In this bright, compact little book, J. Samuel Valenzuela provides a sketch of electoral politics in nineteenth-century Chile, sets this within a broad theoretical discussion of parallel practice in other Western democracies, gives a glancing blow to the work of Luis Vitale and more recently of Maurice Zeitlin, and ends with a brief commentary on the development of democracy. It is a modest and thoughtful examination of a subject that has drawn but scant academic attention in Latin America.
The electoral reform law of 1874 lies at the center of the discussion. At this time, the property requirement was dropped and all literate male Chileans were given the vote, a precocious move that at first glance seems to put this progressive republic in the same political category as the United States, France, and Switzerland; but despite the fact that the number of qualified voters doubled as a result of the law and tripled shortly thereafter, only some 4 percent of the population actually voted. What were the political motives behind the 1874 law? The conventional explanation holds that radicals and liberals backed by a growing urban middle class pushed for a broadening of the franchise and the progressive democratization of Chile; in fact, as Valenzuela shows, the conservatives played a key role. This was because the oligarchical fronde of powerful landowners who formed the core of conservative politics found themselves frustrated by an increasingly powerful executive branch that held the controls of voter manipulation. While the property requirement was in force, the dependent mass of rural service tenants and smallholders was legally excluded from the vote. Local electoral boards, however, were inclined to wink at illegal procedure as long as landowners organized their workers to vote for the official candidate. But if they attempted to vote for the opposition they were frequently disqualified. The conservatives’ tactic in 1874 therefore was to push for the elimination of the property requirement in order to increase the pool of potential voters who could then more easily be mobilized against the executive’s candidate. Such was the seemingly contradictory origin of a widening political franchise that led by 1891 to the formation of “true political parties” that were forced to persuade, as well as bribe, in the scramble for votes.
In his discussion of political conflict among the Chilean elites, Valenzuela resists a recent attempt to link them to economic interests. Not that conflicts among individuals and groups over economic matters did not arise—obviously they did; he maintains, however, that it is difficult, if not misleading, to tie these to specific class interests. The reference here is to Zeitlin’s recent stimulating and controversial book on The Civil Wars in Chile (1984), but the objections are made in passing and the debate requires a more extensive and pondered treatment. What Valenzuela has given us is a brief, lucid excursion into the history of nineteenth-century politics in an essay that is as useful as it is concise.
