Image: The Conversationalist

By Linda E. Moran, Ph.D.

Alex Seitz-Wald (2019) maintains that the most unknowable factor of presidential elections is electability and, more specifically, perceptions of electability. Their role in the surprising outcomes of two Chilean elections — Michelle Bachelet’s in 2005 and Gabriel Boric’s in 2021 — provides the scaffolding for analysis. The combination of failed strategies on the part of the predicted winners and unprecedented breakthroughs on the part of the actual winners created a conundrum for those with expertise on the topic of Chilean sociopolitical behavior. Why were predictions so wide of the mark? In search of an explanation, this essay shifts the focus from standard conversations about anomalies and contradictions to premises at the core of notions of electability. It suggests that the unexpected outcomes of the two elections under scrutiny can be attributed to flaws in five of the premises commonly used to assess electability.

In November 2021, “the spectacular collapse of the political center” left Chileans with two presidential candidates at the far margins: left-wing millennial Gabriel Boric, a former student militant and mass mobilization leader, and right-wing José Antonio Kast, an anti-feminist father of nine with family ties to the Nazi and dictator Pinochet regimes. Chile’s November election narrowed the field to two contenders. A month later, the run-off vote determined the winner. Kast’s win in November created three significant hurdles for Boric. One, no candidate that lost the first round had ever won the run-off. Two, Kast was set to inherit votes from a former contender’s supporters. Three, analysts predicted anemic voter turnout: one week before the final vote, a quarter of the electorate was undecided or planned to abstain. But it was Chile, where the unprecedented makes frequent appearances. In December, Boric won the run-off and garnered the highest number of votes ever cast for a presidential candidate in Chile. Voter participation reached its highest percentage  in a decade. In March 2022, he became Chile’s head of state.

Flashback: sixteen years ago, another dark horse made a run so unprecedented that the media dubbed it the “Bachelet Phenomenon.” The Michelle Bachelet and Gabriel Boric elections are substance for debate about why predictions were so wide of the mark. This study brings to the debate new considerations induced by the following rationale from Ayn Rand (1957): “Whenever you think you are facing a contradiction, check your premises. You will find that one of them is wrong” (189). There are five suspect premises linked to a recurring theme flagged by Alex Seitz-Wald (2019) as the “most unknowable factor” in presidential elections: perceptions of electability. In Chile, social transformation in the last two decades has raised the “unknowable factor” to new levels: “Chilean political culture has experienced some important mutations… the current political map has become more complex” (73). Sociologist Pedro Güell (2004) observed that “the type of culture that has defined the relationship between individuals and establishment institutions is changing very rapidly. In short, the reverential fear of the weak toward the powerful is lessening … there is a diminishing … intolerance of differences that has characterized the cultural history of Chile” (4). Before her second term (2014-2018), Michelle Bachelet reaffirmed Güell’s perspective: “Chile has changed. It is a much more active country, more conscious of its rights, whose people are tired of the abuse of power and are fed up with their needs not being taken into account. The citizens today are more mature and empowered.” These comments and others of similar category establish that the Chilean body politic has undergone transformations that, logically, have impacted and will continue to impact electoral behavior and those who aspire to political office.

Chilean Sociopolitical Climate

The first suspect premise is that the rubric used to evaluate electability was a reliable indicator of the Chilean sociopolitical climate in 2005 and 2021. Some context is needed to appreciate the margin of error. The Boric and Bachelet backstories put the odds against their elections incredibly high when calibrated by the conventional Chilean political profile. The “misfit” appeared to provide an open-and-shut case for incompetence delivered in context-specific offensives by opponents. Historical excerpts serve as illustrations. Bachelet was the first female presidential candidate in a landscape regarded politically as “tierra de hombres” — land of men. She was an agnostic in a predominantly Catholic culture, was a socialist marginalized by her party, had a child out of wedlock, and assumed executive office as a single mother with no male partner. Gabriel Boric was a student militant who orchestrated massive street protests in 2011, is a leftist with a progressive agenda, assumed executive office with an unmarried partner, and is the youngest candidate ever to win the Chilean presidency at the age of 35. The presence of multiple features that should have but failed to jeopardize their electability suggests a flawed rubric.

In the Bachelet case, the flaw was a widely held assumption of a gendered perception of competence. In keeping with that assumption, main contender Sebastián Piñera exploited masculine metaphors to highlight Bachelet’s lack of “leadership, fortitude, knowledge, and capacity to … captain a boat” (74) and distributed car air fresheners in the shape of a tie (Thomas 2014, 128; 133). Additional Piñera attempts took the form of common idioms, declaring himself the candidate “con más dedos para el piano” — meaning more qualified or intellectually superior — and labeling Bachelet as “tuerta” — lacking vision in the abstract (Gamboa and Segovia 2006, 106). The media followed suit. When “nine out of ten stories” declared Bachelet the “likely winner,” they featured her “charisma and honesty” in a positive light yet gave her incredibly low ratings in competence (23-24). By contrast, her male opponents received favorable reviews for competence. Nevertheless, voters were unpersuaded and Bachelet became Chile’s first female head of state.

The established rubric held that the presidency was and would remain a gendered institution forged by a patriarchal paradigm. This presumed a receptivity on the part of the electorate to the elite’s endorsement of that view. Missing from that equation were two relevant developments. One, Bachelet’s appointment to a traditionally “masculine portfolio” as the first female Minister of Defense in the Lagos administration had already initiated the “breakdown of cultural stereotypes about women’s leadership capacities” (763). Two, studies confirm that gender can enhance electability when voters are seeking a “break from the past” (Murray 2010, 14) and fresh approaches to reform (Bonilla and Silva 2005, 14). With citizen demands for equality, participatory democracy, and social justice permeating the 2005 political atmosphere, the rubric yielded a myopic reading of public perception heavily influenced by what Yuval Harari (2017) describes as “retrograde vision”.

Fast forward to November 2021, the case for Boric’s incompetence was built on his lack of “experiencias vitales/vital life experiences” (CNN Chile 2021). Sebastián Sichel argued that leadership in university mobilizations and Boric’s eight years in Chilean congress were insufficient preparation for executive office, backed by the rationale that experience outside the political setting was essential. This allowed Sichel to emphasize his fatherhood as a source of extra-political experience that Boric, childless, could not claim. This should have resonated with voters since Chilean political actors have long exploited the paternal image to portray stability and security (Thomas 2005, 170-71). But it was losing resonance. Developments in the twenty-first century — the legalization of divorce in 2004, an increase in the number of women enrolled in universities and active in the labor force, the 68 percent of Chilean children raised by single mothers, and a robust feminist movement — were indicators that the sociopolitical underpinnings of patriarchy were eroding. Data confirm that marriage is no longer the Chilean norm and there is a rise in “childless couples” (520). Taking the present reality into account, Bachelet, a female and single mother, and Boric, a childless adult with an unmarried partner, were highly electable in terms of descriptive representation.

Reading between lines, age also had bearing on the claim of insufficient life experience: Boric was 35 years old. To date, there is no universal rubric to determine at what age one acquires the necessary life experience for public office, but data indicate an advantage for older candidates. A survey conducted in 2021 among 200 countries found the average age of political leaders to be 62. What, then, explains the win for the millennial? One plausible factor is the social transformation that gained traction in Chile on the threshold of the new millennium. As voters began to break with the status quo, it followed that they would challenge a ranking of human competence that disqualifies women, millennials, former militants, single adults, or single parents for public office. With social inequality a main driver of Chilean reform, the elimination of potential candidates based on qualities unrelated to performance of public office is unwarranted. A synopsis is that the conventional rubric could not yield accurate readings about electability while profound transformations in the context from which candidates emerged nullified parts of it. The rubric was based on what candidates should be, not on what they could be.

To illustrate, the politically counter-cultural features of the Boric trajectory exposed the fallacy of “a widely held belief in Chilean politics … that politics … is best left to technocrats and party bosses, far away from the messiness of the street”. It was from the “messiness of the street” student mobilizations of 2011 that Boric and his fellow mobilization leaders emerged to win congressional seats in 2013. Giorgio Jackson, fellow mobilization leader and current Minister of Social Development in the Boric administration, explained the congressional wins: “We changed the perception of what is possible … The taboos and fears attached to thinking about a different model were forgotten … the message got through clearly” (qtd. in Gregg 2019, 86). Their electoral success elicited a less favorable  response from senator Víctor Pérez: “This new type of leadership is bad for the country. I am sure that the majority of Chileans are going to punish this form of politics, in which the citizen’s aspirations are being toyed with.” Chileans did not, in fact, “punish” it, seeing that Boric won the presidency. Jennifer Todd (2005) provides a theoretical undergirding for this outcome: “More radical, society-wide identity change is provoked when socio-political changes bring the elements of collective identity categories into evident contradiction for whole populations … key elements of the old identity-categories may be eroded” (439-41). To the extent that “old identity-categories” — the political elite — lose their grip on electability criteria and a shifting political landscape, unconventional candidates stand to gain traction.

Political Identity                

A second suspect premise is that Chilean voters use fixed sets of criteria to determine a candidate’s political leanings. Electability is impacted by those leanings. This led opponents to hyperbolize unorthodox factors in the Bachelet and Boric candidacies that could exploit alleged sets of insecurities in the electorate’s mindset. But the Bachelet and Boric elections demonstrated that the sets were fluid. The 2021 Chilean vote was framed by one analyst as a choice between a “fear of rioters”—a Boric presidency—or “living in a Catholic monastery”— a Kast presidency (Oppenheimer 2021). Kast framed it as a choice between “liberty and communism”. Voter perceptions were not as dichotomous. 

Neither voters nor candidates comprise a single immutable political identity. As predicted by Andrés Oppenheimer (2021), both candidates in 2021 had to reposition themselves closer to the center and the winner had to “distance himself from the more radical elements of his platform.” This required a toning down of polarizing rhetoric. The scope of this paper cannot establish how polarizing views of candidates impact voter perceptions of electability but the Kast loss following his initial win offers some perspective. Voters were initially wooed by the law-and-order image promoted by his campaign, then dissuaded by a growing concern about ideological rigidity. His “mano dura” approach had its appeal for those who associated it with stability; others viewed it as incompatible with a bid for progressive reform that would accommodate participatory democracy. Chilean author Alejandra Costamagna voiced those concerns: “José Antonio Kast representa la pretensión de freno al desarrollo social y democrático del país y es un evidente intento de retroceso de los avances logrados desde 1990 / José Antonio Kast represents the arrested social and democratic development of the country and an evident intent to reverse the advancements achieved since 1990.”

Following significant backlash to his initial declaration to dismantle the Ministry of Women just as feminism became “the country’s most powerful mass movement,” Kast had to recant but this could not erase his congressional record of multiple votes against women’s rights legislation nor bely his core “beliefs in a patriarchal family unit.” Electoral ambiguity abounded. Even after Kast’s family ties to the Nazi regime prompted street protests of: “Don’t vote for the Nazi”, Kast’s “‘firm hand’ law and order message” garnered enough political currency for a first-round win. It was convincing enough for analyst Patricio Navia to predict the majority would choose the “law-and-order candidate” in the run-off vote, but Kast lost.

Both the Bachelet and Boric elections indicate that conservatives and political think tanks did not fully comprehend the political repercussions of the social transformation in progress. A poll prior to Bachelet’s election “concluded that 77 percent of the population [was] either liberal or mostly liberal” (Franceschet and Thomas 2010, 181). The data presented a notable gap between alleged Chilean conservatism and the actual Chilean mindset and clarify why attempts to frame Bachelet as lacking “traditional Chilean values” failed to alienate voters who viewed her unorthodox profile as an aperture for change (Hiner 2005, 5). Another gap occurred when the female vote was a key factor in Bachelet’s election despite the running theme that Chilean women did not vote for women.

Similarly, media headlines articulating fears that Chile would take a “left” turn with a Boric election and predictions that “a significant portion of the population” would opt for Kast in the run-off ultimately failed to swing the pendulum to the right. The negative impact of Boric’s leftist leanings was outweighed by the positive impact of his representation of what Kenneth Bunker described as “a younger, … more progressive voter, … in [sync] with the times” (qtd. in Nugent 2021). Analyst Shreya Mukarji explained the shift as a matter of degrees: voters saw Kast as “much more extreme right than Boric [was] extreme left”, which supports the case for mercurial gray in perceptions of electability. The simplified version: perceptions of individuals or collectives are hybrid, which create what we call contradictions.

Just as the opposition failed to comprehend a growing receptivity to a nontraditional female presidential candidate in 2005 and a nontraditional male presidential candidate in 2021, it also failed to comprehend what Fernando Ayala (2021) identifies as “the new political reality — an irreversible fact — of generational change” induced by a citizenry “freed from atavistic dogmas”. I take the view that nontraditional profiles possess greater agility to engage a new political reality where voters, particularly young voters socialized to diversity, are less persuaded by gender, age, parenthood, or orthodox family compositions.

Independent Political Actors

A third suspect premise is that electability is informed by a perception of Chilean candidates as political actors scripted by a political party’s narrative. Patricio Silva (2004) explains the current setting: “Today, the personal attributes of the candidates involved are decisive … the current electorate gives its personal adhesion to a single candidate and not necessarily to the political forces which are officially behind his or her campaign” (73). A comparative study in 2014 among young voters in Chile confirmed a lack of interest in party affiliation but not in political processes (Sola-Morales and Hernández-Santaolalla 2017, 639). The Bachelet election serves to illustrate. Prior to election, Bachelet was not a party favorite and her party had lost voter confidence due to corruption scandals. Yet, she won the election and was ranked the “most admired political personality in Chile” near the end of her first term with an 80 percent approval rating while her party’s rating remained low at 38 percent (112). There is a theory that lends comprehension to this disparity. Rubén Dittus (2006) proposes that candidates are no longer created by parties but by the “common citizen” (43, 46). Bachelet confirmed that her election as the first Chilean female head of state personified “the process of cultural change the country was undergoing”, enhancing her electability factor over opponents that embodied the status quo.

Boric encountered similar impediments to his candidacy. He had difficulty gathering the required quota of signatures to register his candidacy and was considered an “underdog” in the party primaries. Boric’s appeal as “Chile’s first ‘woke’ presidential candidate” offset deficits in much the same way that Bachelet’s symbolic representation of sociopolitical change superseded the stigma of her party’s low ratings.

The Bachelet and Boric elections suggest that candidates may win their case for electability independent of party support or standing. The declining influence of political parties combined with an intensified emphasis on participatory democracy underscore Victor Tricot’s (2021) counsel: “the elite cannot govern without hearing out the streets … it is imperative that our political system is able to adapt and integrate these new expressions. An ostracized and paternalistic political elite is not viable anymore” (87). A comparative study of the political participation of young people in Spain and Chile bears this out (Sola-Morales and Hernández-Santaolalla 2017, 635-36). When asked for their opinion on three modes of political participation that “would impact the most in the decisions of government,” both groups named as their first option “a peaceful demonstration” (Ibid.). This, along with the supporting literature, would indicate a need for candidates to be familiar with the dynamics behind and inside the social movements in progress during an election cycle. Clearly, the unique circumstances of each cycle can so inherently favor or disfavor a candidate that they determine an electoral outcome.

The recent run of unexpected election outcomes in several countries reinforces the notion that success at the ballot box is not assured by a party’s perception of their candidate’s electability but by the electorate’s perception of electability. Monmouth University polling institute director Patrick Murray presses the point that electability “really is ill-informed, but we know that it’s not facts — but perception — that drive voter behavior.”  Herein lies the inconsistency of unpredictability: an electorate that is “nomadic, fluctuating, that adheres to candidacies … for brief periods of time.” This accounts for diverse perceptions of electability in each election cycle and may explain why, according to director of the Chilean pollster MORI, Marta Lagos, Chileans are “a political animal that decides at the last minute” (Politi 2022). An additional impediment to accurate predictions of Chilean voting behavior via polling results is the failure of polls “to capture the new voter, and above all, the young voter” (Ibid.). Unreliable polling results are not a recent development. In the midst of the 2005 Bachelet campaign, polls indicated that many Chileans considered a female presidency an impossible, if not inappropriate, proposition. Their final vote revealed a significant gap between what Chileans said and what Chileans did. Carlos Huneeus resolved the dissonance with the proposal that “Chileans can separate the public and private lives of politicians, like they do in their own lives. People have their public, religious life and then how they actually live” (qtd. in Chang 2005).

Power of the Female Vote

The fourth suspect premise is that the Chilean female vote remains largely shaped by a normalized gender role characterized as antifeminist and conservative (Graf 2020). Historically, this has not impeded female political engagement in Chile. Female voters were a decisive factor in dismantling the Allende regime. By 1970, Chilean women made up 47% of registered voters (Vergara-Saavedra and Muñoz-Rojas 2021, 135) and, two decades later, studies noted they “consistently demonstrate[d] higher levels of voting than men” (Matear 1997, 98). At the start of the new millennium, data found that “Chilean women in every social class tend to have higher participation rates than men at every stage in the electoral process” (720).

What the normalized gender role has impacted is electability but this has not remained static. While the historical record of female electoral behavior does reveal an advantage for right-wing candidates (Graf 2020), I argue that the Bachelet elections in 2005 and 2013 were signs of a departure from that tendency that has since gathered momentum. By 2018, feminists had “altered the traditional means of doing politics,” with “traditional” interpreted as hierarchical and masculine (Archivo Nacional 2020). Fernando Ayala’s proposed “end of an era” after 2021 election results left the political right “looking for explanations for the three successive electoral defeats of its main parties” implies that the electability factor of right-wing candidates is losing currency with sectors of Chilean female voters, given that their high participation rates can be a decisive factor. Ayala (2021) attributes the right’s poor performance to a “myopic view in their evaluation of reality.” According to Cristóbal Huneeus, director of the data analysis team Unholster, the political right has yet to engage the new generation of voters. This was evident in the 2021 election. A member of the Constitutional Convention, Giovanna Roa, articulated an unfavorable perception of the right shared by young female voters in the 2021 election: “Kast explicitly wants to move us back to a place we already left behind. He wants us hidden and out of the public arena.”

The Chilean female vote has a compelling raison d’etre: a robust women’s movement. Campaign platforms that position it on the periphery now run the risk of alienating a large voter bloc. Only days before the run-off vote, Pierina Ferretti (2021) noted: “Feminism, which has become the country’s most powerful mass movement, will be a decisive factor.” From the start, Boric made it a cornerstone of his campaign, stating that his “government would be feminist” and his cabinet “predominantly female.” In the 2021 run-off, women comprised the largest voting group, with most women under 50 years of age in favor of Boric. General manager of Unholster and founder of Decide Chile, Antonio Díaz-Araujo, observed that while the increase in voter participation was greater among both genders, female voters outnumbered male voters: 63% of women younger than 30 years of age, 67% of women 30 to 50 years of age, and 59% of women 50 to 70 years of age voted. A comparison of those percentages to the male vote in the same age categories of 47%, 57%, and 55%, respectively, makes earlier claims by Ann Matear (1997) and Paul Lewis (2004) of high levels of female political participation sustainable. Those who viewed Boric’s inclusion and promotion of the women’s movement in his platform as tokenism may now take a different view. Women hold more than half of the ministry appointments in the Boric administration, which is unprecedented in the Americas. Clearly, underestimating the Chilean female vote constitutes an act of political suicide.

Political Reconfiguration

The final suspect premise is that electability relies on compliance with established Chilean norms. This interfaces with previous comments about sociopolitical climate and social transformation. I believe some supposed contradictions are new norms, not merely breaches of existing norms. More than ever, “political reconfiguration requires including new political actors,” “new perspectives of analysis,” and “a re-examination of power relationships” (Vergara-Saavedra and Muñoz-Rojas 2021, 148). Reconfiguration is both generated by and a generator of new standards. On the threshold of the new millennium, Ulrich Beck envisioned a political configuration totally outside of the known frameworks / “totalmente fuera de los marcos conocidos” (Beck and Merzari 1999, 18). Idna Berosca Rincón Soto (2009) encapsulates Beck’s vision of a future political reconfiguration as one that:

“no sólo genere reglas, sino que las modifique; que no sólo pertenezca a los políticos sino también a la sociedad; que no sólo sea del poder sino también de la creación: un arte de la política. Para el autor, cada vez son más las situaciones que no pueden ser comprendidas ni resueltas con las actuales instituciones e ideas, con las concepciones vigentes de lo político.

not only generates rules, but rather modifies them; that not only pertains to politicians but also to society; that is not only about power but also about creation: an art of politics. For the author, there are more and more situations that cannot be comprehended nor resolved with the current institutions and ideas, with the existing conceptions of the political.”

I maintain that this reconfiguration was in its initial phase at the time of Bachelet’s first election, but the assessment by many that her election was an anomaly made it difficult to recognize. We see its culmination in recent events. Chile’s new constitution is the first “in the world drafted by an equal number of women (49.5%) and men (50.5%)” and headed by a woman (226). The new constitution remains a work in progress after its first draft was rejected in September. Given that in 2022, only 18 percent of Chileans expressed satisfaction with their democracy compared to 42 percent in 2020, decisions about what to keep, what to discard, and what to amend stand to alter established political norms and, in turn, perceptions of electability. In Lisa Hilbink’s (2021) estimation, Chile is a “country whose political experiments and innovations have earned it an outsized place in the global imagination” (232). In a country open to “experiments and innovations” where “the status quo is no longer an option” (342), there will be less impetus for candidates to conform to norms that are losing relevance.

The New Electability Landscape

This analysis attributes the groundbreaking developments in the Bachelet and Boric elections to flawed premises that skewed perceptions of electability and disguised plausible outcomes as contradictions. Taking the flawed premises into account, what are the implications for future elections? First, as demonstrated by the Bachelet and Boric elections, attempts to discredit an opponent’s electability at a personal level failed to achieve the desired results. Playing up a contender’s alleged deficiencies, especially those unrelated to job performance, raises concerns about the need to use personal attacks in order to enhance one’s own qualifications. Both Bachelet and Boric effectively diffused these attempts by maintaining a focus on the concerns of the electorate and strategies to address them. According to Bachelet, instead of gaining electoral support, character assassination can alienate voters: “Failing to understand that the other person is a competitor, not an enemy, and using language to symbolically destroy the other one is not right … that’s not what politics is for — we came to serve the people and words matter. I think all of these things are making a lot of people not want to get involved in politics.” Yes, words matter. Simple observations of the role of social media in the political landscape leave no doubt that online platforms exercise considerable power over the dissemination and interpretation of the words and behaviors of political actors (Crespi 1997). That level of transparency comes at a price. At times, the price is an election.

Second, the rise in mass mobilizations indicates an increasing number of political actors that have chosen the streets as globally visible venues for political participation. Those who aspire to public office can no longer sideline them as transient expressions of momentary discontent. They are expressions of participatory democracy, particularly of a new generation of voters unaffiliated and disillusioned with party systems, to which those in public office cannot remain tone deaf. Electability will be measured by a candidate’s ability to articulate context relevant realignments of unsatisfactory configurations in the sociopolitical contract.

Third, the traditional party system’s role as gatekeeper of the status quo is threatened by an escalating solidarity in mass movements, public demands for more direct involvement in decision-making, gender parity in governing bodies, and an all-inclusive approach to issues of discrimination. The threat was inevitable when party affiliation fell below 20% in 2016. Analysts in 2006 had already flagged the misfit between the established order’s conservatism that was “losing ground in the national psyche” and “conservative norms” that no longer reflected Chilean reality (31). Recently, the status quo’s loss of influence became more obvious when “massive social mobilization against inherited institutions triggered the process of constitutional replacement in Chile and that many members elected to the convention had no or little previous participation in the political system” (355). The convention’s diverse representation of gender, walks of life, political leanings and ethnicities was intentional: “the public signaled strongly that they wanted a constitution written not by politicians … but by people in touch with the average citizen” (230). Candidates that emerge from a body politic characterized by these factors possess the potential to bypass party protocols, leading to the possibility that electability will not be circumscribed by a stamp of approval from the established order. Chile is engaged in a new way of doing politics.

Conversations about electability are highly relevant given the unique conditions in which Chile finds itself at this moment, namely “in the context of a deep and long-standing crisis of representation” (348). Admittedly, resolving flawed premises cannot completely remove the margin of error associated with predictions of electability but perhaps it can improve comprehension about what has transpired in the interest of what is yet to come, not only in Chile but across the globe.

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