Representations and Emotions: Discourses of Independent Women Candidates in the Chilean Constituent Assembly

Abstract

Chile's political evolution, with a social outburst and the crisis of the traditional parties, has allowed the emergence of independent women's candidacies, thanks to the introduction of parity formulas in the election of representatives in the 2020 constituent process. This paper examines the results of one of these processes. To this end, a qualitative research design was developed in which eight non-party militant women candidates, residents of two semi-rural provinces in the Valparaíso region, were interviewed online and asked to describe their electoral experiences. The information collected was analysed through the identification of categories, according to grounded theory, and the inferential identification of latent emotions in verbal explicitness. The results showed that emotion management can be understood as a barrier to women's participation in politics. Some of the emotions described here emerged as a factor that had a decisive impact on the trajectories of female candidates in terms of continuation or abandonment of institutionalised politics. This paper shows how the subjective perspective influences the low incorporation of women in positions of public representation.