Political institutions, policymaking process and policy outcomes

In this analysis we characterize the salient features of the Policy Making Process (PMP) in Chile. We emphasize the influence of political institutions on the PMP, and examine the linkage between policymaking and policy outcomes in Chile. To facilitate comparability with the other country-level studies in this collection of essays, we adopt the theoretical framework of Spiller and Tommasi which emphasizes the importance of transactions costs for the politics of policymaking. Because of the importance of veto players in the Chilean PMP we emphasize the importance of preference alignment (or the lack thereof) to explain variation across policy areas in the quality of policy outputs. Chile’s economic policies are generally stable to political shocks, flexible to new social and economic scenarios, mostly coherent, and promote economic growth, making it something of an outlier relative to other Latin American countries, though not in comparison with OECD countries. The quality of policies tends to be higher on macroeconomic areas, international integration, financial markets and regulations, than on more domestic issues—like labor markets, social security, health and education. On human rights and moral issues, policies show higher rigidity and overall lower quality. The salient features of the Chilean PMP are the electoral system, and the associated party syste