The Christian Democrats just proposed a bill in Congress that would make Chile great again make voting mandatory again in Chile. They stated that the 2012 move to abandon it was “a bad decision unaccompanied by any civic education and which closed off chances to participate.” They added, “only 30% of the population decided for the other 70% and that we can’t allow.”
We are totally sure that the discovery that mandatory voting did not hurt the center-right in recent plebiscite had absolutely nothing to do with this realization. Nothing at all, obviously. Hopefully the Chilean left will be unable to reverse course given that they have been pushing to bring compulsory voting since Congress abolished it.
(We have noticed that dramatic political U-turns are relatively uncommon in countries that don’t have “united states” in their official name. Here’s looking at you, AMLO. More seriously, we think the United States should absolutely use its power under Article 1, Section 4 — and the precedent of the Militia Act of 1792 — to fine people at least $184 for not voting in federal elections. We do not think this reform would help Democrats, but GOP could probably not accept it for other reasons.)
Why did voters say no?
We have some more information now about who voted no the draft. To recap, the average “no” vote was 62%. But we have data at the county level for Chile’s 346 counties (called “communes”). Using this data, we can see how different counties voted by their average income. It isn’t what a naive observer would have expected:
This should not be shocking to American or Canadian observers. Argentines and Mexicans, from countries less riven by culture wars — mostly because they have bigger things to fight over! — might be more surprised.
Might these data be incorrect? We cannot, of course, disprove the hypothesis that poorer voters were bamboozled by disinformation. But that is not how we would bet and it is, anyway, an almost-unfalsifiable proposition. That said, these results could still fall apart when analysts get their hands on precinct data. For example, It is entirely possible that poor people in rich counties were massively in favor of the new constitution, overwhelming the no votes of richer people in those counties — whereas equally poor people in poor rural areas without a lot of rich people were lukewarm. In other words it is possible that if you were a poor person who had inequality thrown in your face by rich neighbors you were more likely to vote in favor; whereas if you were a poor person who lived generally among other poor people you were more likely to vote “no.” That would give a false impression that wealthy people favored the draft.
We doubt that the above is the case but we need more data to be sure.
We also have a little more information about why voters said no to the constitutional draft. We need to caveat here that the data come from polls and the polls in Chile weren’t great: four organizations conducted polls during the blackout period (meaning they couldn’t publish the results until after the election) and while all predicted defeat none got close to the actual result:
So with that caveat in mind, what did people tell pollsters about why did they voted “no”? (These numbers add to more than 100%; people could pick more than one reason.)
40% thought badly of the way the Convention carried out its duties.
35% thought that the new constitution created too much uncertainty.
29% did not like that it declared Chile to be a “plurinational” country.
24% thought that the whole idea was dumb, just amend the exisiting constitution.
13% had no confidence in the delegates. (This seems the same as #1 above.)
13% actively liked the current constitution. (We don’t yet know how many of these people overlapped with #4 above.)
12% didn’t want the Senate to disappear. (They are wrong! Senates are bad.)
8% were angry that it banned abortion.
Another 8% were angry that it allowed the President to suspend constitutional liberties in an emergency.
And a very weird 2% were annoyed that it didn’t let the current awful public (but really private) pension system to persist.
At face value, these results imply that Chile should rewrite its Constitution in order to maintain legitimacy but it should make the fewest substantive changes possible. We are hesitant to recommend the 1917 constitution of Mexico, but it is striking how much of the 1857 constitution it preserved. (If you can get past the paywall the linked article shows a paragraph-by-paragraph comparison.) Even when the 1917 changed things, it was often more for show: frex, it would have been just as easy to nationalize the oil industry — which required paying fair market compensation — under the 1857 document as it was under the more efflusive 1917 charter.
To give a concrete modern example, if you take the polling seriously then it would be politically fine to explicitly protect a woman’s right to abortion, but that shouldn’t be attached to a wholesale rewriting of the text.
In other words, the polling data implies that whatever organ writes a new constitution, it should bear in mind that the problem with the old one was one of legitimacy, not substance. Left-wing policies were easy to enact under the old one, no less so than in France or Sweden or the Netherlands or any European social democracy. The difference is that in those countries people see their constitutions as legitimate national triumphs, not ugly authoritarian holdovers.
(Yes, Spain partially undercuts the argument. But countries are different, and Franco was two years dead when the government called parliament into session to draft a new constitution.)
We aren’t politicians and we don’t want to presume to know politics better than the professionals. But the data so far supports both the proposition that Chileans want a new constitution and that they don’t want to the new constitution to be all that different from the old one.
So, to recap:
Chilean conservatives are coming around to the idea that mandatory voting is a good thing (which it is!)
Plurinationality is the only concrete item that we know a significant of chunk voters did not like. There is some evidence that poorer voters were more against it than richer ones, but that could be an artifact of greater support for the constitution among poor voters who can see rich people throw wealth around.
Abortion (maybe) wasn’t a big deal.
A new constitution is popular … but there are issues. Wait for the next post!