Acceso usuarios
The Chilean party system has long been considered one of the most institutionalized in Latin America. Nevertheless, the country is living through a crisis of political representation. The goal of this paper is to show empirically how this crisis manifest in the electoral behavior of the Chilean electorate during the 2009 presidential elections. Using public opinion data, we show that the perception of how the Chilean democracy is working and that the levels of confidence in political parties distinguished the voters of Marco Enríquez-Ominami (ME-O). We argue that the party system is going through an incipient process of deinstitutionalization and that, at the same time, the leadership of ME-O cannot be concieved of as a populist one. Unlike in Venezuela, it is improbable that the current crisis in Chile will lead to a breakdown or collapse of the party system, because other factors like economic crisis, the presence of a charismatic leader with a strong anti-system discourse or permisivity of electoral rules have not taken place.
