On May 16th, Chileans elected 155 representatives for the 2021 Constitutional Convention. Approved by a landslide vote in its 2020 plebiscite, the new Constitutional drafting process is the result of massive popular protests that have been rocking the country for the past 3 years.
Until the final draft of the new Constitution is approved, Chile will continue to abide by its 1980 Constitution, written during Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship. However, its drafting process will be drastically different from the previous one — whilst the old Constitution was elaborated without democratic participation and only approved by a popular plebiscite, the new carta magna will be drafted by a democratically elected organ, with 17 seats assigned to 10 indigenous groups and a massive participation of independent candidates.
The results also showed an impressive outcome for female candidates: women received 52.2% of all the votes reserved for non-indigenous candidates — over 2.9 million votes more than male candidates. So exceptional were these results that, in order to ensure gender parity in the future Convention, several elected female representatives had to give up their seats in favor of their male counterparts. Take, for example, the case of Natalia Aravena - an independent candidate who lost an eye as a consequence of political violence during the 2018 constitutional protests and whose campaign was based on a platform of feminism and human rights policy. Natalia received over 2.000 votes more than Bazarra in her 13th electoral district of Santiago but in order to comply with parity requirements, she had to give up her seat in favor of Marcos Barraza, a male candidate of the Communist Party (PC) and Chile’s previous Minister for Social Development.
In the end, seat distribution was settled at 78 seats for men and 77 for women – without the Gender Parity Law, that number would have been 71 seats for men and 84 for women.
Gender-based political representation in South America
Although representing roughly half of the population, women remain woefully underrepresented in most South American countries. They hold only 30% of the seats in lower or single chambers in Latin America and 28% in the senates. In the Southern Cone region, women represent only 40% of the elected congress representatives in Argentina, 21% in Uruguay, 16% in Paraguay and 14.6% in Brazil. Even during the 2017 Chilean General Election, women received only 28% of all valid votes and compose 22.3% of the lower house of Congress.
The exclusion of women from the decision-making process can have serious consequences. Without representation, gender sensitive policies are ignored by national parliaments, while regulations with an indirectly detrimental effect on women might be approved without a previously gender-based analysis in areas such as housing, health, education and unemployment. There are also differences in investment priorities. A paper studying the effects of electing women in Indian urban areas showed that raising female participation in politics by 10% raises the probability an individual will graduate high school by 6%, while research performed on Flemish regional politicians also suggests that women politicians tend to push for more investments in education, welfare and culture, regardless of partisanship. Finally, gatekeeping women from access to political participation can create a vicious cycle wherein only a small, limited number of them are properly trained and have the necessary experience to participate in government, thereby perpetuating systemic trends of political exclusion.
The Gender Parity Law
The gender inequality issue was tackled by the Chilean congresspeople as soon as the Constitutional plebiscite was proposed. Motivated by the strong feminist undercurrent present in the 2018 protests, proposals to create a gender parity tool started in 2019. Finally, in March 2020, the Chilean Congress approved Law 21.216 which amended the country’s current constitution to guarantee gender parity in the 2021 Constitutional elections.
The amendment, drafted and presented by deputies of the Renovación Nacional party — the right-wing party of Chile’s current president Sebastián Piñera — ensured that an equal number of representatives of both-genders would be elected to the Convention, requiring an elected candidate of an over-represented gender in an electoral district to give up its seat in benefit of the most-voted candidate of the opposing gender.
However, one of the most noteworthy characteristics of the amendment was the requirement that parties alternate male and female candidates from the top of their lists down — with women topping the lists — in order to secure equal representation in candidacy. This is called a 'Zipper' or 'vertical parity' system and is one of those recommended by the UN to ensure gender parity in elections.
The amendment was not only successful in raising the general voting outcome for women candidates, but also ensured female political representation in all of Chile’s electoral districts. During the 2017 parliamentary elections, 8 districts did not elect a single woman. This changed radically by 2021 , when women were elected in all electoral districts, and received more votes than men in 18 of them. Furthermore, this also implied the need for a conscious effort by political parties to find and promote the candidacy of competitive female candidates in all districts to get the public’s vote. According to Marcela Rios, Assistant Representative of PNUD in Chile and one of the drafters of the Gender Parity Law, this proves that the previous low voting outcome did not stem from a cultural resistance to women in positions of power but from political parties that failed to launch them as viable candidates.
Gender parity on a regional level
On the other hand, women’s participation at local levels remains low: in Chile itself, women’s share of local representatives reach only 24%, and only 11% of the country’s mayors are female. The country has no law obligating for gender parity in regional elections, although a Constitutional Amendment is currently being debated on the topic. Although national elections are more eye-catching, local elections are where many grassroots decisions take place, and a lack of women’s representation in those continue to perpetuate exclusion from the decision-making process in their communities and in situations where they might be directly or indirectly affected.
Conclusions
Chile’s successful policies in promoting gender parity during its election provides a potential path for other South American countries to ensure higher political representation of women. While many Latin American nations have adopted quotas systems since the 90s, these measures are not sufficient. It is true that they were successful in raising the number of elected female candidates from previously abysmal numbers, but such measures risk reducing women’s representation to mere tokenism and obviating gender issues even further.
South American countries should consider adopting vertical parity systems for their national elections to ensure a fair environment for candidates. Countries that already adopt this system showed remarkable success in improving their gender representation — Chile’s neighbour Bolivia was one of the first countries to implement both gender parity laws and vertical parity regulations in its election system. Today the country boasts a 51% share of women in its congress. Finally, governments should also involve women and gender specialists in the discussion and drafting of new electoral laws, in order to detect when regulations have a gender bias and might detrimentally affect women’s participation.
Nevertheless, it may not be enough just to transpose Chile’s successful policies to other countries - many times, political parties may be hesitant to promote female candidates, out of fear they will not be competitive enough, for lack of women in administrative positions inside the party and/or due to gender stereotypes. With this information in mind, it appears that countries managed by left-leaning parties tend to present a higher percentage of women participating in national politics. Nicaragua, Cuba and the aforementioned Bolivia are amongst some of those countries. However, this doesn’t mean that politically-conservative parties must exclude women and, in fact, South America has seen a growth in right-wing female leaders: think presidential candidate Keiko Fujimori in Peru. Or María Eugenia Vidal, the first right-wing governor of Buenos Aires province to win against a Peronist candidate in 28 years. In order to ensure parties’ compliance to the principles of gender parity, countries should monitor and sanction those parties that refuse to comply with regulations or try to subvert them by, for example, only topping electoral lists with female candidates in districts where they aren’t competitive. On their part, parties should include gender parity statements in their statutes and make their candidate-choosing process transparent and inclusive.
Another challenge that may serve as an obstacle for future implementation of gender-parity is the perpetuation of gender stereotypes amongst populations. According to a recent UNDP study, Chile has shown the largest share growth of individuals with no gender social norms bias between 2005-2014. In other countries, such as Brazil and Mexico, this share did not improve - in fact, it degraded. In such countries, a push for policy changes must include educational measures that tackle existing biases, and a strong participation of women’s grassroots organisations as protagonists of political change.
To conclude, translating Chilean policies to other South American countries might not be a clear-cut task, with politically-minded women facing new obstacles whenever they try to break the glass-ceiling - not only from society in general, but from their colleagues and parties as well. Nevertheless, a few years ago a new Constitutional process in Chile was unthinkable, much less one which assigned first-row seats for women and indigenous communities. This was only achieved through strong grassroots organisation and mobilisation; thus there’s no reason to put off similar consequential changes amongst Chile’s neighbours in the near future.
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