Millennium Nucleus Center Challenges to Representation

In the last decade, Chile has encountered new scenarios in the field of political representation: low electoral turnout, growing mistrust in the political system and emergence of social movements. Considering this backdrop, the Millennium Nucleus Center Challenges to Representation seeks to contribute to the reflection on the tests that Chile faces with a comparative perspective, to produce topnotch research on this subject and to propose recommendations in order to strengthen the democratic system.

This Millennium Nucleus Center is anchored at the Political Science School of the Diego Portales University and is organized in four research areas. First, the center studies Chile’s institutional design and its ability to generate governance by the means of processing conflicts appropriately. Secondly, it examines how different actors have been politicizing inequality, forcing this way a change in the country’s political agenda. Third, it investigates how the emergence of critical citizens and the expansion of the middle classes bring along a growing demand for democratic improvements. Finally, it compares the Chilean experience having in mind the objective of assessing how other countries have faced similar challenges and how they have achieved (or not) solutions.