Abstract
At least once every three years beginning in 1823, unfailingly except for the 1891 presidential contest, Chilean voters were summoned to the polls for presidential, congressional, and/or municipal elections throughout the nineteenth century. Congressional and municipal elections were held every three years, and presidential ones every five. With so many elections there should be a rich historiographic tradition devoted to them, especially since they left a considerable statistical and documentary trail. However, they have only recently become the object of study.1 Instead of detailed empirical work on the subject, historians since the 1940s have simply enveloped the nineteenth-century’s electoral processes in a set of enduring but fundamentally misleading and even inaccurate notions that have been taken as fact, thereby stifling further research. Consequently, the early evolution of Chilean political participation and democratisation has been very poorly understood.
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Notes
Germán Urzúa Valenzuela, Historia política de Chile y su evolución electoral (Desde 1810 a 1992) (Santiago, 1992), is the first book offering a comprehensive view of Chilean elections since the beginning. J. Samuel Valenzuela, Democratizatión via reforma: la expansion del sufragio en Chile (Buenos Aires, 1985), is the first work that analyses nineteenth-century electoral politics and their contribution to Chilean democratisation.
See, for example, Ricardo Donoso, Desarrollo político y social de Chile desde la Constitutión de 1833 (Santiago, 1942), p. 69; Julio César Jobet, Ensayo crítico del desarrollo económico-social de Chile (Santiago, 1955), p. 40; Hernán Ramirez Necochea, Historia del movimiento obrero en Chile. Antécédentes, siglo XIX (Santiago, 1956), pp. 76–7; Julio Heise González, 150anos de evolutión institutional (Santiago, 1960), p. 64; Nobert Lechner, La Democracia en Chile (Buenos Aires, 1970), p. 35; Luis Vitale, Interpretatión marxista de la historia de Chile. Ascenso y declinatión de la burguesla minera: De Pérez a Balmaceda (1861–1891) (Frankfurt, 1975), pp. 86–7; François-Xavier Guerra, ‘Les Avatars de la représentation au XIXe siècle’, in Georges Couffignal (ed.), Réinventer la démocratie: Le défi latino-américain (Paris, 1992), pp. 52–3. Urzúa Valenzuela, Historia política de Chile, pp. 72, 87, 185, 233, firmly reasserts the first two premises, although he also provides evidence that contradicts the first one (see p. 62 for example). There are many differences between these authors on matters of interpretation that go beyond the above noted consensus. One of the main disagreements lies in the assessment of the significance of the 1874 reforms for the landholding groups. The extreme positions are given by Donoso, Lechner and Vitale; a revisionist view is contained in Valenzuela.
See Boletín de sesiones de la Cámara de Diputados, Ordinary Session of 16 June 1872, p. 24, for Rodríguez’s first suggestion of the key phrase.
The phrase was contained at the end of Article 16 of the 1874 electoral law. The constitution required revisions of the electoral law every ten years in order to set the income and property qualification levels. Article 16 was the key article that fulfilled this requirement. Chile, Bolétin de leyes y decretos delgobierno, vol. XLII, no. 11 (Nov. 1874), p. 327.
Urzúa Valenzuela, Historia politica de Chile, p. 123.
See Valenzuela, Democratizatión via reforma, p. 150, for figures regarding the size of the electorate from 1846 to 1912. The adult male literacy rate in the late 1870s was about 35%. The numbers of voters declined from these levels in the early 1880s because the Conservative party called on its voters to abstain from voting in the presidential elections and in most districts as a form of protest. The number of registrants and of voters declined further in 1885, and did not recover significantly in 1888, probably because there was little interest in participating in elections in which the only opposition force was the Conservatives. Liberals, Nationals and Radicals were all part of the governing alliance during the decade. The 1880s are not, therefore, the best decade to assess the extent of voter participation in the late-nineteenth-century. However, this is what Guerra does in his ‘Les avatars de la représentation’, p. 52. He is also incorrect in asserting that only five per cent of the ‘adult male population’ voted in 1885, because that is the percentage of registered voters over the total population that year.
The legal obligation to vote in Chile was instituted by a 1962 law. It is only then that the numbers of voters increased sharply; the small size of the voting public was first and foremost due to the apathy of potential voters. There is no space to develop this theme further here.
For a facsimile of these certificates, see Valenzuela, Democratizatión vía reforma, pp. 148–49.
Judicial records show that such appeals were by no means infrequent. For illustrations of such cases when citizens complained of their exclusion from the registry, despite their knowing how to read and write, after 1874, see Gaceta de los Tribunales, vol. XXXV, no. 1739 (13 May 1876), case nos. 708 and 709; and vol. XXXVII, no. 1860 (14 Dec. 1878), case no. 4692. The judges ruled in their favour.
A reference to such observers appears in the anticlerical newspaper El Ferrocarril, 2 Nov. 1875, p. 2. The article stresses that they must know people in the district in order not to be fooled by the practice of registering the same individuals under different names.
El diablo denunciante de los abusos de las calificaciones, Santiago, no. 1,5 Dec. 1839, p. I. El diablo was an opposition periodical that printed the circular to denounce this practice.
This discussion of the use of municipal taxpayer lists to appoint junta members is based on an anonymous article entitled ‘Origen de las funciones électorales de los mayores contribuyentes’, Revista Chilena, vol. XII (1878), pp. 311–5. Abdón Cifuentes, Memorias (Santiago, 1936), p. 105, notes that Manuel José Irarrázabal, the Conservative Party leader and senator, suggested the extension of the largest taxpayer mechanism to the Juntas Calificadoras. Though usually reliable, Cifuentes’s memoirs, written when he was very elderly, may be incorrect on this point.
This matter is discussed in Erika Maza Valenzuela, ‘Catolicismo, anticléricalisme, y la extensión del sufragio a la mujer en Chile’, Estudios Publicos, forthcoming.
Boletín de sesiones de la Cämara de Diputados, ordinary session of 7 Oct. 1969, p. 462. The speech was part of the minority report of the committee that reviewed the 1869 legislation on electoral registries.
Valenzuela, Democratizatión vía reforma, p. 150.
Pedro Félix Vicuña, Cartas sobre la situation de la Repblica y la crisis electoral (Valparaíso, 1870), p. 21.
Lieut. James M. Gilliss, A. M., The U. S. Naval Astronomical Expedition to the Southern Hemisphere During the Years 1849-’50-’51-’52. Chile. Its Geography, Climate, Earthquakes, Government, Social Condition, Mineral and Agricultural Resources, Commerce, etc., etc. (Washington, 1855), vol. I, p. 129.
Ibid.
The transitory article stipulated that such illiterates could vote until 1840. In 1842, after a heated congressional debate, the government enacted a law interpreting the transitory constitutional provision as referring only to new registrants after 1840.
General Tomás de Iriarte, Panoramas chilenos del siglo XX (Santiago, 1965), p. 89. The portions referring to Chile in this diary were retrieved from the original manuscript by Gabriel Balbontín Fuenzalida, who wrote its prologue and notes.
Diego Barros Arana, Un decenio en la historia de Chile, 1841–1851 (Santiago, 1906), vol. II, p. 458.
Gilliss, U. S. Naval Expedition, p. 129. On p. 258, Gilliss notes that barreteros, the miners who broke into the ore and hence had higher skills, earned 25 pesos per month, while the apires, those who hauled the ore, made 12 pesos per month. The latter (assuming they were of age) would apparently not have the requisite 150 pesos in the provinces to vote, except that miners also received, in addition, food for themselves and their families. Hence, if the value of this food supplement were added to their income, even the apires surpassed the required income.
Boletín de sesiones del Senado, extraordinary session of 28 Sept. 1874, p. 54. Despite Irarrázabal’s implication that these income levels were ‘set’ in 1864, they were simply restated from the earlier decennial electoral laws. As noted above, they were never raised after 1834. By the 1870s, given the expansion of the Chilean economy during those decades, it is very likely that income levels had risen. Inflation only became a persistent feature of the Chilean economy after the mid-1870s.
All those with ‘public employment’ could register automatically, as the president of a Qualifying Junta is alleged to have said in 1839. See El diablo denunciante de los abusos de las calificaciones, Santiago, no. 3 (9 Dec. 1839), p. 1. For a typical electoral law stipulating that individuals appearing on these lists were presumed to have the requisite income, see Boletin de las leyesy decretos del gobierno, Santiago, vol. XXIX, no. 9 (Sept. 1861), articles 31–7 on pp. 213–5.
Gilliss, U.S. Naval Expedition, p. 305, mentions a practice he attributes to landowners, of issuing bogus salary certificates to their dependants to ‘qualify’ them to vote. He notes that the resulting contracts were later annulled.
Valenzuela, Democratizatión vía reforma, p. 119.
See Martín Palma, Los candidates (Santiago, 1871), pp. 98–9 for a listing of their names.
For a description of these elections, see Barros Arana, Un decenio en la historia de Chile, vol. II, pp. 277–85.
For an example of an intendant’s efforts to solicit the assistance of wealthy individuals to build railways and roads, see Memoria que el Intendente de Coquimbo présenta al senor ministro del interior dando cuenta de todos los ramos de la administration de la provincia de su mando (La Serena, 1855), pp. 31–5.
Cifuentes, Memoriasy vol. I, p. 149.
Miguel Varas Velísquez, Correspondencia de don Antonio Varas sobre la candidatura presidential de don Manuel Montt (Santiago, 1921), pp. 244–5. In this case the correspondence refers to the presidential campaign of Manuel Montt. The intendente later informed Varas that the victory was assured, which meant that he probably thought that the appointment had had the desired effect.
Urzúa Valenzuela, Historia política de Chile, p. 239. 108 deputies were elected that year, which left the government with a minority of 43 deputies pledged to it.
80,346 votes were cast that year, up from 25,981 in the previous lower house election. Valenzuela, idem, p. 150.
See Gilliss, The U.S. Naval Astronomical Expedition, pp. 144–5 for a description of the tertulias as social institutions, including the role of women in them; and p. 305 for a reference to their political function during electoral campaigns.
This listing is drawn from El Cívico de Valparaíso. Periódico popular dedicado a los artesanos, Valparaíso, no. 2 (15 Mar. 1846), p. 1. The first three newspapers were major ones with daily editions and a national circulation.
Some, such as El Cívico de Valparaíso which was created to support Bulnes’s presidential campaign, even circulated free of charge.
El Cívico de Valparaíso, no. 4 (25 Mar. 1846), p. 1, goes to great lengths in denouncing these opposition appeals, and in condemning a demonstration by artisans in Santiago on 8 Mar. 1846 that led to acts of violence. El Pueblo, the periodical published in Santiago, was apparently one of the most radical. It presented ‘subversive ideas’ according to Amunátegui and Amunátegui, and seems to have had ties to the organisers of the 8 Mar. 1846 demonstration; Miguel Luis Amunátegui and Gregorio Victor Amunátegui, D. José Joaquin Vallejo (Santiago, 1866), p. 126.
El Guardia National, Santiago, no. 1 (6 Feb. 1846), p. 1, mentions the formation in late 1845 of the Sociedad Democrata, for young people, together with ‘two or three societies of artisans’. Domingo Amunátegui Solar, Historia Social de Chile (Santiago, 1932), p. 93, mentions the Sociedad Caupolicán. According to Amunátegui and Amunátegui, El Pueblo was also linked to ‘various clubs of people of the last class that the opposition had organised’, p. 126.
Amunátegui Solar, Historia Social de Chile, p. 93. El Guardia National, idem, also says that the ‘societies of artisans ... had the purpose of preparing public sentiments (espirítu público) for the elections’. It should be added that the governments and their opponents also saw the guards as a military force that could be a strategic asset if political disputes lead to armed conflict.
See El Cívico de Valparaíso, Valparaíso, no. 3 (22 Mar. 1846), p. 1. The club appears to have been called first the Society of Order Composed by the Artisans of Valparaíso (Sociedad del Orden Compuesta de los Artesanos de Valparaíso). Vicuña, Vindicatión de los principios e ideas, states parenthetically that the Society of Order only pretended to support the government, and that in fact it ‘hoped for its ruin’, p. 46. However, he offers no further explanation.
Francisco Encina, Historia de Chile (Santiago, 1955), vol. XV, p. 505.
Nonetheless, after the congressional elections had taken place, disagreements developed between Vicuña, who was a Liberal, and the Conservatives. As a result Vicuña finally withdrew his candidacy before the presidential electors were chosen.
Varas, Correspondencia, p. 264.
Varas, idem, p. 195.
For an analysis of the first electoral laws enacted in Chile, see Juan B. Hernandez E., ‘Las primeras leyes électorales chilenas’, Revista de Historia y Geografía, vol. XI, no. 38 (2nd trimester 1921).
The qualifying certificates were abolished by electoral reforms in 1888; Urzúa Valenzuela, Historia político de Chile y su evolutión electoral, p. 234.
Ignacio Domeyko, Mis viajes (Santiago, 1978), vol. 1, p. 412. Domeyko spent most of his adult life associated with the University of Chile.
Cifuentes, Memorias, vol. II, p. 288. Cifuentes adds that ‘the parties’ (not government agents) had invented many tricks to figure out how people voted despite the changes. And yet, the notion that voting preferences were supposed to be secret was, as noted above, much older than he indicates. The 1890 electoral law also ended the obligation to re-register prior to each election, and introduced a permanent electoral registry. In 1912 the registry was completely renewed. Subsequently, electoral registries were valid for ten years until 1958, when they were made permanent once again.
Barros Arana, Un decenio en la historia de Chile, vol. 1, p. 99. This practice was so widespread that the pro-government periodical El Artesano, Santiago, no. 1 (7 June 1841), p. 3, defended it by saying that national guard officers were not ‘robbing us of our property’, as claimed by an opposition sheet, but simply acting as ‘our depositories’ before returning the calificaciones the night before the elections.
When Antonio Varas took over the Ministry after President Bulnes dismissed Manuel Camilo Vial from the office, he had to figure out who had received the calificaciones from Vial and how to recover them. One of his correspondents advised him that ‘in this district, with very few exceptions, the only persons who are qualified to vote belong to the civic militia, and to the rural cavalry squadrons. It is known that Vial left the calificaciones of these troops with Rafael Cruz.’ Varas, Correspondencia, p. 82, letter dated 18 June 1850.
Cifuentes, Memorias, vol. 1, pp. 68–9. The use of the police for this purpose increased in the 1870s as the national guard voters declined as a proportion of the total number of voters.
On the markings and even the numbering of ballots see Amunátegui and Amunátegui, D. José Joaquín Vallejo, p. 147.
See Domeyko, Mis viajes, pp. 410–11.
Gilliss, The U.S. Naval Astronomical Expedition, p. 305. MacRae was a member of Gilliss’s scientific team.
Gilliss relates that a porter working for his astronomical observatory declined to turn over his calificación to a former employer, having since ceasing to work for him ‘imbibed in other notions’. After an altercation between the two, ‘José was furnished with lodgings at the expense of the municipality’, p. 307. For testimonies of beatings of troops who did not follow voting directives see Valenzuela, Democratizatión vía reforma, pp. 65–6.
Vicuña, Vindicatión de los principios e ideas, p. 51.
The account was published days after the election in El Copiapino, Copiapó, no. 14 (13 Mar. 1849), and is reprinted in Amunátegui and Amunátegui, D. José Joaquín Vallejo, pp. 145–56.
Amunátegui and Amunátegui, D. José Joaquin Mzllejo, pp. 155–6.
Domeyko also mentions that some voters sold their calificaciones in Copiapó, often more than once; Mis viajes, pp. 411–12.
El Artesano, Santiago, no. 2 (20 June 1841), p. 3.
This is noted, as indicated previously, by Vicuña, Cartas, p. 52.
Gilliss, The U.S. Naval and Astronomical Expedition, p. 307. These being 1850s dollars, the $8.62 must have represented a tidy sum. The reference buttresses the notion that where there was electoral competition, and such was always the case in Santiago, it was of great intensity.
Gilliss, idem, p. 306.
Idem.
These averages include the votes for all splinter groups from the Liberal, Radical and Conservative parties that did not eventually become different parties altogether. The averages are calculated from data in Urzúa Valenzuela, Historia politica de Chile.
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Valenzuela, J.S. (1996). Building Aspects of Democracy Before Democracy: Electoral Practices in Nineteenth Century Chile. In: Posada-Carbó, E. (eds) Elections before Democracy: The History of Elections in Europe and Latin America. Institute of Latin American Studies Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-24505-5_11
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