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© 2022 Raveau et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (the “License”), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Notwithstanding the ProQuest Terms and Conditions, you may use this content in accordance with the terms of the License.

Abstract

In the past few decades, constitution-making processes have shifted from being undertakings performed by elites and closed off from the public to ones incorporating democratic mechanisms. Little is known, however, about the determinants of voluntary public participation and how they affect the outcomes of the deliberative process in terms of content and quality. Here, we study the process of constituent involvement in the rewriting of Chile’s constitution in 2016. A total of 106, 412 citizens in 8, 113 different local encounters voluntarily congregated in groups of ten or more to collectively determine what social rights should be considered for inclusion in the new constitution, deliberating and then articulating in the written word why should be included. We brought our data to statistical regression models at the municipality level, the results show that the main determinants associated with increasing citizen participation are educational level, engagement in politics, support for the government, and Internet access. In contrast, population density and the share of Evangelical Christians in the general population decrease citizen participation. Then, we further analyze the written arguments for each collectively-selected constitutional rights. The findings suggest that groups from socioeconomically developed municipalities (with higher educational levels and where the main economic activities are more distant from natural resources), on average, deliberate consistently more about themes, concepts, and ideas compared to groups from less developed municipalities. These results provide an empirical ground on the driver factors of voluntary citizen participation and on the benefits and disadvantages of deliberative democracy. Hence, results can inform the organization of new deliberative processes.

Details

Title
Citizens at the forefront of the constitutional debate: Voluntary citizen participation determinants and emergent content in Chile
Author
María Paz Raveau; Juan Pablo Couyoumdjian; Fuentes-Bravo, Claudio; Rodriguez-Sickert, Carlos; Candia, Cristian  VIAFID ORCID Logo 
First page
e0267443
Section
Research Article
Publication year
2022
Publication date
Jun 2022
Publisher
Public Library of Science
e-ISSN
19326203
Source type
Scholarly Journal
Language of publication
English
ProQuest document ID
2686268483
Copyright
© 2022 Raveau et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (the “License”), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Notwithstanding the ProQuest Terms and Conditions, you may use this content in accordance with the terms of the License.