Chapter 6 examines the collapse of democracy in Chile in 1973 under the Allende administration. Chile was a relatively stable competitive republic without universal suffrage until the mid-twentieth century. As voting rights became more universal, class cleavages among Chilean voters began to rise sharply due to the wide gap between the rich and the poor. Allende’s rise to power as a radical left-wing president was itself the result of an intense class struggle. Chile has a presidential form of government with a proportional representation electoral system, which is the institutional arrangement of a centrifugal democracy. The former tends to trigger political confrontation between the president and the congress, while the latter tends to shape a polarized multiparty system, making it difficult for the president to gain a stable support base in the congress. As a result, Allende’s radical left-wing policies precipitated a serious political crisis. Consequently, the Chilean military decided to change Chile’s political stalemate through a coup d’état, and democracy thus collapsed.