(Español) Between Hope and Disaffection: The Chilean Constitution-Making Process and the Intermediation Crisis

Autor/es

Joaquín Rozas

Resumen

(Español) On November 15, 2019, following almost a month of massive daily demonstrations across Chile, most political parties agreed to initiate an unprecedented constituent process. This process introduced institutional innovations for the Constitutional Convention elections, including gender parity, reserving 17 seats for indigenous individuals, and allowing nonparty candidates to run as independent candidates (Heiss Reference Heiss2021; Suárez-Cao Reference Suárez-Cao2021).

This article examines the distance between society, political parties, and social movements by analyzing the composition of the 2021–2022 Constitutional Convention. I contend that it reflected an intermediation crisis exacerbated by society’s distrust of political parties and their detachment from social movements. The analysis incorporates an original dataset containing the Convention delegates’ background (Rozas-Bugueño Reference Rozas-Bugueño2023), the Social Longitudinal Study of Chile (ELSOC) from the Centre for Social Conflict and Cohesion Studies (COES), and 25 in-depth interviews conducted with Convention delegates and candidates.