Has Chile gone the way of the USA?
Short answer: I don't think that it has, but the possibility is worth considering
I was struck by a small news article this morning: “Why Republicans Want to Keep Free Money Out of Their Districts: The GOP wants to cut 24 clean energy tax credits—that disproportionately benefit Republican districts.” I wasn’t completely convinced by the explanation and I’m not at all convinced that the GOP is serious about repealing the Inflation Reduction Act. But there really is no doubt that logrolling doesn’t work the way it used to work. Why else would so many states have refused to expand Medicaid for so long?
One proposed solution is to rejigger American voting rules to encourage multiple parties. This would make a mess of Presidential elections, but it would supposedly make it easier to legislate. The idea is that you could build legislative coalitions on specific issues. The “American Labor Party” would be fine with trading off a conservative SCOTUS pick for a higher minimum wage in a way that the current Democratic Party just couldn’t. The “Growth and Opportunity Party” could stomach federal protections for abortion rights in exchange for keeping low capital gains tax rates. Etcetera.
Chile has run this experiment. The current Constitution (as amended) enabled a multiparty system. Unlike neighboring Peru, the resulting parties are genuine parties, with internal discipline and coherent agendas. And yet, with one exception (discussed below) President Boric has gone from defeat to misstep to defeat.
There are two hypotheses to explain this:
Gabriel Boric is a bad politician. There is plenty of evidence to support this. I may give some more in a future post.
Chilean politics is broken.
Let’s think about possibility number two. In theory, the Chilean opposition is broken into several well-defined political parties. The main coalition is called Chile Vamos. It has three formal members and two informal ones. In rough center-to-right order, the are formal members are the National Renewal Party, the Political Evolution Party (Evópoli), and the Independent Democratic Union (UDI). Bringing up the further right wing are the informal members: the People’s Party and the Republican Party.
These parties are all really different! The People’s Party gets down into pocketbook issues. If you stick to economics, then many of its members will sound like Bernie Sanders or AOC. Conversely, Evópoli poses the dream party of those annoying people who call themselves “fiscally conservative but socially liberal.” National Renewal is the big soggy center-right. The Republicans are the home of Trump-like voters. And UDI is … uh … well, it started as the party of people who actively liked the Pinochet dictatorship and wanted it to stay in power. It then became the party of conservatives who are fiscally conservative and socially conservative and conservative conservative but didn’t go off to join the Republicans because reasons.
Put it together and you’d think that a center-left President could pick off some of these parties to support various initiatives. Couldn’t you trade something to the People’s Party to get taxes raised on rich people? They should like raising taxes on rich people! Can’t you give some sort of soggy horse-trade to National Renewal? Evópoli would be a hard “no” on that but could be pulled off to vote for other things.
Something like that did in fact happen when a conservative President, Sebastián Piñera, put up a bill to legalize same-sex marriage. National Renewal split in both houses, with half of each delegation voting in favor. UDI united against the measure in the Senate, but split in the lower house. Evópoli voted in favor and the Republicans voted against.
And yes, there is a Chilean “secret congress,” but nobody goes around trumpeting its work. The right is openly anti-Boric.
So there just is no way to get conservative support for any reform. In this view, the only way to reform Chile is to get a Congressional majority and ram it down the opposition’s throat.
The occasional bipartisan bill, in this view, does not obviate the structural problem. For example, the U.S. did get the Infrastructure Investment Act of 2021 but nobody thinks that means that reflexive ideological partisanship is no longer a problem. In Chile, the equivalent would be the recent vote to cut the workweek from 45 hours down to 40. But the Forty Hours Act was the product of six years of negotiation across three different presidencies. Gabriel Boric may have supported it in his campaign, but it wasn’t his project. It could therefore pass the Senate unanimously and the Chamber by an overwhelming 127 to 14.1 But that is because the Forty Hours Act wasn’t considered to be a presidential initiative.
So maybe Chile is just too polarized.
I actually do not think that this view is correct. But I have tried to make the best case in favor here. Thoughts?
Only the Republicans and a few UDI deputies voted against.