Description:
<jats:p>This article describes and characterizes the current state of citizen participation at the municipal level in Chile, taking as reference the law 20.500. The objective is to identify the main factors that are influencing the dynamic disparate of implementation of the law, based on a study conducted in fifty-two municipalities. It is argued that there are municipalities that meet minimum participation standards, but in the great majority it has not been gravitating. Some reasons that would be influencing this dynamic, they are the low incentives of the law to incorporate citizen participation in municipal management, the excessive dependence on the political will of mayors to initiate it, the municipal financial precariousness to sustain it. The main conclusion is that the contributions of the law to municipal participatory democracy have been low, persisting a representative local democracy of low intensity and associated with exclusively procedural aspects.</jats:p>