La paradoja de los sistemas de participación ciudadana y el despertar de las insurgencias en Chile

Abstract

In 2019, Chilean society went through one of its greatest social and political crises in memory, revealing high levels of social and territorial inequality and fostering a process of profound institutional changes. A year later, deepening those gaps and slowing changes, the pandemic appeared as a pause in institutional redefinitions. As effects of both crises, today the country is experiencing an exponential increase in land seizures, prosecution and discrediting of the political system, changes in the traditional political axes, increase in populism and debates on the development model to be adopted, and, as a cross-cutting issue, profound questions to the traditional forms of social participation in a democratic system. It is precisely in this last aspect that the paradox offered by Chilean institutions in terms of social participation is noticed. With a robust and multi-channel design of participation spaces, the institutionality presents at the same time, high rates of disaffection in traditional systems but a sustained increase in social up-heaval and the effective incidence of activist groups. This essay contextualizes, from the perspective of governance, the new institutional challenges in terms of citizen partici-pation that the country must take on when drafting a new Political Constitution.