Enfranchising migrants in Chile: a century of politics, elites, and regime changes

ABSTRACT

Enfranchising migrants into the demos is a growing global trend, not exclusive to democracy. Analysing a country that has expanded migrant suffrage in both democracy and dictatorship, I address how and why Chile became one of the most inclusive countries worldwide for migrant voting rights. Chile was a pioneer for enacting select immigrant suffrage rights in relative democracy in 1925, expanded the rights in 1980 during dictatorship, then was a latecomer for granting emigrant voting rights in liberal democracy in 2014. Stepping away from analysing enfranchisement in consolidated democracies in the ‘Global North’, I unpack almost a century of elite-led top-down politics in Chile through historical analysis and taking 1980 enfranchisement as an extreme case. The evidence comes from constitutional laws, transcribed debates from constitutional commission sessions, scholarly literature, national censuses, and electoral data. The findings reveal the durability of migrant voting rights and a normative path dependence of who belongs as voters. Inclusivity requires not only continued implementation in elections but also rights survival through shifting ideology and political regime types.

KEYWORDS:

• Migrant enfranchisement process
• top-down suffrage
• political elites
• migrant voting rights
• legislative historical analysis

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to Sebastián Umpierrez de Reguero for reading this work in many forms and drafts, and Jorge Vásquez for research assistance on graphing the early 1900s data. For comments on early ideas of this paper, I thank Fernando Rosenblatt, Carolina Segovia, and Claudio Fuentes, as well as Cristóbal Rovira for additional data sources on Alessandri’s populism. Many thanks for useful feedback from Fiona Adamson at APSA 2020 and gracious invitations for presenting parts of this work from Mari-Liis Jakobson at a 2021 MIRNet workshop, Andrew Shields at a 2020 LIMS seminar at Leiden, and at a 2019 seminar at UNU-Merit. I am also deeply grateful to have discussed twentieth-century Chilean politics with Dr. Prof. René Millar Carvacho, which greatly supported my arguments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Alessandri organized the original Consultative Commission through Decree 1.422; it comprised 122 people, then resulted in two subcommissions (forma and reforma). The first met three times to oversee tasks and logistics, e.g. obtaining voters’ approval for the process; the second was the Subcommission of Constitutional Reforms.

2 The DINA (Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional, or the National Intelligence Directorate) was Pinochet’s secret police, which changed to the CNI (Central Nacional de Informaciones, or the National Information Center) in 1977. These organizations, and Pinochet himself, were later tried in court for violating human rights, e.g. for conducting torture (Huneeus 2000, 113, 163).

3 For details on the constitutional process, see: www.gob.cl/procesoconstituyente/.