Chile – From Street Protest to a New Constitution

Full Transcript:

Introduction:

Hello and welcome to the Rules of the Game podcast, where it is my job to discuss democratic institutions

Chile is currently in the process of drafting a brand new constitution. The current constitution is rooted in the dictatorship years of Pinochet and does not serve modern Chile. My guest, Claudia Heiss, recounts the fear and tension during her childhood in the years of repression, and her motivation to become a researcher of democracy. She is excited but also a bit strained as Chile is anticipating a new constitution that is drafted by the people, and will reflect the will of the people.

Claudia Heiss shares with us how public pressure on the streets of Chile has built up over years, how people have been injured and even killed while protesting for basic rights and better representation. In 2019, the protest became so massive and fierce that the parliament was compelled to propose two plebiscites, one asking the people whether they wanted a new constitution, and second, whether a constitutional convention should be elected to draft it. The people approved both proposals, and just two weeks ago elected a new constitutional convention.

An important step in the process was the electoral reform in 2015 that changed the parliamentary elections from using a binomial system with two-seat electoral districts to an open-list proportional system. That reform ended the duopoly powerplay of the left and right political blocs, and allowed for a more diverse and representative parliament to be elected in 2017. That same proportional electoral system was now used to elect the constitutional convention, including a gender quota and reserved seats for the indigenous people of Chile.

Dr. Claudia Heiss is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the Instituto de Asuntos Publicos at the University of Chile. She has written and published extensively on the constitutional reform process. You can find more information about her work on her website and you can connect with her on Twitter. I’ll link to both in the show notes.

I am your host, Stephan Kyburz, and this is the eighth episode of my podcast The Rules of the Game. I am a political economist with a PhD in Economics from the University of Bern in Switzerland. And I previously held positions at the London School of Economics and Political Science and the Center for Global Development.

Please subscribe to this podcast on your preferred podcast platform and you’ll never miss the latest episode. You can support my work by rating the podcast or leaving a review. If you like an episode, please also share it with friends and on social media.

Now please enjoy this wide ranging conversation with Claudia Heiss. 

Interview:

Stephan Kyburz: Claudia Heiss, welcome to the Rules of the Game podcast. Very happy to have you. 

Claudia Heiss: Thank you. Thank you Stephan for having me, for this invitation. 

Stephan Kyburz: So as usual I’d like to give a little bit of background of your person. And I start usually with that one simple question of what is your first memory of democracy or of politics in general? 

Claudia Heiss: I think democracy and politics were a very important part of my life growing up since very, very early in time, because I lived under a very feared dictatorship and I sensed all the time the fear and the lack of political freedom, particularly through my parents. My parents had participated enthusiastically in the project of Salvador Allende and the Popular Unit. And so for them, the dictatorship and the military coup in 1973 came as a very big shock. I was born in 1972, so I was one year old when the coup happened. My parents worked downtown, so they saw the bombing of the presidential palace. It was a Tuesday, my mother was calling home. I was with the nanny at home, a baby, and she always told me these stories of how scary it was, how they had to go on under the desks at work where the bullets were going up above their heads. And after that we lived in a very politicized environment where there were secret meetings in my house because my parents were not first line politicians, they were engineers, they were both technicians, both engineers. And so since all the political leadership went either into exile or were killed, jailed, people like my parents became very important articulators of the opposition in Chile. So there were meetings all the time in my house since I have memory and there was always talk about this, and about the dictatorship and about the lack of democracy. So I always knew that the situation I lived in was very, not natural, not normal. And I always hoped for free elections and freedom to say whatever one thinks. And as a contrast to that, I had lived in a country where you couldn’t say what you thought, you couldn’t say what people talked about in your house because it was dangerous. So I had this political persecution very present from very early age. 

Stephan Kyburz: Well, that sounds very impressive and also I guess very intense to feel that also already as a kid. And I guess that’s also your motivation also to have become like a researcher on democracy and constitutional questions, I guess.

Claudia Heiss: For sure. And also I’m Jewish, so it was always very present to me how politics can really change people’s lives. I was born in Chile because my four grandparents had to flee Europe because of the Nazi persecution, most of the families died. And so I had the trauma from my grandparents of fleeing a totalitarian regime and fleeing political, not political, ethnical in that case persecution. And then I lived my parents’ experience as leftists in Chile, again of a dictatorship that was very cruel to freedom and to democracy, basically. So this lack of democracy, I think these two situations and the direct role they have in human rights violations really made it very important to me to study how political decisions, state action can really affect people’s lives, like my grandparents and my parents. 

Stephan Kyburz: So I guess the current process of constitutional reform must also be very emotional and very important for you in your life. And looking from the outside perspective, I think how it has been going so far, it’s almost like if you’d look for an example of a theory of change, that might be a very good example, right? So I’d like to start with the very recent election around the constitutional convention. So, what is your first impression of the results, just a few days after the election has happened? 

Claudia Heiss: Well, I think what this election showed is the relevance of the Rules of the Game as your podcast underlines. Really, people were able to elect women for the first time and we have more votes for women than for men, whereas the Congress before this one had only 15% women and right now in the same election where people elected half and half, men and women and where people voted mostly for women. So the gender parity ruling the convention worked more in favor of men than of women in the same election, we only had 16% of women candidates for the governor’s because these were four elections in one. We can talk about that later. So, what I mean is that people chose women, people chose indigenous, people chose independents, not militants from political parties because they were allowed to. In other elections, these kinds of representatives are not elected because the system is designed to make it impossible for them to compete with political parties. And so I think this is a very clear signal of how the rules determine what the citizens can do and when the rules are too tight, are too restrictive, as they have been in Chile since the return to democracy, people just stop believing in rules, stop following the rules. And I think that’s what happened in Chile, the elitization of politics and the extreme restrictions imposed by the dictatorship and maintained throughout democracy really made people stop believing in political parties in elections. To me, it’s very painful because as I was saying, I really hope for elections all my childhood and now people don’t care, people don’t vote. We’ve had elections with a third of the electorate participated in 2016. So, and this I think it’s a responsibility of the political system that has created rules that are really adverse for a true participation for electing one wants to win and not the lesser evil. And I think in that sense, the political system in Chile has worked against, the former political system really being able to transmit social demands and social preferences. 

Stephan Kyburz: And I think important in that respect, is also to mention that Chile had an electoral reform in 2017, right? When the previous binomial system of electing people was replaced by an open list proportional system. And that same system was now also used for the constitutional convention, right? With the additional regulation, I think that there is a parity of gender and also the 17 seats reserved for the indigenous people. Can you maybe elaborate a bit on how important that electoral system, that changed in 2017, was for the constitutional convention now?

Claudia Heiss: Right, I think the binomial system is very, is responsible to a great extent for the political crisis we’re living in now. The binomial system was designed by the military and was entrenched through the constitution to make, to create a very stable system, a very unmutable system in a very predictable system. So indeed, you could predict the results of elections before holding elections just because of how the candidates and the districts were designed. The system which is not used anywhere in the world because it’s so, it distorts so much preferences. I mean we all know that every electoral system distorts preferences in some way. But this is a very extreme case. And so what it did was, it wanted to reduce the proportionality. Chile usually used to have historically a proportional system for the congressional election. But it did not want to set a majoritarian system. So the normative argument was of a majoritarian nature. So the logical consequence of that argument would have been to set, to replace the proportional system but by a majoritarian system, like the one used in the U.S. or in the U.K., right, where every district elects one represented. But they did not do that. Why didn’t they do that? Because they would have been banned from representation? Because the right wing would have lost most seats it was electorally too much against them, because they’re a minority. So this overrepresentation of majoritarian, would have worked in detriment of the political right. So what they did was very creatively invent a system that leans towards majoritarianism but is not majoritarian. You could say that it’s the least proportional of proportional systems. With a district magnitude of two. So instead of electing one where you can the right wing or the left can win and that leads to bipartisan system. They invented this system where you could elect one. So obviously one from the right and one from the left. And so there was this really immobilized political representation and they made a rule so that for both candidates to be from the same sector, the one candidate had to have double of the votes of the others, so it was a very high threshold. It was very difficult to get two candidates for one coalition. So what this created was a system where what really mattered was who the center right, and of course this created the incentives to create broad coalitions, center right and center left, because only two we’re going to be elected. So if you fragmented the vote you would lose the capacity to be elected. So two broad coalitions were created, the Concertation in the centre-left and the Alianza por Chile or Chile Vamos – it changed names – on the right. And of course in every election for senators and for deputies, one from each side was elected. So there was a tie in Congress, there was a tie in representation because the proportion of preferences were between 30 and 70, or 40 and 60. There was even, yeah, I think it’s 30 to 40 for the right, and 60-70 for the left, that’s in general terms, but this translated to half and half in Congress. And so the result of this was that it didn’t matter who you voted for, because one was going to be elected from it. So what really mattered was the selection of the candidates, political parties when they elected the candidate, when they decided for the candidate, for you to vote for that candidate, that was really the election, right? So and then you had to go and vote for the one that was closer to your political center. So it didn’t matter if you were a Christian Democrat or Communist, you had to vote for the center-left candidate because there was no option. So just to impede the other side from doubling and getting two representatives. So this created was what some people call a binomial culture. It went beyond elections, went beyond the electoral system. It created a political system of a perpetual tie of perpetual certainty. There was no uncertainty in elections and there was no uncertainty in government. And it was extremely predictable and stable. And that’s good for some for some people. It is certainly for power, it’s good certainty seems like a very good thing to have. But the problem is that democracy lies in uncertainty. You have to have uncertainty as to who will win. Otherwise it’s not a democracy. It’s just a repartition of, I know repetition is not a word, I don’t know how to say. It’s just an arrangement among elites, right? So really Chilean politics became an arrangement among elites with no participation from citizens. And the gap between elites, political elites, center-left and right, both of them, and the rest of citizens became bigger and bigger and bigger. And we can see in this election for the convention that people did not want to vote for parties, not for the right and not for the centre-left. They have the same kind of illegitimacy in the eyes of the public. 

Stephan Kyburz: So, essentially, the system really worked to preserve the power of the elites, both on the right and the left, and it excluded alternative parties and alternative choices, right, for the people. How do you think, or what triggered the 2017 electoral reform? I mean, it wouldn’t, if they wanted to preserve power, they maybe wouldn’t have needed to do that, or what built up the pressure to have this electoral reform. 

Claudia Heiss: That’s a very interesting question I think. We had the center left always had a discourse of change, right? They always, because programmatically the centre left came to power with a democratizing agenda. So they always said they wanted to remove the dictatorial elements that were entrenched in the democracy. We had, I mean, very impressive things that remained after 1990, after the return to democracy. For instance, in Pinochet remained as commander-in-chief for many, many years of the armed forces. He had a very important political role in Chilean life until he was appointed, when he retired from the military, he became for-life senator. So he always had political immunity to be tried for crimes against humanity, that were presented against him in court. So he was never tried. He was a military chief all throughout the democracy after 1990. Then he became a senator for life and then he was arrested in London. And if he had not been arrested in London where he traveled to get surgery, I mean, he would still have been a very important political power in Chile, in political life. So the center-left always had the agenda of removing for-life senators and appointed senators, of removing all the obstacles to political representation that remain in the system. We had super majoritarian laws that were designed by the dictatorship, very quorums to reform the constitution, the binomial system, a very powerful role of the constitutional court to protect the military made constitution. And so in 2005, because of political pressure, because some of these rules were no longer benefiting so much the right, like the appointed senators, because some of these senators were former presidents and former presidents were all from the center left, political elites came to an agreement to change in 2005 the constitution. That was the most important constitutional reform in democracy, led by President Ricardo Lagos. And the most important thing that reform did was removing the military from political power. The military were given a lot of political power through a national security council that had a lot of power to appoint authorities and other things. And so they really removed the role of the military and they replaced it by a stronger role of the constitutional court to protect the system. And in that reform they also removed from the constitution the clause that protected the binomial system in 2005. So everybody thought now the constitution is no longer protecting the constitutional law and so now it’s outside the constitution, now political forces can reform the electoral system. But it took them 10 years. It was only in 2015 that the centre-right and centre-left agreed to change the binomial system and to replace it by a proportional system. Why? Because it benefited everybody, it benefited the right, but it also benefited the center-left. So what really, I think the dictatorship and the right very smartly did was really co-opt the center-left, to keep things unchanged, to prevent very deep reforms. And in addition to that, the entrepreneurial groups in Chile financed not only the right, but also the political campaigns of the centre-left. So there was really a cooptation I think of the centre-left to keep things unchanged. And so It seems very remarkable or surprising that only in 2015 they changed the system and only 2017, as you said, was this new electoral rule used for the first time. And it was because of political pressure, and we saw in 2006, right after the reform was announced, first of social movements in 2006, the students, the high school students went into the streets, took over their schools to demand change in education. And then a whole cycle of contentious politics started. We had a lot of social movements in 2011 and afterwards. And so the political class and the political elites had to try to modify the work to try to channel this, all the social demands. So it was really a push from below, I think that really has created all these changes. 

Stephan Kyburz: And also the, so you say the kind of old elites on the right and the left were kind of broken up in that sense, right? 

Claudia Heiss: Right, because the change of the electoral system allowed for new forces to enter the congress, basically. So there were new forces on the left, the Frente Amplio, the broad front, and smaller parties could enter because we now had a representative system. So instead of having just two elected, which forced these two coalitions that nobody was voting for because voter turnout was going lower and lower because people didn’t want to vote for either the right or this center-left, right? So the proportional system allowed two conglomerates to emerge, two new parties were formed. We have now, as a result, a very broad fragmentation of the political system. This is bringing a lot of problems because it’s very difficult to negotiate, to find, to join forces to select presidential candidates and other things like that. So we really have a problem of governability now, in political forces. This happened to some to a smaller extent also in the right. In the right, some younger people formed new political parties that also made it to Congress, Evópoly, Amplitudo and other other right wing groups that challenged the two broad traditional parties, UDI and Renovación Nacional. And what we saw after the election of 2017 was this emergence of smaller groups and of younger leaders also. It was not only a very concentrated political system but also a very, I don’t know how to say aged, the leaders were all old, old men. So now more women and the change of the electoral system in addition to make it proportional, including a gender quota of 40%. So the least, the political parties had to present 40% of women candidates. Of course, you know, that’s easy to overcome for men who lead the parties because you can abide by the law, and present women candidates that are weak and will never make it in districts where you know, you’re gonna lose. So the women were sent to places where they couldn’t win. They were underfunded, et cetera. But still, this allowed the Chilean Congress to go from 15% of women, 15%. So we had before 2018, 85% men making the law and this changed to 23%. So we went with 40% gender quota, we went from 15 to 23. But that’s, I’m sure that’s gonna change after this constitutional convention. 

Stephan Kyburz: Yeah, I totally agree. I think also usually we see in other countries that electoral reforms, right, they also take time to be, like, implemented and embodied by the political forces. New coalitions have to build and especially if the proportional system is combined with a presidential system, right? The parties on the left and the right, probably that’s or the two blocks, whatever, they have to find ways of cooperating to promote presidential candidates. And that’s probably going to take one or two or 3 elections till that kind of new balance has formed. Okay, now I’d like to go back to the constitutional convention and how it built up over time. So, we know that new pressure has built, political pressure, has built on the streets in the years 2018, 2019. And that kind of led to the parliament proposing that new law that would lead eventually to the constitutional reform process. So, the first steps were the plebiscite, right? So the people were asked about whether they wanted to have a new constitution and also who should sit in the constitutional conventions. So, I would like to know from you, like, how did you see that pressure building up from the street? You know, it was like protests, it was very violent, it was an intense period, I think, in political life in Chile, how did that translate into actually parliament, you know, going that step and and changing the law because the people themselves, they couldn’t do it themselves, right? They needed parliament to start that process. 

Claudia Heiss: I think it was very interesting, it was very interesting to see. And I think it was, it gave hope that this could be resolved in a peaceful democratic way. What you mentioned, the social uprising of 2019 really felt like a revolution. It was like a revolution. I mean, political life, I mean all life in Chile was completely turned over. School stopped, there was the problem of getting food, for instance. The streets were taken by people. There were, as you mentioned, mostly pacific protests, but also some violent burning of buildings, burning of churches, burning of and breaking of companies that became the symbol of neoliberalism. The man that comes to my house to see the indicators of light, for instance, to make the bill for the basic services for water and light, they usually wear jackets with a sign of the company – electricity – they had to have to hide their jackets because people were so mad at basic services. Basic services, they are all privatized. And so nobody wanted to use the logo because they could be attacked on the street, The TC channel, sometimes they invited me for interviews. This was before Covid, they hid their signs. They hid the logos and the names of the TV channels not to be attacked because people were really mad at the official media at the mainstream media because of the way they were covering the events showing all the time the violence and not showing the huge pacific, massive pacific protests. And  so it was really a very impressive moment to live. And as I said, life stopped, the children didn’t have school. The works stopped working. The streets were covered with graffiti. It was a very beautiful, it’s tricky to say that way, but a very beautiful choreography of street artists, street protests. There were many, for instance regarding the constitution, taking from, there was a street artists that made very beautiful murals with the constitution with ancient images combined with the protest. Some superheroes emerged from the protest. We had like the marvel superheroes. There was like a local marvel series of superheroes with a dog that used to bark to the police, with Pikachu, a woman went to the protest dressed in a Pikachu costume that her son had bought from China by mistake and that they couldn’t return. So she decided to go to the protest wearing this Pikachu, and she fell and she became an icon of the protest. And now she was elected to the convention. She’s a school bus driver. And she became an icon of the protest from this costume. I also mention her in one, in a broadcast live, internet broadcast. And there were others who used the traffic signs to protect themselves against the police, against the police. So they have traffic lights as shields. So all of this became icons of the social mobilization. And it was very impressive and it lasted for a very long time. And it was really stopped by covid. It was when the covid confinement began that the protest really stopped. So and there were very violent confrontations between police and citizens. At least five people have been acknowledged to, I mean, officially acknowledged as killed by the police. And we had many, many people injured. There were over 30 people, like 35 people dead. Some in very unclear circumstances. Over 400 people lost their eyes because the police shot with, supposedly with rubber bullets. The engineering department of the University of Chile made a study of these rubber bullets and concluded that they had 20% rubber and 80% met and including lead.

Stephan Kyburz: Wow, so they were much heavier than they’re supposed to be. 

Claudia Heiss: And they were, these were are anti-mutiny strategies of the police. The police were clearly shooting to the eyes, they we’re not shooting to the legs. I mean, it’s the proportion of people injuring their eyes is so high. I mean, no other police, anti-mutiny police in the world damaged so much the eyes of the people. So, there is now, an organization of victims of eye injury by the police, imagine more than 400 people and some lost both eyes. There are people who became blind from pacific protest in the streets, you go out on the street and you say, I want to change the system, and you get, you get blinded by the police.

Stephan Kyburz:  Wow, that’s that’s very sad and also horrific.

Claudia Heiss: So the police were extremely violent. This has led also in addition to corruption scandals, to a very sharp drop in the legitimacy of the order forces of the police, particularly. And the militarisation and the criminalization of protest is very much under scrutiny now, and we’re going probably to see institutional change in the structure and the strategies of the police. 

Stephan Kyburz: So some, some people from the protests, they are now literally, they can reinvent the system to some degree, right? They are elected and they can contribute to writing a new constitution. 

Claudia Heiss: Some people are saying that really the result of the electoral convention, which was extremely surprising to everybody, even to political parties, to political analysts, completely different from what all polls were saying beforehand. It’s really a very, I think a very close expression of the social protest. I think the social movement behind the outburst of 2018, 2019 is really expressed in this constitutional convention. I think that’s a really good thing. It’s something that really gives hope that this social movement can be channeled institutionally and peacefully. 

Stephan Kyburz: And so the politicians in parliament that essentially started the process. So, enough politicians in parliament were afraid of not being re-elected, and then because pressure was so high, would you say that was the reason why they started it? Or was just the protests so huge and overwhelming that they thought this would be the only solution? 

Claudia Heiss: I think it’s more than re-election, it’s more than individual electoral calculus, it’s more that the political system was breaking down and the government was not being able to control the country, to really govern. The country became ungovernable, as I was telling you, not only schools and work stopped, there was no food. I mean, the chains of, I don’t know how you say that, chains of supply was broken by the protest and the things were becing ungovernable. So it was a matter of survival of the political system. I think it was really a desperate measure. It was very impressive to see sitting in the negotiating table the very heirs of this constitution. It was people very close to Jaime Guzman, to the brain that really created the 1980 constitution, a very important ideologist of the military regime and people very close to him personally were negotiating the rules to dismantle this constitution. I mean, it was really, and they were trying to maintain as much as they could. I think the calculus was that it was more possible to keep some things in the system, if you try to influence the way it was going to be replaced and if you just kept confronting something that was, keep maintaining a predisposition that was untenable. So I think the calculus of the right was that it was better just to be sitting in the negotiating table and try to maintain some things than just to, you know, be stubborn and just keep repressing people. I mean, some people in the right think they were weak. Think that they should have been more repressive and send more of the police forces. And at the end that would be a self coup, right? So when the protests started, I’m sure that some people on the right evaluated calling the military to take over power and to, you know, finish this by force. The problem is that the military were not willing to do that. The military already paid the cost of the human rights violations. The people who were jailed for killing leftists in the 1970s were not the politicians, were the military. So I think the armed forces were not willing to pay the price once again, you know, to save political positions with which they probably agree, but they know that it’s not the politicians, who are going to go to jail for human rights violations later. And so really, it would have been a bloodshed if they had taken that path. 

Stephan Kyburz: And maybe in the old system, right, with the old electoral system, that maybe would have been different. I mean, just, you know, like in the older type of representation in parliament, that could have ended differently, because now, I guess the pressure from the street was better represented in parliament.

Claudia Heiss: But I think the flow of the people was so big that there was no rule that could contain this. I think it didn’t matter. I think it was, I mean, it was so big, the lack of respect for institutions and for rules, it didn’t matter which rules you had. I think you could have prevented this if you had changed the rules beforehand, if you had made a more inclusive political system before and would have not waited 30 years to begin to change things. So I think this was like a pressure pot. I don’t know if that’s a word that exists. These pots, you know the cooking things that cook very fast because they are under pressure. I use it to make artichokes and lentils. So this was really a situation like that. It was so much pressure and you could have released that pressure if you had made institutional change beforehand. So I think it was, we have a very short sighted elite and very shortsighted and political class really, that really lost connection to citizens. 

Stephan Kyburz: Okay, cool. Yeah. So that’s so fascinating. And I would love to hear a lot more details and all the stories. But we also want to kind of come to a conclusion of the discussion. And kind of you know, we have now the constitutional convention, it has been elected. There are like 50%, or around 50% women, there are seats, 17 reserves for the indigenous. So what do you think on the way forward? What is kind of your biggest hope and what is your biggest fear or where do you see things could go wrong or what will be the difficulties on the way forward? 

Claudia Heiss: We have a very uncertain landscape right now. We have many people in the convention that are not politicians. That’s good for representation, but also presents problems for negotiating. There are no benches or no like hierarchical, like political parties really subordinating the representatives. We have many people that are independents. Most of the convention is independents. And this will be a challenge for negotiation. It will be a challenge to build agreements, I think. And it would be a challenge to decide the rules. There’s a lot of lawyers also, the biggest profession represented in the convention are lawyers. I think that’s good because they know how constitutions work. They are not the majority though, and so they will bring their knowledge but they will have to explain it to the others to get the votes. I think it’s a good convention. It gives hope that all political positions will be represented. I think the problem is really with political elites and with political parties. We are in a moment of reconfiguration of the Chilean political system. The center has been strongly punished in this election. So the positions that won were on the extreme right and on the extreme left. And I think the emptying of the center is always a problem because you need to, you know, particularly for a constitution, you need to build consensus and bring everybody together, set basic rules. And I think that’s going to be hard and it’s hard to see how this will translate into the rest of politics. We have in November the presidential election, and also the election of Congress, because this convention works in parallel to Congress. Congress keeps working On the current constitution. The constitution, the 1980 Constitution is still in place, and the Congress will be elected in November and we’ll start working in 2022, upon the 1980 constitution. While the convention creates the new constitution. And I’m sure there’s gonna be, you know, pressures from the convention to Congress, conflicts between Congress and the convention, because they’re going to be talking about basically some issues that are, that overlap, like pensions, like other things that are tax reform, that will continue in Congress together with a more substantive debate in the convention. So we’ll see how all of that interplays, the presidential election, the congressional election and the working of this convention within this entire political system. 

Stephan Kyburz: Cool, that sounds very fascinating, especially for a political economists or political scientist as well. Yeah, so I’m very glad you still, you know, came on the podcast, so I’m very happy about this. So, if you had one wish for the constitution for the new constitution, one paragraph or one element that you could include, what would that be? 

Claudia Heiss: That’s a tough question. I just hope this constitution is really inclusive and can be  liked by people. I think the most important thing, I think, for instance, the preamble is important. Even though people say that this is poetry, some people despise preambles in constitutions, I hope we have a constitution that has some, that is appealing to people that where people feel represented and that people can maybe love is to maybe love is too much, but but feel interpreted by. And so in that sense, I think the constitution should be broad enough so that all the political actors can feel represented and can feel they have a chance to defend their own political views in this political system, that everybody has a place in the rules set by this constitution. I hope we have a constitution as inclusive as we can, that gives a signal to the political system of inclusion, of respect for diversity and that really says that we are a community, we are a political community and we are responsible for each other and not just individuals that need to resolve according to their personal capacity or their personal position in the market, their needs. 

Stephan Kyburz: So really a constitution of the people and also built by the people. Yeah, that’s super beautiful words and I think that’s a great point to come to an end of the discussion. I will link in the show notes to your work, but also, if you, do you have any books just right now that you’d like to mention or papers that would be informative for a broader audience? 

Claudia Heiss: Well, in the last few years there’s been a very broad discussion about Chilean constitutions, Chilean constitutionalism, they’re mostly in Spanish. So unfortunately there’s very little written in English. For people who want to know more about the Chilean political system, there’s a book called “El Systema Politica de Chile”, by Carlos Huneeus and Octavio Avendaño, they are the editors with several chapters. Me and a co-author, we wrote the chapter on the 1980 constitution, where we explain some of the problems of the constitution that I have mentioned here. But there are many other Books on on the Chilean Constitution for instance, Fernando Adrian 2013 said the debate in the way I have mentioned it here in a book called “La constitución tramposa”, the tricky constitution, showing how this constitution is full of tricks to impede the expression of the popular will and the expression of majorities. That’s I think that’s a very basic book to understand the constitutional problem. I wrote an article in Constellations about the constitution as a legacy of authoritarianism, that’s in English, and its short. But there’s a lot lately about the constitutional problem.

Stephan Kyburz: Of course. Yeah, cool. I’ll link to all of those in the show notes and at this point I just want to thank you very much for the discussion. It has been fascinating and I’m really looking forward to what will happen in the next few months. And yes, I wish the Chilean people the best of luck for, you know, building a new foundation for society and also you, all the best with your work and and your commenting and analyzing of the Constitutional Convention. I guess it must be one of the most fascinating times for you as well in your life probably. So all the best. 

Claudia Heiss: Thank you so much and thank you for having me in your program. 

Stephan Kyburz: Thank you so much. And hopefully we’ll be able to do an update at some later point. Thank you. 

Claudia Heiss: Any time.