What Matters About the Chilean Election

Javier Sajuria has a nice post at The Monkey Cage on the Chilean election. There are major structural changes underway in Chile, in part unleashed by electoral reform. Most attention has been on the presidential race, but the Chilean legislature is younger, more female, and less experienced with governing.

Another issue that I have not seen addressed is whether we are potentially seeing a return to Chile's traditional three-thirds political system. For a good chunk of the 20th century, Chile had a left, center, and right. The center, which eventually was represented by the Christian Democratic Party, was the anchor. When it shifted away from the center, that opened the door to the 1973 coup. The binomial system put in place by the dictatorship squashed that system and pushed a two-party system.

Although these results don't matter for the outcome of the presidential race, they set limits on what the next president can do. The three-thirds system was centrifugal and plagued by the problem of the executive coming in with grand plans that could not be fulfilled given the composition of the legislature.

In his post at Global Americans, Lucas Perelló starts getting at this a bit.

The biggest challenge for both candidates, however, is to keep one eye on winning the presidency and another eye on forming the necessary alliances to get legislation passed in Congress. Whoever wins the run-off and becomes president of Chile will face a deadlocked Congress.

This is what really matters about the election. Whoever is elected will have to reduce expectations because the legislature will be more unwieldy than ever. If expectations of change (in any direction) are too strong, then there will be backlash.