Shifting Electorates and Preferences in Chile’s Constitutional Process

Abstract

Normatively, democratic constitutions should express how citizens want to govern themselves collectively. Little is known, however, about how citizens’ constitutional preferences can be elicited and aggregated in practice. An intuitively appealing approach is to allow various forms of popular participation during a constitution-making process, including a popular vote to accept or reject the draft constitution (Fishkin 2011). Based on the Chilean experience with democratic constitution making, this article identifies unanticipated and previously unexplored distortions that can lead to incongruence between the preferences of voters and representatives regarding the extent and direction of constitutional change.