Democratic Breakdown in Chile: Structural or Voluntarist?
Why are some democracies successful in ensuring their survival, while others fail and breakdown? This is a question that of great interest to many scholars, and one that is therefore the subject of a great body of research. One example of a democracy that, despite having a long history of democratic transition, eventually failed and led to an authoritarian regime is Chile. There were many reasons to believe in 1970 that Chile would remain democratic, but by 1973 the chances of a smooth democratic transitions had vanished. What had been a largely peaceful, if polarized, country was overturned by a military coup, thrown into chaos, but why? There are two major theoretical frameworks to …show more content…
Polarization has been on the rise for years, and was finally resulting in conflicts that were not being mediated effectively by a center party. As a result of this high levels of political polarization we can see the beginnings of the breakdown of consensus among political elites and with is the democratic regime. This political polarization made it impossible for political parties, even those which contained actors who would have preferred a peaceful solution to the conflict, to work together to resolve disputes.
Typically, this is the basis of a functioning democracy, trust that next time your party will be able to compete fairly for re-election and possibly win. Absence this trust, that there will be a future chance, and that being willing to work out a solution to any problem will in the end benefit your party, the regime is in deep trouble. Combined with the budding class conflict which placed stresses on the political institutions, and the frustrations that the constitutional regime and electoral realities limited realistic actions, it was obvious that Chile was in trouble, and despite the attempts of president Allende to resolve the conflicts, he was not able to single-handedly remove years of built up …show more content…
While the Christian Democrat shared a similar platform to the popular unity, many Christian Democrat did not support Allende (Valenzuela 1978, 41). In order to secure support from the Christian Democrat, Allende was forced to promise support for a constitutional amendment, which would hold him to respect civil liberties, elections and the free press. This is highly condemning of the state of Chilean politics, as all three of these protections had been understood as basic rules of Chilean democracy for decades, and needing a formal promise meant that parties were no longer able to trust each other to hold to them (Valenzuela 1978,
Why are some democracies successful in ensuring their survival, while others fail and breakdown? This is a question that of great interest to many scholars, and one that is therefore the subject of a great body of research. One example of a democracy that, despite having a long history of democratic transition, eventually failed and led to an authoritarian regime is Chile. There were many reasons to believe in 1970 that Chile would remain democratic, but by 1973 the chances of a smooth democratic transitions had vanished. What had been a largely peaceful, if polarized, country was overturned by a military coup, thrown into chaos, but why? There are two major theoretical frameworks to …show more content…
Polarization has been on the rise for years, and was finally resulting in conflicts that were not being mediated effectively by a center party. As a result of this high levels of political polarization we can see the beginnings of the breakdown of consensus among political elites and with is the democratic regime. This political polarization made it impossible for political parties, even those which contained actors who would have preferred a peaceful solution to the conflict, to work together to resolve disputes.
Typically, this is the basis of a functioning democracy, trust that next time your party will be able to compete fairly for re-election and possibly win. Absence this trust, that there will be a future chance, and that being willing to work out a solution to any problem will in the end benefit your party, the regime is in deep trouble. Combined with the budding class conflict which placed stresses on the political institutions, and the frustrations that the constitutional regime and electoral realities limited realistic actions, it was obvious that Chile was in trouble, and despite the attempts of president Allende to resolve the conflicts, he was not able to single-handedly remove years of built up …show more content…
While the Christian Democrat shared a similar platform to the popular unity, many Christian Democrat did not support Allende (Valenzuela 1978, 41). In order to secure support from the Christian Democrat, Allende was forced to promise support for a constitutional amendment, which would hold him to respect civil liberties, elections and the free press. This is highly condemning of the state of Chilean politics, as all three of these protections had been understood as basic rules of Chilean democracy for decades, and needing a formal promise meant that parties were no longer able to trust each other to hold to them (Valenzuela 1978,