ABSTRACT
The Chilean electoral system was designed by military reformers to achieve two goals. The first was the short-term goal of assuring overrepresentation for pro-government forces of the Right in the first congressional elections. The second goal was to fundamentally transform the nature of the party system through electoral engineering aimed at the creation of a two-party system, which authorities considered a more stable alternative to the often polarized multiparty system that had characterized much of Chile's preauthoritarian history. The chapter shows the potential volatility and exclusionary tendencies of the electoral system even with the current pattern of party coalitions. Despite a certain disillusionment with proportional representation systems in both theory and practice, in certain sociopolitical and party system contexts proportional representation may possess more of the moderating characteristics the literature commonly attributes to majoritarian electoral systems. The two-list test assumes a coalitional configuration identical to that in the 1989 election.
