Columbia International Affairs Online: Working Papers

CIAO DATE: 06/2013

From Town Assemblies to Representative Democracy: The Building of Electoral Institutions in Nineteenth-Century Chile

J. Samuel Valenzuela

December 2012

The Helen Kellogg Institute for International Studies

Abstract

Scholarship on the origins of democracy has focused on the United States and on West European countries as the cases in which the so-called “first wave of democratization” occurred, while little or no attention has been seriously given to this kind of regime building change that took place in Latin America at the same time. This paper takes a step in correcting this glaring absence in the literature by analyzing the Chilean experience with rich historical detail. All Hispanic American countries had to find an alternative model to establish legitimate governance after rejecting the Spanish monarchy, and they therefore adopted the general outlines of the then readily available liberal republican constitutional models, drawing them largely from French writers and the US constitution. But a key element of that model had still not been perfected anywhere by the first quarter of the nineteenth century, namely, how to organize electoral institutions. Hence, the main issue of the first wave of democratization has to do largely with the creation of such institutions. The importance of the Chilean case is that it turns out to have been a world pioneer in creating some of the key elements that would later become standard features of electoral systems in modern democracies. Unlike the rest of Latin America, Chile adopted from the very beginning a direct vote for legislative elections based on a broad conception of male suffrage rights with no ethnic or racial exclusions, a modality of secret voting through written paper ballots folded four times over that were to be counted after the polls closed, a method of representation based exclusively on territorial districts that took into account the size of the population in them and, beginning in 1823, a national registry of voters. The electoral calendar was set definitively by the 1828 Constitution, and from 1831 until 1925 it was followed without any interruptions despite a few episodes of armed political conflict. The paper focuses heavily on the first decades of electoral construction beginning in 1809, and tries to discover and elucidate, largely on the basis of primary sources, the exact moment of origin of each aspect of the electoral system and its political consequences. The paper then explores in a final section how the system evolved until the crucial electoral reform of 1890 that allowed the Chilean regime to transition from a proto-democracy to a democratic regime, albeit one with an incomplete extension of the suffrage given the absence of voting rights for women and for the dwindling half of the population that then was illiterate.