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This panel will explore Chile's constitutional reform process. Discussants will take a step back and evaluate what happened over the last four years and what it means going forward.
Speakers: Claudia Heiss, Professor in the Faculty of Government, Head of the Undergraduate Program in Political Science, Universidad de Chile. Patricio Navia, Clinical (Full) Professor of Liberal Studies and Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, New York University. Marcela Ríos Tobar, Director for Latin America and the Caribbean, IDEA-International; Former Minister of Justice and Human Rights in Chile.
Moderated by: Steven Levitsky, Professor of Government, Harvard University; Director of the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies
Claudia Heiss is a Professor at Universidad de Chile’s Faculty of Government, head of the undergraduate program in political science. Ph.D. from the New School for Social Research, M.A. from Columbia University, Journalist from Universidad de Chile. Adjunct researcher at the Center for Social Conflict and Cohesion Studies (COES) and the Millenium Nucleus for the Study of Politics, Public Opinion and Media (MEPOP). Former president of the Chilean Political Science Association 2012-2014, council member of Comunidad Mujer and member of Women in Political Science Network (Red de Politologas). Member of the Technical Commission for the constituent process in 2019, and head of Public Hearings at the Secretariat of Public Participation in the 2023 constituent process. Author of the book "Why we need a new Constitution” (in Spanish, 2020), as well as book chapters and articles on constitutionalism and Chilean politics in Constellations, Journal of Democracy, Latin American Politics and Society, and Revista de Ciencia Politica, among others.
Patricio Navia is a Clinical (Full) Professor of Liberal Studies and Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at New York University. Navia is also a Professor of Political Science at Universidad Diego Portales in Chile. Ph.D. in Politics from New York University, an M.A. in Political Science from the University of Chicago and a B.A. in Political Sciences and Sociology from the University of Illinois at Chicago. He has been a visiting professor at Princeton University, New School University, Universidad de Salamanca, Universidad de Chile and NYU Buenos Aires, and a visiting fellow at the University of Miami. He has published scholarly articles and book chapters on democratization, electoral rules and democratic institutions in Latin America. As founding director of Observatorio Electoral at Universidad Diego Portales, he has co-edited Democracia Municipal (2012), El sismo electoral de 2009. Cambio y continuidad en las preferencias políticas de los chilenos (2010) and El genoma electoral chileno. Dibujando el mapa genético de las preferencias políticas en Chile (2009). His books Diccionario de la política chilena (with Alfredo Joignant and Francisco Javier Díaz), El díscolo. Conversaciones con Marco Enríquez-Ominami (2009), Que gane el más mejor: Mérito y Competencia en el Chile de hoy (with Eduardo Engel, 2006) and Las grandes alamedas: El Chile post Pinochet (2004) have been best sellers in Chile. He is a columnist in El Líbero in Chile, Buenos Aires Herald, and Infolatam.com. He has previously penned columns for La Tercera, Capital and Poder magazines in Chile, Perfil in Argentina.
Marcela Rios Tobar is the Director for Latin America and the Caribbean at the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (International IDEA). She served as Minister of Justice and Human Rights in Chile during the government of Gabriel Boric (2022). She holds a PhD in Political scientist from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA, an MA in Social Sciences from the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences in Mexico City (FLACSO – Mexico), and a Bachelor of Arts from York University in Toronto, Canada. She is a recognized scholar, practitioner and activist in the promotion of women´s rights and democracy. Dr. Ríos Tobar served for over 15 years at the United Nations Development Program in Chile. She has taught a different universities in her country (Universidad de Chile, Diego Portales, Universidad de Santiago), and served as board member of NGOs and think tanks. During her professional career she has led both research and development projects in the areas of democracy, electoral and constitutional building processes, human rights including children´s and indigenous rights, gender representation and women´s empowerment. She served and aided high level policy reform commissions on electoral reform (2006), anticorruption (2015), pension reform (2014). She has played a key role in her country promoting legislative reforms to strengthen democracy, particularly in the areas of representation and participation; including to foster gender equality, electoral quotas and parity, reserved seats for indigenous peoples, political party regulation and finance, electoral systems, constitutional design. She is the author of ¿Un nuevo silencio feminista? La transformación de un movimiento social en el Chile postdictadura. (Santiago, Historiográfica 2020). A series of UNDP reports on the state of democracy in Chile, as well as book chapters and articles in journals in Spanish, English and Portuguese on the feminist movement, gender quotas in Latin America and human rights.
Steven Levitsky is the David Rockefeller Professor of Latin American Studies and Professor of Government and Director of the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard. His research focuses on democratization and authoritarianism, political parties, and weak and informal institutions, with a focus on Latin America. He is co-author (with Daniel Ziblatt) of How Democracies Die, which was a New York Times Best-Seller and was published in 25 languages. He has written or edited 12 other books, including Transforming Labor-Based Parties in Latin America: Argentine Peronism in Comparative Perspective (Cambridge University Press 2003), Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes after the Cold War (with Lucan Way) (Cambridge University Press, 2010), Revolution and Dictatorship: The Violent Origins of Durable Authoritarianism (with Lucan Way) (Princeton University Press, 2022), and Tyranny of the Minority: Why American Democracy Reached the Breaking Point (with Daniel Ziblatt) (Crown Publishers, 2023). He and Lucan Way are currently working on a book on democratic resilience across the world.
This event is hybrid.
Presented in collaboration with the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs