Until the 1973 coup, Chile was one of the most stable democracies in Latin America. The highly repressive regime of General Pinochet lasted until 1990. His economic policies were neoliberal, unlike the South Korean military's state-led development. Chile failed to achieve comparable progress (although it is one of the more successful Latin American economies in macro-economic terms, despite a high social cost) and failed to broaden its political base. But controlled redemocratisation has left deep institutional traces by which the military keep a tutelary role (Luckham 1996: 222). These include non-elected senators, an electoral system which gives considerable power to the second-largest party and inhibits smaller parties, and Pinochet's right to appoint the first five directors of the central bank. Pinochet himself remained as head of the armed forces until 1998, before becoming life senator. His economic model and partially redemocratised political system have thus been hard to erode.

Chile (with Brazil) has the oldest mass Protestantism in Latin America. Significant growth dates from the 1940s. Protestantism is overwhelmingly pentecostal and accentuatedly lower class. Unfavourable electoral systems, the institutional power of the Catholic Church and a fairly rigid society with a social ceiling beyond which evangelical penetration is virtually non-existent, have led to the almost total absence of Protestants from formal politics in democratic periods. There are currently no Protestants in congress, and there seem to have been only four ever, compared to nearly one hundred and fifty in Brazil.