Technocracy And Quality Of Democracy In Chile

Abstract

It is usually argued that the centrality of technocracy in the management of Chilean government is a fact of recent decades and that the Chilean democracy starting in 1990 became more elitist than in the past (Joignant & Güell 2011; De la Maza 2010). Contradicting that perspective and based on historical sources, the paper shows that there is evidence about the technocratic influence on government decisions already in the 1850s, that the old Chilean democracy – that ending with the coup d’etat of 1973 – was no less elitist than the new one – that emerging in 1990, as a result of the defeat of General Pinochet in the 1988 plebiscite – and that several indicators show that the quality of the new Chilean democracy is higher than the old one. Information comes from official documents, press, academic literature, interviews, and the Fitzgibbon-Johnson Index and data from the Varieties of Democracy Project. That information has been analyzed applying documental historical and hermeneutical methods as well as quantitative technics.