Too Many Labels Chasing Too Many Concepts: Characterizing the Post-1990 Chilean Regime.

The literature on Chilean democracy since the 1990 transition has been disjointed. Authors have assigned numerous "labels" to characterize Chilean democracy, which, compounded with the diverse features of the regime on which scholars have focused, makes for a very confused literature. Due to a lack of the same vocabulary and a shared analytic framework, the various characterizations in the 1990s of the Chilean regime failed to provide a coherent discussion of how to think about the Chilean transition and its post-transition regime. In this paper I look beyond the many labels for the regime to gain a better understanding of Chile not only in the context of various scholars' individual frameworks, but also from within the Chilean democracy literature as a whole. Behind the numerous labels lies a fascinating, ongoing discussion of Chilean democracy. Progress toward appropriately conceptualizing the regime requires that we shape our frameworks and analyses in terms of what is already available in the comparative and Chile-focused democratization literatures, and that we abstain from creating more labels. I also propose that scholars limit themselves to characterizing the regime as they see it at the time, rather than either employing the democratic label prematurely or withholding it based on the belief that a label itself can affect a regime's chances for a higher quality democracy in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]