The struggle for participation in Chilean elitist democracy

This article proposes that the political arrangement that emerged from the Chilean transition to democracy has an elitist emphasis in terms of both the concepts that inspired it and the practices the leadership of political power has promoted. This conception of democracy is present across the political spectrum and has its roots in a tradition that emerged early in the 1990s and has strengthened since. The article reviews how this concept of democracy gained hegemony in the Chilean process and examines the dynamics of citizen participation in Chile. The means of citizen participation involve not only civil society organizations but also a series of public programs, primarily of local implementation. The model of governance set out the main aspects of participation and political debate concerning relations between state and society, but this model—which emerged from the agreements of the transition process—has so far prevented the practices of citizen political participation that were projected. Chilean society seems to be showing that strengthening citizenship and participation is a political necessity, and that what has been stable until now will not necessarily continue unchanged: the political system is losing representativeness and reproducing patterns of inequality from the 1980s. The article ends by identifying the challenges involved in strengthening democratic policy toward participation.