracies is their excessive proximity, the weakness of politics, vulnerable to the pressures of each moment and attentive only to short-term ups and downs (Bardhan 1999; Calhoun 1998); what Wlezien (2020) calls “dynamic representation,” which occurs when the political actions of elected representatives change in response to public preferences. Meanwhile, physical distance, understood as separation, is a problem derived from population growth and about which we cannot do anything (Sartori 1999). This may affect the representation of citizens and the definition of public policies (Durand 2010; Subirats 2001), but in practice the problems are explained more because politicians have their own objectives, interests and values, and because they possess information and take actions that citizens cannot monitor without assuming costs (Manin et al. 2002). The effect is a general antipathy toward everything that is perceived as politics, mistrust toward public institutions, and distance with issues of collective interest (Gargarella 2002), questioning the “title to govern” (Lipset 1990: 229) of those who represent, an especially problematic aspect in areas such as Latin America, where the resolution of crises and the construction of the political order are simultaneous processes (Lechner 2014). As previously stated, many issues of the citizens’ debate are being referred to the decision of “expert committees”, of “technical reports,” or of “professional” political forums inside and outside the parties. The lack of preparation or availability of citizens to take charge of all the complex problems of the public and of the political that reveal a political lack of culture and civic weakness, is usually a justifying reason, many times used but rarely analyzed in depth and, even less, with a determined will to amend it (Mayos 2011).

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Therefore, our concepts share the trend toward a crisis reading, on which it is not possible to be up to date given the growing body of literature available (Posada 2018), which is a paradox, because one of the most frequently analyzed explanations to understand the crisis of democracy is its main characteristic: political representation, whose “legitimacy crisis” (Milstein 2020) has been addressed more in its “legitimacy by performance” than in its “legitimacy of origin.” In the first, it matters because of the performance of the policies that they implement and with that the efficiency of the political system constitutes its main source of legitimation (Habermas 1999; Carrillo and Tamayo 1997). However, the evidence shows that this “legitimacy in the eyes of the people” is being lost (Deutsch 1980: 81), as it is being responded to through specific public policies rather than in the representation of general interests, which is judged to be less effective by making the public sphere dependent on the private sphere (Camps 2010). The “legitimacy of origin,” which arises from the votes obtained and the type of electoral system that transforms them into public office, is less frequently studied, but it is on the agenda of the problems of representation on which progress must be made. Meanwhile, the “legitimation crisis” leads  – following Forst and Günther (2017)  – to a “justification crisis,” a conflict over the functions and justifications of a given order with competing languages and narratives that highlight prevailing forms that are no longer considered adequate. In short, the State appears to us, once again, as lacking legitimacy and the resources to direct social, economic, and political developments (Lodge 2013). This is because the limits of legitimation by results have a lot to do with the fact that efficacy does not dissolve the political question about what society values as truly effective (Innerarity 2017), especially in democracies in Latin America, where, although they are surviving, few are thriving (Levitsky 2018). However, the representation was not an invention of the democrats but the development of a medieval institution of monarchical and aristocratic government (Dhal 1992; Acton 2011). Two concepts have been installed in the discussion since that time: “the general will,” which is assumed to be channeled by the representatives, as – following Montesquieu (1906: 230–231) – the “people do what they do through their representatives, that he cannot do by himself” because the “people are not entirely suitable” for discussing the problems that affect them. But being elected by the people does not alter the fictitious nature of the attribution, carried out through the concept of mandate or representation (Kelsen 1982: 304) and there cannot be a representation of “the collective” if the different actors do not recognize themselves as constituting a community (Lechner 2014). And the second concept is the “common good,” the “guiding beacon of politics” that guides representatives in the exercise of power but that “vanishes into thin air” because it presupposes a determined and “discernible existence for all” (Schumpeter 1963: 221 and 223), a “belief” that cannot be answered except through subjective value judgments (Kelsen 1988). Thus, the institutions of the current representative system were designed by elites that are currently “counterintuitive” (Gargarella 2002), weakening the political system – and with it its ability to face the dynamics of order and disorder – and the logical abandonment of the old strategies to deactivate the crisis processes (Balandier

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1994). If this is so, then why don’t our representatives change? Part of the answer is in Tony Judt quoting Upton Sinclair: why would a Congressman leave his relations with interest groups? The surprising answer was: “it is difficult for a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it” (2011: 161). Having said the above, reviewing the representation in Latin America and the state of reflection from political theory, the scenario of provide solutions to the problems of current politics is discouraging (Roiz 2019). A first diagnosis in 1990 argued that creative political thought was mostly exploratory and tentative, more interested in local issues and lacking theoretical rigor (Parekh 1996). Thirty years later, this seems not to have changed substantially at the theoretical and empirical levels, we still have few works that explain the mechanisms of representation through which citizens delegate the ability to make political decisions to their representatives (Luna 2007).

1.1  Theories of Representation and the Place of Parties One of the most frequently cited works on representation is that of Hanna Pitkin (1985 [1967]) who elaborates five dimensions: (a) representation as authorization; (b) representation as responsibility; (c) descriptive representation; (d) symbolic representation; and (e) representation as substantive performance. Over time, she recognized an “omission” in her text, as she did not consider that representative institutions can “betray instead of serving democracy and freedom.” A recent trend in democracy theory is to argue that democracies “do not die suddenly” and the process that leads to this is “from within” by elected representatives, that is, it begins at the polls (Levitsky and Ziblatt 2018). The problem is that representative processes are typical of the democratic political system and in particular of the parties (Cotta 1988), but assuming a “representation of mandate” via elections requires the parties to account for their true intentions and that these to be the best for voters (Manin et al. 2002), something that citizens do not perceive. This is affecting democracies and the search for a consistent explanation has a single connecting thread: representation through political parties no longer works as before in its role of articulating interests, adding demands, and managing competing passions (Schmitter 2019). We consider it opportune to make some warnings at this point in the text: “Let’s not simplify the complexity of democratic life to the populist scheme of a healthy and virtuous people-victim, opposed to a corrupt and disoriented institutional framework” (Rosanvallon 2006: 23). Modern theories on representation have turned us all into “passive” citizens (Tuck 2019), creating a “gap” or “trap” of expectations (Corbett 2016), and additionally show that neither the extreme left nor the extreme right is especially interested in intervening through the usual procedures of representation (Innerarity 2015: 140). The latter does not take Kant back, who displaces the question about the form of government by that of how it is governed (Escamilla 2007) and this must be

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reconsidered. As Sartori (1999) argues, the form of representation is in need of defense. If, as has been stated, we know that it fails and in what way it has failed, as well as about what it cannot or must not give us, then the parties must take on a problem regarding the quality of the militants they recruit and who end up professionally dedicated to politics, as the “quality of politicians should affect the quality of politics” (Alcántara 2013: 23) and this, in turn, the quality of representation. Balancing “receptivity and independent responsibility” is a response to the demand for “directism,” where the citizen is the one who decides on public issues, “does not choose who decides, but is the decision maker” (Sartori 1999: 6) and this debate is about the form and not how it is governed. The problem in the above is that direct participation is already installed −in the way of old democracy – through referendum and plebiscite, popular legislative initiatives, and citizen candidacies (Reveles 2017), which has not displaced representation via parties; it seems that they coexist more at the local level than at the national level and that they show similar failures. If the crisis of the parties is the crisis of representation (Badiou 2000), then it is the parties that must give part of the answer, especially when they face independent or citizen candidates. The other is in the hands of academics, who are comparatively analyzing the advances and setbacks of representation and the models that support them. Now, is the assumption that people have lost trust in traditional forms of representation, such as political parties, valid? (Chandhoke 2005). In Dahl’s (1976) logic there seems to be no definitive answer. There is no politics without representation or representation without parties and although citizens do not want or trust them, they are necessary for the proper functioning of politics and the State (Mair 2015) even when, in general, support for the party’s government they have weakened, generating long-term doubt about whether party democracy can be sustained (Katz 2020). This should lead us to recognize that non-electoral modes of representation must be taken seriously (Saward 2010a). This is demonstrated because the theoretical discussion on representation is disconnected from real-world problems and cannot argue that democratic representation focuses only on the voice of the citizens (Brito 2020), as this has been overcome by the growing body of literature on minority representation (Phillips 1998; Castiglione and Pollak 2018). In feminism, which considers how women are represented and who speaks for them (Disch 2015), we can find a good example of this. The politics of decision is inseparable from politics as representation. And “the street,” protesting citizens, also express pressure and lobbies, irrational emotions, and illegitimate representations (Innerarity 2015: 142). But “protest provides something that nothing can provide: It draws attention to issues that no functional system recognizes as its own [...]. It compensates for the manifest deficit of reflection in modern society” (Luhmann 1991: 153). The Chilean case is illustrative of the above: it has a stable party system but comparatively low levels of citizen identification with them, and since 2011 it has been experiencing a deep crisis of political representation that has turned citizens onto the streets, to be heard and represented by new movements that seek to alter the status quo (Luna 2016), reaching in October 2019 levels of intensity not observed since the return to democracy in 1990 (Escoffier and Clemente 2020). The challenge of the current democratic societies is not to

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leave their representatives alone – whom they must monitor, criticize, and, where appropriate, replace – without destroying or depoliticizing public space (Innerarity 2015: 161). In the following pages of this book we take a new look at democratic representation challenges in contemporary Chile, and about the causes of the biggest social outbreak that the country has confronted since the return of democracy. For this, it examines the interaction between political parties and social movements in Chile since 2000 owing to which we must establish bridges between two bodies of literature that have so far been distanced, that tend to study parties and forms of traditional representation separately from social movements. The book is organized into three parts. The first one analyzes the Chilean political system diachronically and the crisis and innovations in the turn of its representation. The second part studies the relevance of social movements as political actors in this last decade. Finally, the third part will delve deep into case studies of relevance to understand the current political and social movement scenario. All chapters are constructed with the October uprising.

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Part I

The Collapse of the Political Party System in Chile

Chapter 2

Party System Crisis: The Exhaustion of Chile’s Spine Bernardo Navarrete Yáñez

Party systems impact the political system and public policy outcomes. This has been addressed in the following five lines of research: analysis of the emergence of party systems, how to classify party systems, building indices and metrics to statistically capture their attributes, changing the party system theoretically and empirically, and the political consequences of party system attributes (Nwokora and Pelizzo 2015). This chapter takes the first line of research to study the origin of Chile’s party system and then the fourth and fifth lines of research to analyze the changes in the system and the consequences they have for Chilean society. First, the Chilean party system is analyzed in three eras, because, on the one hand, a distinctive feature – compared with other Latin American countries – is its early institutionalization (Lechner 1985) and the persistence of this over time (Angell 2007), and on the other hand, during these three periods there are components of adaptation and change (Appleton and Ward 1997), where the continuity of the parties is a sign of their institutional capacities. The first period analyzed is the so-called “old democracy” (1925–1973), characterized by a system of parties closer to the European evolutionary model (Huneeus and Avendaño 2018) and with deep historical and social roots that allowed it to represent most social groups (Angell 2007). It consisted of two left-wing parties: Communist and Socialist; two center: Christian Democrat and Radicals; and two right-wing: Liberal and Conservatives, who in the late 1960s merged to create the National Party. All of them – in alliance or on their own – at some point gained access to the Executive (Correa 2000). Despite the broad representativeness, democracy was perceived to be in “permanent crisis,” increasingly dominated by parties with “global and exclusionary planning” (Góngora 1986, 246–259), and in an

B. N. Yáñez (*) University of Santiago, Santiago, Chile e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 B. Navarrete, V. Tricot (eds.), The Social Outburst and Political Representation in Chile, Latin American Societies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70320-2_2

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escalation of ideological demands (Hirschman 1981; Valdés 1989) that had in the State the fate of “all internal and external demands” (Garretón 2011:10). The party system was stable, representative, inclusive, highly ideological, with a strong imbrication with the leadership of social organizations, but subtracting autonomy, and a strong tendency to polarization (Garretón 1989). Then, the analysis addresses how the party system worked under the authoritarian regime (1973–1990), considering that it was not a simple parenthesis between two forms of democracy, as it had a profound impact on political culture (Huneeus 1998) and generated significant changes in the party system (Torcal and Mainwaring 2003). The military went from a corporatist stance, influenced by Catholic fundamentalists, to a neoliberal discourse that allowed a group of economists and technocrats to generate an economic and social architecture that characterized the authoritarian regime (Valenzuela 1993). After 17 years in power, they produced a real revolution in Chile owing to the global restructuring, which broke with the tradition of Chilean society in its economic relations, in the nature of the state, and in the dominant ideological–cultural conceptions (Vergara 1980), and because it bequeathed an institutional system that imposed the rules of transition, generating a marked system that tended toward consensuality (Moulian 1992). Political parties were dissolved by the authoritarian regime and – in the case of Marxist parties – “persecuted one after the other according to the degree of political and military threat attributed to them by the Armed Forces” (Barros 2005:162). However, the four center-left parties of the “old democracy” managed to stay active, some from underground, others with a very low profile, as the regime successfully resurrected a widespread distrust in the matches (Angell 1993), a situation that remained until Pinochet’s defeat in the plebiscite of 1988 (Cañas 1997) and that was observable in all existing opinion polls (Garretón 1993). But it was the support or rejection of the authoritarian regime that relegated traditional sources of conflict between parties (Scully and Valenzuela 1996) and consolidated, in the late 1980s, an opposition coalition that rejected General Pinochet’s continuity in the aforementioned plebiscite of 5 October 1988. This meant that party mobilization capacity, both programmatic and strictly political–tactical action, was limited (Solari 1995) showing that the party system could no longer be characterized by “extreme polarization” (Valenzuela 1995: 65–66) and that, unlike the past, leaders tended to highlight the centrist nature of their positions and programs (Scully and Valenzuela 1993). This did not happen with the Communist Party, which defined a different strategy with which to confront the authoritarian regime. The third and final part analyzes the return to democracy and why, after 30 years (1990–2020), parties cease to be the “vertebral column of society,” as happened in the “old democracy,” facing problems typical of all parties in consolidated democracies (Luna and Vergara 2016): a rigid organizational architecture, a decrease in the number of its militants, a systemic crisis of legitimacy in public opinion, given a “fantasy consensus” that stabilized a social economic order that prevented collective mobilization and social change (Puga 2020), a serious failure to represent social demands, where the protest gap widened, from low-cost protests (request for signatures) to high-cost protests (participation in a demonstration) (Rodon and Guinjoan

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2018), particularly in the context of economic unrest, corruption scandals, illegal policy financing (Matamala 2015), and fracture with the demands of social organizations, highlighting a less institutionalized party system, both in its external/systemic and internal/organizational dimensions (Hicken 2016).

2.1  Parties in the “Old Democracy” (1925–1973) There is consensus on the genesis of the parties in Chile. It had to be sought after national independence (1818), and more specifically in the 1850s (Del Campo 1995; Valenzuela 1985; Gil 1962). The parties did not emerge from the eaves of the State, but from parliamentary debates that took place and political clubs that started between 1820 and 1850 (Valenzuela 1995), and that were structured as a party system in the 1890s, showing a clear tendency toward stability (Hidalgo 1991). This political party system has been studied from the theory of “cleavages” or “generative fractures” of Lipset and Rokkan (1992), also called “generative divisions” (Valenzuela 1990: 136). There are three explanatory proposals for the origin of the Chilean party system. The first to use the Lipset and Rokkan model were J. S. Valenzuela and Arturo Valenzuela, who in 1982 raised “three corporate divisions in the background”: the first, called “Centro Periferia” expressed strong resistance to a centralized lay state, born of personal and family rivalries, and of regional rivalries. The second division was a religious one, which occurred between the State and the Church, where liberals and radicals fought for greater secularization and the Conservative Party to defend the temporal influence of religious elites. The third split was the class divide – workers against employers – which emerges in the “institutional environment” of the so-called Parliamentary Republic (1891–1924), a time of significant changes in urbanization and industrialization generated by the exploitation of the saltpeter in the north of the country that would last until 1973. For his part, 10 years later, Timothy Scully (1992) raised three “critical junctures: religious conflict, the emergence of the urban working class and finally rural ones” (Scully 1992: 26–27). Scully’s accrual presents a novel contribution to the religious and class dimensions (Correa 1992), as the Catholic Church changes its position in the face of social conflict and “class struggle” assuming the demands of the peasant and moving away from rural oligarchy and its political representatives, the Conservative party, which lost the essential element of its historical identity: its connection with the Catholic Church. Scully’s second novel contribution is to show that “there is a center and that center political parties have a role,”, distancing themselves from the thesis of Duverger (1994) and Sartori (1997) – authors who underestimate the Center’s ability to generate its own identity and project – by showing that the existence of a Center acting as a mediator between the extremes may be necessary to keep the party system cohesive and does not necessarily constitute an obstacle to democratic political competition in polarized multi-party systems. The third and final proposal was made in 1997 by Genaro Arriagada, who points out that the first party system emerged in the mid-nineteenth century by the

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clerical–anticlerical struggle, the second by a break in the class structure that generated the so-called “social issue,”, and the third by the conflict of rival utopias expressed by the Christian, Socialist, and Communist Democratic Parties (1997:17, 21, 38ff.). In the latter, he moved away from J. Samuel and Arturo Valenzuela and, to a lesser extent, Scully, as he seeks to highlight the ideological variable – or rather hyperideologization – that existed in the 1960s and 1970s.

2.1.1  Features of the Party System Between 1960 and 1973 The Party System in this period was characterized by uniform competition in all the territories of the country (Valenzuela 2016), where the participation of citizens was channeled centrally by the parties (Arriagada 1997), and with an ability to be present in all areas, thus being able to determine the recruitment of candidates to hold positions in institutions as diverse as public distribution, trade unions (IRELA 1997), professional associations, neighborhood organizations, and even in secondary schools (Valenzuela 1989). Entrepreneurs, despite being educated in a democratic tradition, participated very little (Petras 1971). For some, because they depended heavily on the State (Moulian 1992; Angell 1986), for others because more than 50% of parliamentarians were connected to business and agricultural activities (Urzúa 1973; Pizarro 1978). In fact, the entrepreneur did not feel represented exclusively by the traditional Right (Correa 1986); thus, by the end of the 1960s a new type of entrepreneur began to emerge who flourished under the authoritarian regime. The institutionalization of the party system and the functioning of parties were not regulated by a Statute of Political Parties or a law giving them legal recognition. This situation favored the performance of a political leadership made up of closed groups that were not always subject to voting requests. The indirect selection of candidates – albeit with consultation with the parting bases – was carried out by a Board, Council or Central Committee (Moulian 1993; Chelén 1966; Grayson 1968), which, in the absence of open competition within the parties, allowed those leaders who showed more loyalty and ideological fidelity to nominate parliamentary constituency where success was easier, thus favoring the reproduction of the parting elite. It was only in the Government Program of Christian Democratic candidate Radomiro Tomic (1969) in the 1970 presidential election that the need to establish a legal framework to regulate political parties was contemplated (Guzman 1964). Multipartyism was persistent and rooted, independent of variations in electoral systems and their reforms (Fernández 1989; Miranda 1982; Portales 1988), which in the mid-1950s was structured around six political parties called structurals (Aldunate 1984). These parties – two right-wing, two center, and two left-wing parties (Huneeus 1985) – got more than 80% of the vote, exposing the existence of a highly competitive system, with a tendency to concentrate (Valenzuela 1990). In addition, these organizations maintained significant political differences between

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them (Hunneus 1987), a symptom of ideological pluralism, as well as the importance of political location in terms of the Left–Right axis. These characteristics contributed to the electoral stability of the main parties, becoming one of the most outstanding features of Chilean multipartyism, and for some authors, rather a historical constant (Lechner 1985). It has been said that this multipartyism was “pure” (Nogueira 1986) and “proportional” (Moulian 1993), coinciding with the “polarized pluralism” and the pattern of “high fragmentation,” pointed out by Sartori (1987: 163) regarding the Chilean case. This fragmentation has been a distinctive feature of Chile’s political system (Moulian 1993), because it characterized and supplemented politics (Chaparro 1985). The parties represented all the political tendencies that existed in the country (Gil 1969), coinciding, at the same time, with the main ideologies: the Marxism of the Socialist and Communist parties, where both evolve into Leninism; Christian humanism and the communitarianism of Christian Democracy; and the Liberalism and Conservatism present on the Right (Silvert 1965). For Cavarozzi (1995), the “ideological specialization” of the system had “prevailed” since the 1920s. In this way, a power structure was consolidated that differed from the oligarchic model existing in some Latin American countries (Atria 1992). Until the mid-1960s, multipartyism developed under a “State of Commitment,” where parties and public institutions engaged in a continuum of negotiation and commitment, acting as intermediaries of almost always conflicting interests (Scully 1992: 148). At the elite level, this situation was characterized on the basis of the following assumptions: (a) recognition and acceptance of the legitimacy of the interests of the participating groups; (b) legitimacy of the groups themselves; (c) institutionalization of the conflict; and (d) permanence of a particular status quo situation that until the late 1950s excluded the peasants. However, at the beginning of the 1960s, the low level of social inclusivity began to jeopardize the stability of the system, especially as marginalized sectors began to push to alter the conditions of “commitment” (Morales 1986). This coexists with one of the main features of Chile’s political system: Party Centrality. One of the first social scientists to introduce this thesis in Chile is Manuel Antonio Garretón (1983), who argues that the party system was concerted, channeled, measured, and represented the “social base” before the State, producing an “imbrication” between parties and social groups (1987:64). In the words of Raúl Urzúa, the process of incorporating and mobilizing new social groups – which characterized the 1960s  – was from “above,” through “particularistic relations with politically dominant elites” (1973). Clientelism with organizations required parties to accept their demands and aspirations as their own (Foxley 1985), morphing into brokers between social organizations and the State. Political parties provided organization, mobilization, participation, recruitment, and leadership (Chaparro 1985) to respond to “the heterogeneity of their foundation” (Valenzuela 1989) and because there was no class vote (Bitar 1998) or workers’ organizations representing sectors on the Left (INSORA 1963), or gremial associations of the entrepreneur, who was represented exclusively by the Right (Correa 1986; Vitale 1998).

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In this way, part-party centrality was understood as “neither could society be reduced to parties, nor was an analysis of it achievable without them” (Garretón 1987: 193). Were parties really the “backbone” of Chilean political evolution until 1973? Although the importance that citizens recognized them was evident (Baño 1993), at the same time a strong anti-partisan sentiment manifested (Angell 1993), which was reflected in support of two presidents who rejected the central role of the parties: Carlos Ibáñez in 1952 and Arturo Alessandri in 1958 (Angell 1986). Much of this sentiment came about by the smear of the system of partisan relations based on negotiation and agreement on the widest range of subjects, whether these were of national, local, group or personal interest, used as an instrument for obtaining prebendas (Correa et al. 2001). There was also a low level of interest in politics. This is a paradox, as its importance was inversely proportional to the negative opinion expressed by people regarding the actions of politicians (Baño 1993). In fact, opinions agreed to highlight them as those who worked less for Chile, resulting in a distance from the middle and low strata relative to the high sectors, relative to businessmen, public officials, and labor leaders (Moulian 1965). However, a 1973 survey conducted in Santiago by Mario Hamuy noted that political parties were regarded by 68.5% of citizenship as indispensable for governing and only 26.7% said that “they are not indispensable” (quoted by Hunneus 1987: 69). From 1971 onward, and, to some extent with the municipal elections of that year, there was a change of interest in politics, when the “apathetic” became “active militant,” with politics invading much of national life (Arriagada 1974). In this context, the existence of an small active militant proportion of the total electorate, which had sought to impose and effect a technobureaucratic project, as the Presidency of the Republic, instead of modernizing its mass party structure, it was important to maximize its electoral power (Flisfisch 1984), thereby generating a double discourse that was simultaneously operationalized: one internal “very ideological and radical, intended to exert its impact” within the party and another “electoral, pragmatic, moderate and much less ideological,” intended for the citizen in general (Angell 1993). This dynamic was only valid until the middle of the Christian Democrat government (1964–1970). Then, the speech became strongly radicalized and the media, especially the written press, began to portray the facts from their position on the Left–Right axis (Jenkin 1989; Dooner 1989; González and Fontaine 1997), playing an active role in the process of political polarization. The extremism of the words and slogans on the left, together with the proposal of the “single path” of the DC, reflected the state of “feverish slogans” (afiebramiento consignista) (Rodríguez 1990). There was a divorce between thought and reality, between language and its signs, where this double discourse was seen only as a “coating,” a rhetoric denied by the actual functioning of political communities (Moulian 1993). Apart from this, and because of their interpretation of the 1925 Constitution, political parties  – along with being the electoral base of the President of the Republic – were also “co-governors and co-administrators” of the various administrations that were in place until 1973. These rules of the game, known and applied by all, were expressed through the so-called “pass,” which consisted of the authorization of the parties for a minister to assume his office, a situation that all the

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Presidents after Pedro Aguirre Cerda (1938–1942) accepted, beyond their persistent attempts to avoid this practice (Bravo 1978). There was also the “quota system,” which consisted of the allocation of positions according to the composition of parties of the ruling coalition, which reached its maximum expression in the mandate of Salvador Allende, as the six parties that comprised the Popular Unity were assigned the administration of the State through a vertical distribution, so that two members of the same party could never find themselves subordinate to each other in key positions (Véliz 1983). Consequently, the political system was highly polarized at the level of the parting elites, who by their strong presence had a decisive influence on the appointment of candidates, thus structuring the alternatives of the electorate (Valenzuela 1989). For James Petras (1997), political polarization existed at the militant base and in the dome of the parties; for example, in the Senate it “functioned as a private club”: socialists and conservatives drank together and exchanged acuities. These elites in their parties tended to make decisions in a very restricted way, a common practice of internal democracy (Alcántara 1995), which also fostered the tendency to give specific weight to intellectuals, which accentuated the ideological factor in party politics (Angell 1986). For its part, the electorate supported parties that postulated a radical transformation of economic, social, and political structures, as well as parties that favored the defense of the status quo (Valenzuela 1989). This electoral support accentuated the dependence of party elites on the social sectors they represented, generating little autonomy to transfer interests (Rehren 1997). This polarization hindered the formation of alliances, as they sought “structural transformations, both economically and socially” (Gazmuri 1992) and with it each party emphasized the conflicting elements, considering its project impassable and totally exclusive of the other existing proposals, which were supported by important sections of the population (Martínez and Palacios 1991); these were the so-called “global and exclusionary plans” (Góngora 1994). A “rigid” Center represented by Christian Democracy, the anti-coalitionist attitude of the Left – socialists and communists – for his obsession with the “dangers of reformism,”, and a Right that in the early 1960s began to face the “game of losers” (Moulian 1983: 71–73), as the change of the social structure was an important cause of its “defeat” (Petras 1971). This, in short, helped to explain the absence of coalitions beyond the location in the ideological arc of the party system. In summary, polarization took place in two aspects: the first, referring to the institutional element, in which the system required gradualism and negotiation, by not providing mechanisms that facilitate agreements and alliances to form a relatively stable majority, such as the absence of a presidential run-by. The second “relates to this phenomenon of the party as a subculture, as a messianic carrier of a global society project, where differentiation of its identity sometimes mattered more than cooperation in common programs and policies” (Garretón 1987: 200). But it was also reflected in the society of those years. In other words, all issues of public life were reduced to political terms, partly because of the inadequacy of party-alternative organizations. These became the main, perhaps unique, means of

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taking part in public life, a fact that “will contribute to accounting for the explosiveness of political conflicts, since any interruption of communication between opponents is not mitigated by the existence of a parallel network of organizations that cross-engage political contenders” (Merino 1978). This strong penetration of parting cultures into the social and civic life of voters led them to identify themselves on the Left, Center, and Right axes “with a collection of symbols, beliefs and values of very sharp profile” (Baño et al. 1991), which ultimately also involved the Armed Forces. In short, there was also an ideological polarization between “conservatives” and “revolutionaries” (Huneeus 1988), which affected even Center parties such as Christian Democracy. Even though polarization penetrated society from party structures, it would have been given more into the political elite. This statement is reinforced by examining the results of the deputy’s elections from 1937 to 1973, in which the Right got 30.1%, the Center 39.7%, and the Left 21.5% of the vote. Something similar is apparent from the public opinion polls of those years (Hamuy Surveys, in Carlos Hunneus. 1987: 163). In this sense, Michael Fleet (1988) argues that it would have been political-partisan and nonsocial or ideological in nature. Since the 1952 presidential election, there had been a “shift of the Chilean government to the left”, but not in the left-wing ideological content among citizens (Chaparro and Prothro 1972). Until now, polarization has been assumed only in its political aspect, but it is no less true that it, as various Chilean historians have put it, “was not so much due to the ‘uncompromising’ nature of global planning introduced since 1964, but rather to the cumulative effect of economic stagnation and social crisis” (“Manifesto of Historians” 1999). Without attaching greater importance to the economic than to the political, there is abundant empirical evidence to support the need to give special relevance to this cause (Valenzuela 1989; Godoy 1990. Dieter Nolhen (1981) had a different vision: the management of the socioeconomic expectations of the middle and low sectors conflict with the country’s economic growth, generating a “traumatic relationship” between politics and economics (Pinto 1996). Indeed, there was a relative advancement of social organization and institutional forms with regard to changes in the level of economic structure, a dissociation that tended to sharpen in the 1960s and 1970s (Pinto 1970; Bitar 1998). In the light of the above, it is necessary to repair the fact that the agents who expressed social conflict and the projects of change and transformation in the 1960s and early 1970s were, mainly, the center and left parties, in competitive and antagonistic relations with each other (Gazmuri 1988). Starting in 1975, the Right implemented a project of “global planning” under the authoritarian regime of Pinochet (Arriagada 1997: 47), but it was not the old right of the Conservative, Liberal, and National parties, but a new right that had begun to be forged in the late 1950s, dominated by the business sector, which would bring a coherent project of economic modernization characterized by a profound distrust of partisan activity (Correa 1986). This situation has led to the argument that the three trends – Left, Center, and Right – represented in the 1970 presidential election were the transformation of the political system from the redefinition of the role of the parties, at the cost of destroying the system that they formed themselves (Yocelevzky 1986).

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In this scenario, the so-called “ordinary” citizen lived a decade of political ruptures that began with Frei Montalva’s “Revolution in Freedom” (1964–1970), continued with the “Chilean path of transition to socialism of Popular Unity,” led by Allende (1970–1973), ending with the military coup de état of the Armed Forces on 11 September 1973. From that moment on, and for 17 years, a neoliberal economic model was implemented that arose from the reflection of a sector of the right gathered mainly around the School of Economics of the Catholic University (Rehren 1998). In this way, the three ideological currents of Chilean politics managed to occupy the country’s first judiciary (Jocelyn-Holt 1998). At least two situations explain the “rupturism” that had taken place until 1973: (a) society sought different alternatives to govern, where the population growth and external and internal changes in the country shaped a polarized picture of behaviors and perceptions, and (b) the “political antagonism of the one who replaces its predecessor.”. Faced with the increase in polarization in the 1960s, the Executive Branch, in the form of the President, helped to block the possibilities of understanding and regulating the conflict (Trujillo 1990; Subercaseaux 1998). The absence of a presidential run-off (Guzmán 1964) gave the National Congress the responsibility of choosing between the first three majorities concerning the President of the Republic. This involved, as had been going on since 1932, the certain possibility of the formation of minority governments and that they could implement their government programs. In addition, parliamentarians voting for the presidential candidate in Congress could be placed in opposition after the election event was finalized (Nogueira 1986). In the government programs of Alessandri, Tomic, and Allende in 1970, “the idea of crisis” of the existing reality is highlighted (Garces 1972), a reading of the national reality made by the elite, which was persistently manifested in political culture. For many, “the history of Chile in the twentieth century is the story of an endless crisis” (Krebs 1985), a “crisis reading” (Arriagada 1997: 33), which was based on an independent diagnosis of the analytical approach that underpinned the attempt to explain Chilean political development (Atria 1974). After the governments of the Popular Front, this analysis was deepened by the absence of the same election cycles, because critical elections were held, especially those of Frei Montalva in 1964 and Salvador Allende in 1970.

2.2  The Party System Under the Authoritarian Regime After the coup, the political parties were dissolved, first the left-wing ones, and later in 1977, the center and right parties (DL N° 1697 1977). The official thesis regarding this measure was that they were an abnormal expression of politics, more in sync with an underdeveloped society, in which the State gave too much access to resources through militancy in parties and public positions, generating support not based on real ideological reasons but rather on clientelist links (Tironi 1998: 115).

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Another unrecognized reason was that the military felt a strong resentment toward politicians owing to their constant neglect of the military institutions (Angell 1986, 28). This was called by Commander in Chief of the Army Carlos Prat “the deaf resentment,” which also expressed the impossibility of accessing a higher social position (Prats 1985). Consequently, a fundamental feature of military leadership is its deep rejection of the Chilean multiparty system and of its leaders. Therefore, there was a basic skepticism about the viability of the democratic representative system (Valenzuela 1990). The authoritarian regime reinstalled a generalized distrust toward political parties (Angell 1993). During the 1980s, they continued to be poorly valued by public opinion, which was visible in all the opinion polls of the time (Garretón 1993), a situation that continued until the defeat of Pinochet in the 1988 plebiscite (Cañas 1997). Only 3% held that parties contributed to the “country’s good” (FLACSO 1985: 3). The latter reflected the socialization of the authoritarian regime in favor of opinions, attitudes, and sentiments against politics, and also, the fear of political activities developed under a highly vigilant regime (Chaparro 1986). Also during the 1980s, the interest in politics was low, coinciding with what was seen in the “old democracy,” an issue that translated into a distancing sentiment toward political parties that started to change with the approach of the electoral process −the 1988 plebiscite − and with the possible regime change (FLACSO 1989). At the beginning of that decade there was a recognition of the importance of political parties for democracy, and that they were an effective mechanism for defending interests of groups and classes. There were certain critics, because of a feeling that they did not comply with their function of representation, they fought too much among themselves, and that they only served to divide. This negative sensation existed mainly in sectors of the lower middle class because politics was perceived as an elite activity, and it was possible to observe a lack of affinity between specific sectors and options of the Left, Right, and Center, showing a weakness in the political adscriptions and class conscience of popular sectors (Baño 1986). This sector and its shanty town organizations prioritized the solution of everyday concrete survival problems of its members, and they were not interested in political or national level issues. There was no identification of these organizations with parties, and the majority had an attitude somewhere between apathy and indifference (Angell 1993). In fact, in most parties representatives from shanty towns were not part of the leadership (Angell 1993). Despite this, the political parties had a deep and prolonged presence, and deep roots in the history of the country (Valenzuela and Valenzuela 1982), that marked their return to the national and local political arena (Lechner 1985). In this sense, the capacity of the parties to survive a long period offers an indication that they had the capacity to attract the longstanding loyalty of some social groups (Mainwaring and Scully 1995). The latter is relevant because one of the objectives of the authoritarian regime was to displace the political elites identifying with the preexisting democracy up to 1973 (Hunneus 1987). Therefore, the objective to replace the preexisting political system failed because the 1988 plebiscite was lost by the authoritarian regime. Furthermore, 75% of the

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political leadership that had played some significant political role before 1973, still exercised their leadership in 1988 (Walker 1988). The elites reemerged with particular force in 1983, owing to a severe economic crisis that sparked a political crisis expressed in national protests, the regime generating a process of liberalization of the political order (Huneeus 1988), better known as the “opening process.” In this sense, it is normal for an economic crisis to affect the political situation, because it influences the regime’s legitimacy, in this case the authoritarian one, affecting the interests of those who sustained it. This is way in which the first expressions of this crisis can be seen among its supporters, starting a process known as “hook off” (descuelgue), which in middle class sectors is more evident and that in popular sectors becomes street protest (Baño 1985: 13–15). On the other hand, the protests were called from outside the political parties (Escudero 1986). First, they were led by the Copper Worker Confederation (Confederación de Trabajadores del Cobre); later, they became general protests by social organizations that were outside the local participation structure generated by the authoritarian regime. These protests started in shantytowns in popular and middle-­ class sectors. Later still, they started to be convened by the National Command of Workers (Comando Nacional de Trabajadores), but their strong impact led the political party leadership to assume the conduction of the protests and their social leaders were replaced by the parties (Garretón 1987). This was possible because of the high degree of social disorganization and a generalized weakness of social movements that contrasted with the extraordinary strength that they had during the Christian Democrat and Popular Unity governments (Angell 1983). However, the protests failed in their intention of overthrowing Pinochet, more due to the reluctance of a large part of the population to risk a return to power of the Left than to the ability of the regime to overcome the conflict (Valenzuela 1993). From that date on, it is possible to see a reconstitution phenomenon of Chilean politics, related to the reorganization of the political parties and the reappearance of the traditional political elite. An important factor in the survival of the party system is the international support they received. The Socialist Party had the support of the Italian, French, and Spanish socialists; the Christian Democrats the support of the Germans and Italians; and the Communist Party the support of the East German and other more radical socialist groups (Angell 2007). In the period between 1982 and 83, the parties sought the “colonization of the social movement” that was increasingly expressing degrees of independence. They began to recruit new militants among these sectors (Baño 1985). With this, the party militants were no longer “shanty town dwellers” but became transmitters of the national political structure, the organizations losing their autonomy in this way. Starting a process of on growing weakening because the parties, tried to replace these social organizations with their own, created to manage the political juncture, despite there being fewer of them than of those organizations close to the regime (Pozo 1986). In 1985, the mother centers (CEMA) had 237,216 affiliates, and the General Direction of Sports and Recreation (DIGEDER) had 19,807 affiliated sport clubs. The Communist Party was the first to do so when they created in 1979 the Metropolitan Coordination of Settlers (Coordinadora Metropolitana de Pobladores).

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Four years later, a renewed fraction of the Socialist Party and of the Unitary Popular Action Movement (MAPU) established the Dignity Movement; at the same time, the Christian Democrats created the Solidarity Movement (Baño 1985). The new “party networks” gave Chilean society an important channel through which leaders and activists of social and union organizations developed links with the centers of power (Valenzuela 1995: 9). This brought about a change from a model of “imbrication” among party and social leadership to a model of “tension” between party and social actors (Garretón 1993: 451), a “problematic relation” that expressed the growing decrease in autonomy in the social organizations, because the tendency in the parties was to autonomize from their bases and to a “confusion-identification among party interest and general interest.” Despite this, the system worked, and social organizations did not question it, “collecting the corresponding earnings” (Pozo 1986: 1–2). The gap between the party proposals and the real necessities of social organizations resulted because the proposals from the parties were focused toward institutional changes, meaning that only a regime change would solve the problems. Therefore, solutions become vague and abstract, and it was obvious that the opposition leaders’ discourse of the issues that affected settlers did not exist (Pozo 1986).

2.2.1  Changes in the Party System Parties survived the authoritarian regime and remerged in 1982 aware of not being what they were in the past, and seeking how to be different (De Riz 1989). There was a step away from the globalizing and exclusive projects of the “old democracy” to the so-called “Agreements Democracy” that started to be structured from then on. This was a sudden change (Huneeus 1995) regarding the “extremely polarized” political system that existed in 1973 (Valenzuela 1995: 65–66). The latter is explained by a “rise in the levels of cooperation among different political and social forces” that sought to show an image of moderation based on proposals for measured and incremental change (Flisfisch 1990: 1). This depolarization of the political struggle expressed a general consensus of the political elite to give stability to the process of socioeconomic development, directed at the business sector rather than at citizens (Cañas 1997). This became especially evident when the plebiscite approached. The justification of this new political style was mainly in Chilean history, which demonstrated a laboratory of democratic experiments: “community democracy” of the Christian Democrats (1964–1970); the “Popular Democracy” of the Popular Unity (1970–1973); the “Organic Democracy” or “Protected” of Pinochet (1973–1989); and finally the “Agreements Democracy” that characterized the governments of the Concertation of Parties for Democracy (Concertación de Partidos por la Democracia) between 1990 and 2010. However, the decision made by the Communist Party and the Christian Democrats generated a division in the opposition that was impossible to solve (Baño 1985).

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The other left-wing party, the Socialists, begins an self-critical process regarding their role during the government of the socialist Salvador Allende (1970–1973). This generated an ideological renewal incorporating social democratic positions, distancing themselves from the Communist Party and creating divergent paths that broke the political alliance that had elected Allende as President of the Republic and that had held them together since the 1950s (Angell 2007). Another divisive line that continued after the plebiscite was the one represented by the Yes and No to the continuation of Pinochet in 1988 (Auth 1994).

2.3  T  he Party System After the Return to Democracy (1990–2020) The parties that negotiated the transition were organized into two coalitions that have governed the country. This “bicoalitional logic” has been considered the most well-known characteristic of the party system (Ruiz 2006:78). The transition was characterized by being negotiated inaugurating a style of advancing through agreements by “consensus,” in a dialogued and gradual manner (Otano 1995: 116). This transitional model  – like all of them –led to the “disenchantment rule”: with the consolidation of democracy, individual and collective disappointments came about with regard to the outcomes of the regime change (Schmitter 1991: 113). In Chile this debate was made public in 1998, 8 years after the start of the democratization process. Two documents showed the fundamental difference regarding the emphasis that the political discourse of the Concertation of Parties for Democracy should have. For those part of Renew the Concertation (Renovar la Concertación, 1998), there was a underlying danger in the pessimism that could drag down all of society. On the other hand, for those who were part of The People are Right (Gente Tiene Razón, 1998), on the contrary, the danger was in highlighting too much of a successful mood, cutting any critical dialogue that they said always characterized the Concertation. They placed the emphasis on the disenchantment of the people due to the loss of the sense of community and the need for the management decisions to be not only technical but also political. There was in this an explicit value to the sensation of dissatisfaction of the people and this should be central to the Concertation. On the contrary, Renew the Concertation estimated that even though this feeling should be considered, Chile had not been a society in malaise; therefore, the Concertation should infuse optimism into the people. This debate identified personal positions between those who argued the existence of uncertainty, malaise, and disenchantment (Lechner 1998) and those such as José Joaquín Brunner (1998a, b) and Eugenio Tironi (1998), who argued the contrary, that there were also other broader and critical to both positions (Huneeus 1998). Just like the “old democracy,”, all the parties that started the transition – but now in coalition – achieved the presidency of the republic. An important aspect regarding the analysis of coalitions has to do with the institutional incentives that exist to

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their formation and permanence (Riker 1962) and the electoral system was one of them. The Binominal majoritarian system that existed for deputies and senators between 1989 and 2013 was unknown at national level (Fernández 1989), “unique” (Carey 2006: 227) or “sui generis” (Portales 1988: 3), and lastly “exotic” (Saffirio 2006). The law that created it had as its objective the “formation of big political parties” or “big opinion currents” (project message, Law 18.700). The system was designed to force bipartidism, with the intention of changing the multiparty reality existing until 1973. For this, 60 districts were designed for deputies where only two would be elected in each district and 38 senatorial regional circumscriptions. However, “the binominal system did not reduce the effective number of political parties, or the effective number of candidates” (Cabezas and Navia 2004: 49), but tended to hide the multipartyism inside the coalitions that was organized in the Left–Center–Right axis (Carey 1999; Ortega 2003). The electoral system disincentivized parties leaving the coalitions and presenting candidates of their own (Carey and Siavelis 2003; Rabkin 1996; Siavelis 2002), also excluding the representation of parties that were not capable of forming coalitions (Nohlen 2006; Von Baer 2006), punishing “strongly candidates from outside the majoritarian poles” (Tironi and Agüero 1999: 156). The latter generated the control of the party elites of the selection of candidates, an issue that was attempted to be solved through intraparty and intracoalition primary elections (Siavelis 2009; Navia 2008). These issues and a systematic critic to the “only” system ended with a change that implied the return of the proportional system of the “old democracy.” This new electoral system replaced the binominal majoritarian in the Congress elections of November 2017, is known as “inclusive proportional,” and entailed an increase in the number of deputies and Senators in districts and circumscriptions, elected in a proportional way using the D’Hondt method. Also, a gender quota was incorporated with a mandatory 40% of women candidates for parties and electoral pacts; the requirements of signatures for independent candidates was reduced; and for the second time the vote was voluntary. This was legislated in 2012 and implemented in the election of 2013. This last change, together with the automatic inscription of people over the age of 18 years had a strong impact on electoral participation, which decreased to numbers never seen in the country. The two coalitions that had governed the country over the last 30  years were organized under these two electoral systems. The Concertation of Parties for Democracy ruled based on four parties. Between 1990 and 2010, the PS, PPD, PR, and DC were the cooperation incentives; they “were product of the struggle against the dictatorship and its strong legacy in the national political life. More than a product of a natural logic of interparty cooperation” (Valenzuela 1998: 19). This coalition was formed to confront the authoritarian regime, later became an electoral coalition, and finally a government that continued to succeed itself for 20 years. The Right was integrated by the RN and the Independent Democratic Union (UDI). They arrived in power with Sebastian Piñera (2010–2014), but turned power back into a new coalition, the “New Majority” formed by the parties of the old Concertation plus the Communist Party and led by Michelle Bachelet (2014–2018),

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which also had to turn power back again to Piñera for a new period between 2018 and 2022. All parties and both coalitions compared with other countries in Latin America showed high levels of institutionalization, stability, and low volatility (Mainwaring and Scully 1995; Payne et al. 2003; Kitschelt et al. 2010), but this did not mean that the party system remained unalterable. There have been changes in the party competition structure, in the conformation of coalitions, and in the configuration of social bases that support the different parties (Luna 2008:75). At the same time, the division of support or rejection of the military regime started to lose intensity. When designating authorities, each coalition in government generated a quota system (cuoteo), or balance of the designation among party members, which incentivized permanence and loyalty, even though these appointments were not based on talent or necessary experience for the positions. This practice was considered a successful combination of presidentialism and multipartyism in the country (Siavelis 2009). Among the changes observed in parties, we can see the “collapse” of the number of militants in each organization. This was also reflected in the polls, when asked about identification with parties and the presence of “political operators” in the parties and administrative structure. Abandoning militancy, public servants became relevant in the functioning of the party machinery (Hunneus and Avendaño 2018:174). With the introduction of the regulation of the public financing of political parties in 2016, the strong influence of businessmen in legislative decisions started to decay. The latter is evident in a series of scandals known as “irregular financing of politics” that demonstrated that there were laws approved to favor corporate interests of different kinds. Another substantive change related to the “old democracy,” was that presidents had little influence in party decisions that supported them and even less when they left power. Also, the relevance of independent candidates changed, they slowly consolidated in representative positions, especially at the municipal level, starting to influence discussions of the political system concretely owing to the delegitimization of the party leaders. Finally, the most distinctive change looking to the past was the autonomization of social organizations from political parties where the concept of “civil society” gained reputation and legitimacy, despite knowing little about their interests, composition, and leadership. There were apparently no changes in party system fragmentation; in fact, today in Congress there are 16 parties with at least one representative (Table 2.1).

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Table 2.1  Classification of parties by trajectory Historical parties (emerged New parties before 1973) (1981–1988) Radical Party (PR) National Renovation Party (RN) Communist Party (PC) Independent Democrat Union (UDI) Socialist Party (PS) Humanist Party Christian Democrat Party (PDC)

Emerging parties (1990 to date) Green Social Regional Federation Regional Independent Party (PRI): formed by ex-DC members Progressist Party (PRO): created by ex-PS members Democratic Revolution Party (RD) Amplitude Party: created by ex-RN members Political Evolution Party (Evópoli): created by ex-RN members Partido Igualdad Citizens’ Party: created by ex-DC members Common Party Social Convergence Party Green Ecologist Parties Liberal Party of Chile Republican Party: created by ex-UDI members

Source: Huneeus and Avendaño (2018: 158). All emerging parties have at least one representative in Congress

2.4  The Changes in the Party System (2010–2020) The arrival of the Right in government in 2010 was an inflexion point for the party system, because for the first time since 1958 they came to power through elections. A year after being in power the government had to confront social and citizen movements that had been taking to the streets since 2011, incorporating new demands centered on university education and with a strong impact on public opinion. This destabilized the government and its political agenda because the movement leaders created new party organizations that competed in the elections of 2013 and also gave visibility to the Communist Party through their young leaders. These leaders were elected as deputies and created parties that started to compete with the Left and in alliance with the Communist Party. The autonomous tendency of the young leaders was different than what happened with the high school student mobilization of 2006. This other great social mobilization ended with many of the leaders becoming militants of the political parties that ruled in the country then, especially the Socialist Party. In the opposition parties, after losing the presidential election of 2010 (Morales 2012), the Concertation disappeared and a new electoral and government coalition was created, the “New Majority” that formally included the Communist Party when

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Bachelet assumed the presidency (2014–2018). The generation by this coalition of a high level of ideological heterogeneity can be explained because the Chilean electorate was more ideologically misaligned, an issue that makes parties relate to its bases in a nonprogrammatic manner (Luna 2008) and this had an influence by reducing, in part, the intensity of the conflict. In the last decade (2010–2020), the emerging parties have started to compete mainly with the left-wing parties, and less with the Right. Many of them are the product of the leaders’ “transfuguism,” which created new parties because of differences with their collectives of origin.

2.5  The Party System After October 2019 Is it possible that the “political representation crisis” of the Chilean party system and the consequences of the protests of October 2019 described in this book will mean its collapse, as in other countries of Latin America? The answer is no. The party crisis is not a crisis of the party system; Chile is not confronting a process similar to Venezuela and Perú (Seawright 2012). This argument is in line with research traditions that agree that a change in the party system is gradual and that new parties enter to change the composition, not the system. If we observe the party system from the concept of realignment, it is not evident that in the 2017 elections there was a dramatic and lasting change among parties inside the system. In fact, the primaries for Governors and Majors that took place in November and December of 2020 did not show that the new parties were able to move more voters than the traditional ones. These had serious difficulties in mobilizing sympathizers. If we consider the vote for new parties as a measure of change in the party system, we will then have a good measure with which to evaluate them in the 2021 elections. The latter only explains the institutionalization and persistence of the system characterized by the traditional parties. There are other problems in the Chilean party system, problems that are serious and that remain. Maybe the most relevant is that it is “out of sync” (Luna 2017: 53), distant from the citizens who until 2019 were demobilized and who have since then started to demand issues that have been in discussion for too long: the economic model and social and territorial inequalities. This pressurizes the party system into generating changes and the first of these will be the redaction of a new political Constitution, when, in April 2021, for the first time in history, Chileans will vote for representatives to elaborate this new constitution. To this we must add a comparison between the old and the new party systems that shows that there are more components that change than those that remain (Table 2.2). In time, the effects will form part of a necessary research agenda.

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Table 2.2  Stylized comparison of significant features of party systems pre-1973 and post-1989 Organizational features National penetration National leadership Extraction benefit mechanisms Importance of the label and identity Role of ideology national level Brokerage

Pre-1973 Vibrant parties with national penetration Parties with a wide presence and territorial reach Territorial, local, and national leadership coordinated and with harmonic strategies Tied to negotiation and parliamentary and log-rolling, access via party leaders to national executive power Rooted party subcultures

Post-authoritarian Weak parties with permanence related to the rules National party organizations with a weak presence Territorial and national leader not coordinated

Ideological parties, programmatic living with an important leader and clientelist networks Centered in the party as an institution, pyramidal mechanism of transfer of votes and territorial support in exchange for goods that are distributed from the center to the periphery via the party, based on parliamentary negotiation and access to the executive power

Moderation, pacts increasing the personalization of politics

Dependent on personal or local resources (access to financing via personal relations)

Anti-politics and party discourse

Segmented and decentralized. Each leader activates its power resources (electoral, institutional, and symbolic) at local, district, and circumscription levels to generate and take resources from the brokerage. Personalization fragments the articulation, diluting the party articulation capacity. In the case of majors and deputies of the same party in the same commune or district it is possible to have competition and not cooperation En casos en que alcaldes y diputados del mismo partido están presentes en una misma comuna o distrito, es probable observar competencia y no cooperación

Source: Luna and Mardones (2017: 41)

References Alcántara, M. (1995). Fragmentación y partidos políticos en América Latina. In L. López Nieto, R.  Gillespie, & M.  Waller (Eds.), Política faccional y democratización. Madrid: Centro de Estudios Constitucionales. Aldunate, A. (1984). Antecedentes socioeconómicos y resultados electorales. Documento de Trabajo (207). Santiago: FLACSO. Angell, A. (1983). Sindicatos y trabajadors en el Chile de los años 1980, in Paul W. Drake e Ivan Jaksic (eds.). El difícil camino hacia la democracia en Chile 1982–1990. Santiago: FLACSO. Angell, A. (1986). Algunos problemas en la interpretación de la historia chilena reciente. Revista Opciones, (9), 9–29. Angell, A. (1993). Chile de Alessandri a Pinochet. Andrés Bello.

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Chapter 3

Opportunities and Constraints of a Stagnate System. A Time of Representation Crisis or Political Innovation? Mario Herrera

3.1  Introduction Chile is generally referred to by the literature as an example of institutionalization of the party system and stable preferences (Mainwaring and Scully 1995; Payne et al. 2006). In fact, two large coalitions have been in power in an alternate fashion since the return of democracy. Even when the number of parties has increased from 13 in 1989 to 26 in 2017, the effective number of parties only increased from 7.1 to 10.9 during this period. Furthermore, Chile is characterized by being one of the most robust democracies in the region (Siavelis 2005; Levine and Molina 2007). In this same line, Valenzuela (2011) states that the policy of consensuses and agreements has brought continuity and stability in terms of governance. However, he warned about a clash between changes in society and the configuration of political leadership, which is exacerbated by a decrease in identification with political parties. According to data from the CEP survey, if in the early 1990s over 75% of the population identified with a political party, in December 2019, the identification was barely 14%. In fact, political parties are recognized as one of the institutions with less levels of trust (2.4% in 2019). Something similar applies to other political institutions such as the government (5%) and the congress (3%). According to Valenzuela (2011) the two-party electoral system restricted the renewal of party elites and prevented new players from having access to political representation positions. In 2015, an amendment to the two-party electoral system was passed, enlarging the size of the discrict from 2 to between 3 and 8 deputies, which intended to introduce new players into the arena. Besides, the electoral system does not consider the

M. Herrera (*) University of Talca, Talca, Maule, Chile e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 B. Navarrete, V. Tricot (eds.), The Social Outburst and Political Representation in Chile, Latin American Societies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70320-2_3

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chance that independent parties submit their candidate lists. The purpose of this was to benefit the position of political parties, since when a candidate was part of a list, such candidate had more chances to become elected (Morales and Gamboa 2018). Such objective was achieved at the elections in 2017. Between 1989 and 2013, the two main coalitions obtained 96.7% of the seats, while at the elections with the new electoral system, the percentage was reduced to 83.2% with the uprise of Frente Amplio as a third coalition. Therefore, it would seem that the electoral system and the introduction of new players could influence, but not determine, the issues related to political representation and reliability. The social outbreak in 2019 is the result of the unsolved issues in Chilean democracy. In this chapter, I discuss the thesis of representation issues related to the lack of renewal and introduction of new players as a product of the two-party system. I analyze political renewal during the previous and subsequent period to the adoption of a new electoral system, with three indicators: party -fragmentation-, candidates -incumbency- and from a citizen perspective -party identification. The core argument of this chapter is that electoral changes allowed for the introduction of new players but that political party-related issues have to do with a lower renewal of their leaders and supporters.

3.2  Theory The literature about the institutionalization of the party system assumes that they are essential for the development of democracies. In this process, the institutionalization of political parties is measured through two indicators: electoral volatility and social roots (Mainwaring and Scully 1995). Classifications by Mainwaring and Scully (1995) and Payne (2003) rank Chile in the first three positions in terms of stability and institutionalization of the party system. The representation logic in a party system is framed within the “responsible government theory.” For this, such representation implies that law makers are capable of making decisions on public policies in line with their citizens’ preferences. For Adams (2001), representation requires homogeneity in the preferences of both the parties and their voters. Thus, party institutionalization depends on the increase of programmatic bonds and reducing clientelist practices (Kitschelt et al. 2010). To the extent such bonds are developed, elite vertical account rendering is increased through the vote and the party system is strengthened. For the Chilean case, Morgan and Meléndez (2016) show that the two largest coalitions—Concertacion/Nueva Mayoria and Alianza/Chile Vamos—have failed to show political alternatives which relate to the citizenship interests but rather aim at their ideological differences. Chilean political parties, according to the authors, are not capable of introducing the demands from emerging groups, while clientelist practices are still in place. In this same line, Herrera and Morales (2018), in their study about programmatic congruency in Chile, Uruguay, and Argentina, conclude that high levels of institutionalization in the party system may exist together with a

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low programmatic congruence. Particularly, in the Chilean case, although high levels of institutionalization are shown, there are inconsistent levels of congruency according to the studied dimension, which implies that there are certain problems in relation to representation mechanisms and the ability of representatives to be in line with the citizens’ preferences. Undoubtedly, party creation is influenced by the characteristics of the electoral system and history cleavages, which determine their composition. In this regard, traditional literature about electoral systems and party systems seeks to determine if the former can determine the latter ones (Duverger 1954) or if it is the other way around (Cox 1997; Colomer 2003). According to Duverger (1954) simple majority systems favor a two-party system, while proportional systems favor multi-party systems. Subsequent studies question these findings, stating that it is necessary to introduce other variables such as the magnitude of district, electoral candidate proposal, and coordination ability of political parties (Riker 1982; Taagepera and Shugart 1993; Cox 1997). Colomer (2003) indicates that, considering that it is political parties who choose electoral systems, they create rules which allow to keep a balanced relationship with the already existing policies. Therefore, within a two-party system, the trend is to favor the introduction of majority rules to keep power restricted and avoid distributing such power among new actors. On the contrary, in a multi-party system, proportional proposals are preferred which allow to ensure a certain number of seats based on the electoral force of each party. Sociological approaches identify social cleavages as determinants of party systems (Scully 1992; Lipset and Rokkan 1967). The argument is that there are moments of breakdown in society that determine the conformation of party systems. In the Chilean case, the transition to democracy acts as a time which determines the maintenance of certain electoral rules (Valenzuela 2011). In effect, the Chilean party system after the return to democracy was ordered between the parties that were in favor and against the authoritarian regime (Mainwaring and Torcal 2005). The combination of a proportional electoral system with a low magnitude of district and a split between authoritarianism and democracy forced political parties to get grouped into two coalitions which prevented the introduction of new actors (Valenzuela 2011). Nevertheless, and as opposed to Colomer’s central hypothesis (2003), Chilean political parties approved an electoral reform in 2015 which increased the magnitude of district—from 2 to between 3 and 8—and allowed new players into the game. Gamboa and Morales (2016) remark that such reform was adopted due to three reasons. To begin with, the government offered incentives to the reform so that parties could maintain the same number of seats. Second, there was a favorable political scenario where right-wing parties’ votes were not needed— who opposed to such system change—to approve such reform. Finally, it was about a general interest project for the entire citizenship. Another relevant aspect in relation to political parties’ survival is its level of fractioning. Boucek (2009), in his study about Christian-democrat party fractioning study, establishes three stages: cooperation, competition, and degeneration. On the first stage, which is traditional in post-transition parties, fractions are split and there

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are incentives to build consensus and establish coordination mechanisms at the time of presenting their candidates. On the competition stage, conversely, fractions show higher levels of opposition, and a rotation among partisan elites takes place. The degeneration stage is characterized by the clientelist practices and political apparatus.

3.3  Data and Methodology Data from the electoral results in Chile were used historically for the descriptive section. The purpose is to analyze the variations of party fragmentation and the reelection of incumbents in a time series. This was supplemented with information from the internal organization of the parties. Indeed, to evidence the renewal at the grassroots and elite level, a database of the Electoral Service was used, and a systematic review was carried out of the minutes sent by the political parties in which the new directives are notified. For the inferential analysis, probit and linear regression models were used to evaluate the effect of variables such as gender and influence on the probability of being elected and on the number of votes obtained by the candidate. The models were built with data from the municipal elections of 2012 and 2016, and the deputy elections of 2013 and 2017.

3.4  Analysis The analysis shows two characteristics of the party system. First, generally speaking, there is party fragmentation throughout time, with a special emphasis in the process which takes place after the constitutional reform in 2015. Below, political parties are analyzed from the point of view of the renewal of the candidates, changes in internal leadership, and changes to their member supports. Figure 3.1 shows time series party fragmentation from the 1989 election onwards. Data correspond to deputies election. In the Chilean case, party fragmentation shows how relevant it was to conform coalitions to avoid the proliferation of political parties and vote dispersion. Although at the early beginnings of the transition to democracy there was a higher gap between the two indicators, during the first half of the decade, there was some kind of stability from the 2000s  in the difference between the number of parties and the effective number of parties. After the reform to the electoral system, the number of political parties significantly increased, but not in the same proportion to the effective number of parties. Since the effective number of parties controls by voting, data show that the reform has allowed to introduce new player, but they did not necessarily enjoy popular support. Figure 3.2 shows percentages of reelection of the relevant parties in a series of time for deputy, mayor, and townhall advisors election. These three elections are

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30 26 25 20 15 10

14

13

11

7.1

6.7

10

9

7.2

10.6

8.7

7.3

6.6

6.6

14

12

5 0 1989

1993

1997

2001

2005

Effective Number of Political Parties

2009

2013

2017

Number of Political Parties

Fig. 3.1  Party fragmentation. (Source: Own preparation. Data taken from www.servel.cl) 70 60 50

61.7

60.8

58.3 46.6

64.2

50.5

50.1

30

50.1 43.9

40

63.3 61.7

62.5

58.3

42.8

44.0

39.4

32.0

20 10 0

Fig. 3.2  Reelection of incumbents. (Source: own creation based on data from www.servel.cl)

carried out under different voting systems. Mayors are elected by means of a simple majority system. Townhall advisors are elected under a proportional system, and, as previously mentioned, deputies were elected under a binomial system until 2013, and under a proportional system with a district magnitude from 3 to 8 in the 2017 elections. Data show a higher rate of incumbents reelection in the deputy rather than townhall advisors elections. Moreover, it is noticed that there is some kind of similarity in relation to deputies and mayors. It is obvious that the incumbents have an advantage both in the majority system and in the binomial system. But it is also relevant to consider that a percentage close to 40% in each election of deputies and mayors cannot achieve a reelection. Therefore, under these two voting systems, a constant onboarding of new players truly took place. The situation dramatically

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changed when the voting system was changed. While 63.3% of the incumbents were reelected in 2013 elections, such percentage went down to 39.4% during the next elections. Table 3.1 shows probit regression models for municipal elections in 2016 -mayor and advisors-and for deputies in 2013 and 2017. This is intended to make a comparison between the previous and subsequent period to the voting system reform, showing also a comparison with the most recent municipal election the dependent variable is the eligibility of the candidates. This is a dichotomic variable that becomes 0 when the candidate was not elected and becomes 1 when the candidate won the election. The results show a significant effect of the incumbency variable on the three models, in line with the descriptive analysis presented above. According to the data, one of the objectives of the electoral reform would be met. The incumbency variable has greater impact in the 2013 election than in 2017. Therefore, the adoption of proportional system with a wider district magnitude allowed to introduce new players and reduced the chances that the incumbents obtained their seats. That is to say that although there was a continuous renewal of deputies, the binomial system offered a greater advantage to the incumbent. In relation to data of municipal elections, there is a higher impact of the variable of incumbency in relation to mayors than in that of advisors. This could be explained by the fact that mayors are uninominal offices, while the district magnitude is greater for advisors. When comparing the proportional systems with a higher district magnitude—advisors 2016 and deputies 2017—it is observed that the coefficient is slightly higher for deputies. The genre variable, on the other hand, shows significant and positive coefficients at all elections, except for 2013. This implies that women are more likely to be reelected than men. Thus, the reform to the electoral system not only contributed to the incoming of new leaders, but also increased the chances that women obtained seats. Table 3.2 shows a second series of multiple linear regression models. Unlike the previous ones, the number of votes was used as the dependent variable in these ones. Independent variables continue being the same, namely, incumbency for the four Table 3.1   Probit Regression Models. Dependent variable: elected for the position Variables Gender Incumbency Constant Pseudo R2 Observations

Model 1 Deputies 2017 0.442*** (0.117) 1.910*** (0.167) −1.526*** (0.0979) 0.331 960

Model 2 Deputies 2013 0.0156 (0.189) 2.131*** (0.176) −1.206*** (0.171) 0.212 470

Source: Own elaboration with data from www.servel.cl Standard errors in parentheses *** p