End of the Authoritarian Regime and Rearticulation of the Political Elites in Chile

Abstract

This chapter describes the political process that led to the end of the military dictatorship and marked the rearticulation of Chile's political party elites as two large political coalitions that defined the post-Pinochet process of democratisation: the Concertación and the Alianza. This is important in order to understand the research object of this study because the list of members of the political elite used here is drawn from a universe of individuals belonging to one of these two coalitions. The political negotiations that took place after Pinochet's defeat in the 1988 plebiscite meant that the democratic transition took the form of an agreement or, as some scholars have described it, a pact between the relevant political actors of both the incoming and outgoing regimes. This affected not only the democratic transition but also, given the political hegemony of the two coalitions, its consolidation. Indeed, from 1989 through to 2010, the Concertación and the Alianza held almost all the seats in both chambers of Congress and, as shown by a number of scholars, competition between these two multi-party coalitions dominated electoral and legislative politics.