This is the first of three chapters that use roll-call voting records from Senate committees to chart the ideological landscape, mapping Senators' policy positions and linking substantive policy alternatives to the ideological spectrum along which they are evaluated. These details are critical to understanding the impact of the institutional framework that governs Chile's democratic transition. As we shall see, the picture of the Concertación the emerges from the Labor Committee is consistent with the view that this left-of-center coalition of parties pursues a cohesive policy agenda: the estimated ideological positions for the four Concertación Senators who served on the Committee are very similar to one another and distinct from the positions taken by most of the opposition Senators. However, a very different picture emerges on the political right, with large differences both between the institutional Senators and the members of the RN Party, and also among the Senators within each of those groups. This is at variance with the bipolar model of the government and the opposition that many take as their starting point in analyzing the Chilean transition. The opposition's heterogeneity on labor policy needs to be built into theoretical analyses. However, these empirical assertions are not uncontroversial, and it is to the evidence supporting them that our attention now turns.

The jurisdiction of the Senate Labor and Social Provision Committee lies at the heart of the substantive issues that divide the left from the right throughout the industrialized world.