Latin America Research Seminar: “Political Elites’ Decision-making and Democratic Constitutional Change in Chile after a Social Uprising”

Presenter: Simon Ballesteros, PhD Candidate, Department of Government

Bio: PhD candidate in Government at Georgetown University. In my research, I use quantitative and qualitative methods to study (i) the causes and consequences of the democratic characteristics of constitution-making processes and (ii) the evolution of political and legal institutions in Latin America.

Abstract: Recent literature in constitution-making shows that their democratic characteristics, namely, the degree of citizen participation and elite contestation, are linked to desired political outcomes, including reduced post-conflict violence (Widner 2007) and enhanced democracy (Eisenstadt et al., 2015; Negretto and Sanchez-Talanquer, 2021). Despite the importance of the mentioned desired political outcomes, the process by which political elites decide the specific institutional mechanisms for constitution-making remains unclear. In this presentation, I present work in progress in which I use process tracing to understand how a highly democratic process of constitutional change began in Chile in 2019 after a social uprising during a conservative government initially reluctant to any significant constitutional reform. Specifically, I interviewed Chilean political elites and used archival evidence from newspapers and social media to study the decision-making process of the relevant political elites who agreed to initiate a constitution-making process in 2019, focusing on the evolution of their political positions based on learnings and circumstantial accommodation. Preliminary results suggest that the uncertainty created by the social uprising was critical to forcing the government and the opposition to reach an agreement that introduced unprecedented democratic mechanisms in the Chilean political system to guarantee their survival. Once uncertainty dissipated, social protests ended, and a new constitutional deal was needed to begin a new process after the failure of the first one, political elites abandoned several democratic provisions of the first process. This article contributes to the literature on democracy and conflict by detailing and explaining the causal sequence of events that transforms political conflicts into democratic processes of institutional change.

LARS will meet twice a month, on the second and fourth Wednesdays from 12:00 p.m. to 1:00 p.m. (see schedule below). Lunch will be served.

To see the full LARS schedule, please visit: https://clas.georgetown.edu/research/latin-america-research-seminar-lars/