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Shifting Electorates and Preferences in Chile’s Constitutional Process

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 January 2024

Philip Keefer
Affiliation:
Inter-American Development Bank, USA
Gabriel L. Negretto
Affiliation:
Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Spain, and Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Chile

Extract

Normatively, democratic constitutions should express how citizens want to govern themselves collectively. Little is known, however, about how citizens’ constitutional preferences can be elicited and aggregated in practice. An intuitively appealing approach is to allow various forms of popular participation during a constitution-making process, including a popular vote to accept or reject the draft constitution (Fishkin 2011). Based on the Chilean experience with democratic constitution making, this article identifies unanticipated and previously unexplored distortions that can lead to incongruence between the preferences of voters and representatives regarding the extent and direction of constitutional change.

Type
Constitution-Making in the 21st Century: Lessons from the Chilean Process
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2024. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of American Political Science Association

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References

REFERENCES

Aleman, Eduardo, and Navia, Patricio. 2023. “Chile’s Failed Constitution: Democracy Wins.” Journal of Democracy 34 (2): 90104.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
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Keefer, Philip, and Negretto, Gabriel Leonardo. 2023. “Replication Data for ‘Shifting Electorates and Preferences in Chile’s Constitutional Process.’” PS: Political Science & Politics. DOI:10.7910/DVN/LR89AZ.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
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Supplementary material: Link

Keefer and Negretto Dataset

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