1 DRAFT: Please Do Not Cite Without Permission Prepared for the 2018
DRAFT: Please do not cite without permission Prepared for the 2018 WPSA Meeting, San Francisco, CA, March 29-31, 2018 Resolving a Participatory Dilemma in Chile Nancy D. Lapp CSU Sacramento1 “I was wrong… I thought that there was a greater civic spirit but the evidence is that they voted because it was obligatory” -Chilean President Michele Bachelet, December 20172 Introduction During her first term in office, Chilean president Michele Bachelet approved of a law that solved a long-time dilemma: that since the end of the Pinochet regime, voting had remained compulsory, while voter registration was voluntary. While this situation had been universally condemned, a resolution took over twenty years to achieve. Modeling the problem, albeit loosely, as a Prisoner’s Dilemma helps illustrate the difficulty as well as how the stalemate was broken. In brief, changing the system necessitated two steps: changing voter registration and changing compulsory voting. The two major party coalitions each feared the worst possible 1 Early versions of this article have been presented at the Western Political Science Association Annual Meeting, Oakland, March 17-19, 2005 and at the 2006 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Philadelphia, PA, August 30th-September 3, 2006. Research support included a summer research grant from the UCLA Latin American Center, funds from the CSUS Center for Teaching and Learning, and the CSUS Political Science Department (formerly Government Department). 2 CNN Chile, “Michelle Bachelet por voto voluntario: ‘Yo me equivoqué’” December 17, 2017 Http://www.cnnchile.com <accessed Dec. 30, 2017> This and other translations done by the autor.
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