Protected Neoliberalism

Abstract

The results of Chile's December 1997 parliamentary elections revealed the existence of 3,700,000 voters who chose not to voice a preference.l If we consider the nearly 1,000,000 young people who did not register in the electoral rolls, the abstention of registered voters, and the null and void ballots cast, the total comes to 40 percent of the potential electorate-a striking figure by Chilean standards. This nonvoting rate marked a sharp decline in formal political participation.2 Initial interpretations of these electoral figures on the part of political elites and the press explained them as an expression of apathy and depoliticization. My research in Chile, however, suggests that this significant proportion of missing votes is more likely a conscious rejection of the political system and the institutional order inherited from the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990). My contention contradicts the claim that more highly institutionalized party systems facilitate a deepening of democracy (Mainwaring and Scully, 1995; Scully, 1995). Quite to the contrary, the data strongly suggest that the institutionalization of Chilean political parties into a network of exclusionary institutions designed to protect a restricted democracy has limited their representative capacity and led to a loss of legitimacy at the grass roots reflected in electoral withdrawal. This problem is intimately linked with neoliberalism, an ideology of the free market that has led to the restructuring of the economy and the state, effectively reducing the role of governments in providing social welfare and regulating economic activity at the domestic and the international level