Politics of Chile

Chile's government is a representative democratic republic, whereby the President of Chile is both head of state and head of government, and of a formal multi-party system. Executive power is exercised by the president and by their cabinet. Legislative power is vested in both the government and the two chambers of the National Congress. The judiciary is independent of the executive and the legislature of Chile. The Constitution of Chile was approved in a national plebiscite in September 1980, under the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. It entered into force in March 1981. After Pinochet left power in 1990, saying this country was ready to keep going along with a plebiscite, the Constitution was amended to ease provisions for future amendments to the Constitution. In September 2006, President Ricardo Lagos signed into law several constitutional amendments passed by Congress. These include eliminating the positions of appointed senators and senators for life, granting the President authority to remove the commanders-in-chief of the armed forces, and reducing the presidential term from six to four years while also disabling immediate re-election. Statistical analysis suggests Chilean politicians in Congress "are not randomly drawn from the population, but over-represent high-income communities". As such Chileans of Castilian-Basque, Palestinian and Jewish ancestry are overrepresented in it. The autocratic and conservative republic (1831-1861) was replaced by the liberal republic (1861-1891), during which some political conquests were made, such as proportional representation (1871) and the abolition of the condition of ownership to have the right to vote (1885). When the era of the parliamentary republic began in 1891, the struggle between liberals (pipiolos) and conservatives (pelucones) had already evolved due to the emergence of a multi-party system.