Here's the bias! A (Re-)Reassessment of the Chilean electoral system

Beyond the Balance Sheet: Performance, Participation, and Regime Support in Latin America

“…There is some dispute as to how much this system gives an unfair advantage to the political right, which usually gets about one-third of the vote but half the seats (Polga-Hecimovich & Siavelis, 2015;Zucco, 2006). The fact that this system limits the impact of voters' choices is, however, undeniable.…”

“…Liberal economics tend to create an atomized, highly individualistic society wherein collective action is difficult, especially for the poor (Garretón, 1989b;Roberts, 1998). The electoral system devised by the regime during the transition process led to overrepresentation of the right, which could thus block reforms (Polga-Hecimovich & Siavelis, 2015;Posner, 1999), although this point is contested (Zucco, 2006). Finally, the parties which emerged from the crucible of dictatorship were fundamentally different from those which had operated in earlier democratic eras (Oxhorn, 1994(Oxhorn, , 1995.…”

What Should (Knightian) Economists Do? James M. Buchanan's 1980 Visit to Chile

“…To my knowledge, Buchanan never wrote anything about the binomial electoral system over the course of his lengthy career, and he similarly appears to have made no mention of binomial representation in any of his May 1980 lectures in Chile. Although there is a burgeoning and fascinating academic literature on Chile's binomial electoral system (see, e.g., Siavelis and Valenzuela ; Rahat and Sznajder ; Zucco ; Polga‐Hecimovich and Siavelis ), any detailed analysis of the binomial system is far beyond the scope of this article. Nevertheless, the binomial electoral system which was adopted in 1989 and in use until 2015 was largely designed to assure the “overrepresentation” of the “pro‐government forces of the Right in the first [mid‐December 1989] congressional elections” (Siavelis and Valenzuela , p. 79) .…”

Malapportionment and Ideological Bias in Chilean Electoral Districts

“…Most of the debate over bias in the Chilean system has focused on whether and how seat thresholds affected the conversion of votes to seats by the main coalitions that dominated Chilean elections from redemocratization in 1989 through the last elections held under the binominal system in 2013. Notwithstanding some contributions that express skepticism about the extent to which the binominal system favored the Chilean right over the left (Carey 2006;Zucco 2007), most analyses conclude that the binominal system was adopted to generate exactly such a bias and was effective in doing so (Scully and Valenzuela 1997;Siavelis 1997;Polga-Hecimovich and Siavelis 2015).…”

“…Analyses of malapportionment are somewhat less contentious. Siavelis (1997Siavelis ( , 2000, Rojas and Navia (2005), Auth Stewart (2014), Zapata Larraín (2014), and Polga-Hecimovich and Siavelis (2015) all connect malapportionment to the motivations of the electoral system's designers from the outgoing military government. Although the Pinochet government had already settled on the binominal system, it undertook to redraw the two-member districts after the 1988 plebiscite that rejected an extension of Pinochet's presidency.…”