Quo vadis, Chilean constitution?
Young Chileans are much more conservative than young Americans, in case you needed to be told
Chile rejected a very progressive constitution. Chile is getting ready to take another swing at constitutional reform. As we discussed in the last post, the new process is tailor-made to produce a conservative document that looks a lot like the current magna carta.
But constitutions are written for the long-term! Maybe the failed “woke” constitution reflected the values of the young.1 In that view, conservative older Chileans are going to write a replacement that will suit them, but not the young people who will inherit Chile from them! Chile is simply building a bridge to the past.
So … how progressive are younger Chileans? Well, it turns out the World Values Survey (WVS) breaks out it responses by age. The WVS asks a lot of questions, but there are a few that would seem to capture progressivism v. conservatism:
Where do you place yourself on the left-right spectrum?
Should incomes be made more equal or should there be more incentives for individual effort?
Should society prioritize protecting the environment or promoting economic growth?
Do people have a duty towards society to have children?
When is abortion justifiable?
When is homosexuality justifiable?
Should men have more of a right to a job than women?
We took the results for 16-24 year old Chileans and compared them with their Argentine and American equivalents. Here’s what we found:
Left-right spectrum
Young Chileans are aggressively centrist!
Americans aged 16-24 bunch up on the left end of the spectrum, while their Argentine equivalents spread out towards the right. But not Chileans! They cluster in the self-identified middle. Still, it’s quite possible that “left” and “right” mean different things in different countries, so let’s get more specific.
Redistribution
This is a specific question about whether the government should equalize incomes or provide individual incentives. The center for young Chileans is to the right of their gringo counterparts. They are also well to the right of their elders: fully 25% of Chileans aged 45-54 put themselves into the far left column on this question.
Environmental protection
This question asked the respondents to prioritize environmental protection or economic growth. Young Chileans preferred environmental protection, 44% to 22%. But young Americans were much more pro-environment: 62% to 31%. Meanwhile, middle-aged Chileans were also more pro-environment than the young, 52% to 43%. (Young Argentines, by the way, favored economic growth, 43% to 41%.) The young people do not seem to be much greener in Chile than elsewhere.
Duty to have children
Liberalism prioritizes individual choice. A progressive liberal might want to have children, maybe even lots of children, but they won’t feel that individuals have a duty to procreate for the good of society. And young Argentines and Americans are liberal in this broad sense: basically none of them “strongly agree” with the above proposition.
But young Chileans are different. A fifth of them strongly agree that individuals have a duty to have children. That is many things, but it is really not liberal.
Abortion
Young Chileans are more conservative on abortion than their American counterparts, albeit not quite as reactionary as young Argentines. (Argentina recently legalized abortion in a contentious battle; the move did not reflect a national consensus.)
I wouldn’t make too much of the difference between Chileans and Americans. The big difference is that only one out of twelve young Chileans believes in abortion-on-demand, whereas roughly one out of every seven young Americans believe that. And young Chileans are more liberal on abortion than their elders: 37% of Chileans aged 45-54 believe that abortion is never justifiable. Nevertheless, there is no evidence of particularly strong social progressivism on this issue.
Homosexuality
This one is surprising to people who have only a superficial knowledge of Chilean society:
The Chilean center of gravity is far more conservative than among young Americans. Equal shares of young people in both countries are intolerant, but there is a large plurality of American young people who have no issue with sexual orientation. That’s not true in Chile. And Chileans aged 16-25 are little different than Chileans aged 35-44: it’s only when you get to people over 45 that intolerance starts to increase over the (high!) baseline set by the young people.
Patriarchy
This was an interesting question: should men have a bigger right to a job than women? It manages to encapsulate assumptions about a wide variety of gender roles, which is why I’m including it.
It’s stunning. 43% of young Chileans agree with the statement. Only 39% disagree, compared with more than 70% of their Argentine or American counterparts.
Conclusion
The Chilean constitutional convention not only got ahead of the median Chilean voter; they got ahead of young Chileans. In fact, young Chileans appear to be remarkably conservative, compared to their counterparts in North America or across the Andes. This is not to deny generation gaps in Chilean society. Nor is it to argue that Chilean society cannot or will not change. It might even change rapidly!2
But. The constitution that came out of the convention did not reflect a changing society; rather, it was intended to change society. And that explains why it was rejected. Even young Chileans appear to be remarkably conservative. There are many ways to create social change — but in the Chilean context, writing a new magna carta subject to a referendum with mandatory voting does not seem like a particularly useful strategy.
One problem with this hypothesis is that the median age of convention delegates was 47 years old, which really isn’t all that young, and that group of middle-aged slackers produced a super-progressive document.
That said, Margarita Palacios and Javier Martínez noticed Chilean conservatism in a 2006 article in the Journal of Latin American Studies.