—Guillermo Pérez, Researcher at Instituto de Estudios de la Sociedad; Graduate Student of the Ph.D. in Government of the University of Texas at Austin. On September 4th, 2022, Chileans overwhelmingly rejected the text drafted by the Constitutional Convention, even after achieving levels of citizen participation that were widely considered unprecedented. The “reject” (“rechazo”) option alone
I-CONnect Symposium on the Chilean Constitutional Referendum – Participation, representation and deliberation in constitution-making: tentative ideas from the Chilean case
—Esteban Szmulewicz Ramírez, Leiden University and Universidad Católica del Norte, Chile[1] On September 4, 2022, Chile held a referendum on a new Constitution, drafted by a directly elected Constitutional Convention. The proposed text introduced interesting innovations, like gender parity in representative institutions, a high degree of decentralization through a so-called “regional State”, clear concern for climate
I-CONnect Symposium on the Chilean Constitutional Referendum – The Paradox of Constitution-Making in Democratic Settings. A Tradeoff between Party Renewal and Political Representation?
—Sergio Verdugo, IE University Law School Introduction In 1995, Jon Elster concluded his landmark article by identifying the paradoxes of constitution-making.[1] Constitution-making processes are unlikely to occur without the urgent need that a political crisis triggers. Even though political crises are arguably necessary for constitutional replacement processes, those crises can also create unfavorable conditions for
Introduction: Symposium on the Chilean Constitutional Referendum
—David Landau, Florida State University College of Law[1] On September 4, 2022, after a two month campaign, voters headed to the polls and rejected the draft Chilean constitution by an overwhelming margin – 62 to 38 percent. With mandatory voting in effect for the first time in recent years, turnout was extremely high. About 13
The New Chilean Constitutional Project in Comparative Perspective
—David Landau, Florida State University College of Law[1] The new Chilean constitutional text was delivered by the Constitutional Convention to President Gabriel Boric in a ceremony on July 4, 2022. This ended the year-long Constitutional Convention, itself sparked in large part by a set of massive social protests in 2019. The next step is the
The Call for Politics in the Americas: A Constitutional Turning Point?
—Juliano Zaiden Benvindo, University of Brasília and National Council for Scientific and Technological Development [Editors’ Note: This is one of our biweekly ICONnect columns. For more information on our four columnists for 2021, please see here.] In his fascinating book Inventing the People: The Rise of Popular Sovereignty in England and America, Edmund S. Morgan
Choosing Scylla: climate change vs. private property in Chile’s new constitution
—Ernesto Vargas Weil, Assistant Professor, University of Chile and Associate Lecturer, University College London Climate change is here to stay. A few weeks ago, the UN Secretary-General argued that the last report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Working Group was ‘a code red for humanity’, urging Governments to take immediate action, especially in containing greenhouse
The First Week of the Chilean Constitutional Convention
—Lucas MacClure, Boston College The Chilean Constitutional Convention has begun the work that will lead, one hopes, to the replacement of Pinochet’s 1980 constitution. In this piece, I summarize the Convention’s first week and highlight themes we comparativists often discuss under the banner of the optimal design of constituent assemblies.[1] The first week of the
ICON Volume 19, Issue 1: Editorial
We invited Marcela Prieto and Sergio Verdugo, I•CON’s Associate Editors, to write a Guest Editorial. Understanding Chile’s constitution-making procedure* For good or bad, Latin America has seen several constitution-making processes in the past decades, including the cases of Brazil (1988), Colombia (1991), Perú (1993), Ecuador (1998 and again in 2008), Venezuela (1999), and Bolivia (2009).
Indigenous Peoples and the Chilean Constituent Assembly
—Francisco Osorio, Department of Anthropology, Universidad de Chile This is a time of many firsts. The first female Vice President of the United States of America (also of black and Indian descent). The first vaccine for a global pandemic in less than a year. The first constitution of Chile to be written by elected representatives,
