Reserved Indigenous Seats and Electoral Turnout: Evidence from the Chilean Constitutional Convention

Abstract Two hypotheses are common in the literature on the electoral turnout of Indigenous people. The first is that Indigenous people vote less given their disadvantaged socioeconomic conditions. The second is that Indigenous people vote more when the alternatives on offer are relevant to them. To evaluate both perspectives, we study the election of members of a constitutional convention responsible for drafting a new Constitution 2021. For this election, 155 seats were to be distributed, 17 of which were reserved for Chile’s 10 native peoples, to whom a special ballot paper was assigned. Of registered Indigenous voters, only 22.8% voted using the Indigenous ballot, while the overall turnout stood at 43.4%. We present three findings. First, the use of the Indigenous ballot was greater in those municipalities with a larger proportion of Indigenous people, which pointed to a strong territorial determination of turnout. Second, the electoral turnout of the 10 native peoples is highly uneven, with greater participation observed in people that are less numerous. Third, although the overall electoral turnout in a municipality was lower the greater the number of its Indigenous people, the opposite occurred in Araucanía, a region with the largest proportion of Indigenous population.