3 - Chile

Summary

This chapter analyses a case of party-building by agrarian elites in Chile. It presents evidence of Chilean landowners’ financial support of the political right, their identification with rightwing legislators, and the programmatic convergence between agrarian elites’ preferences and the policy positions of rightwing parties, Renovación Nacional (RN) in particular. The chapter argues that agrarian elites in Chile decided to invest in an electoral strategy of political influence at the time of the democratic transition because they feared a center-left government would endanger their property rights. It presents evidence of how this perceived threat was founded on landowners’ previous experience with democracy during the 1965–1973 period, when their farms were expropriated. The chapter also illustrates how low intragroup fragmentation facilitates party-building. Shared political and economic interests among the Chilean economic elite in general, and agrarian elites in particular, decreased the coordination costs associated with building a party to represent them. The chapter analyses the tax reform of 1990 and the Water Code reform of 2022 to show how the partisan strategy works.