Constitutional time, plebiscitary sequencing, and intertemporal legitimacy: a conceptual analysis of the Chilean case (2019–2023)

This conceptual analysis examines Chile’s 2019–2023 constitution-making cycle as a problem of constitutional time. Its objective is to clarify why a process that began with broad democratic authorization ended in two successive plebiscitary rejections of different constitutional projects. The article develops intertemporal legitimacy as a mid-range analytical category that links four moments of a constituent cycle: opening authorization, deliberative sequencing, ratification, and anticipated implementation. Methodologically, the study proceeds through conceptual reconstruction and a single-case stress test. It triangulates public normative materials, official electoral records, CEP surveys, the 2022 and 2023 draft constitutions, and recent comparative constitutional literature; it uses these materials not to estimate causal effects but to assess whether the proposed concept illuminates a recurrent sequencing problem. The Chilean case shows that legitimacy cannot be inferred from origin, participation, expertise, or content in isolation. The 2021–2022 itinerary suffered from acceleration and programmatic overload before an expanded electorate, whereas the 2023 itinerary corrected by precommitment and expertise but arrived after the constitutional promise had lost public centrality. The article concludes that constitution-making depends on the temporal congruence linking crisis, authorization, drafting, closure, and plausible implementation, and that this diagnostic insight travels to other volatile constituent processes.