Chilean Left Wing Parties’ Debate on Direct and Representative Democracy

This research addressed the Chilean left wing parties’ debate on direct and representative democracy since the aftermath of the social outbreak in October 2019 and during of the constitution-making process in 2021 – 2022. An intense debate has taken place between the political parties and blocs represented in the Constitutional Convention. Within the debate, direct democracy as opposed to and critic of representative democracy has tended to ideologically divide sectors of the left and center-left. Indeed, left-wing parties, together with some social movements, have tended to emphasize the need to promote forms of direct democracy, and even alternative institutional models to representative democracy. These same sectors have made a strong criticism of the role of political parties, even going so far as to propose constitutional initiatives through which the parties were replaced by other associative forms, or their condition was equated to that of independent groups and social movements. In the specialized literature from both political science and contemporary political sociology, the preference for direct democracy has been seen as manifestation of various neo-populist experiences. For the purposes of this research, we consider that this interpretation should be complemented with contributions that come from studies that have dealt with phenomena such as anti-political parties and anti-politics. As a hypothesis, we propose that there are anti-party elements rooted in sectors of the left, as a consequence of the characteristics of the Chilean democratization but mainly because the influence of Latin American and European new political organizations and parties that have emerged in the last 15 years. The research uses a qualitative methodology, which combines various sources, such as primary documents of the Constitutional Convention, interviews and press analysis.