In Chile, there has recently been a debate about the size of parliamentary allowances in relation to the national salary levels and other equivalent activities.
In the context of this debate, a group of representatives introduced a bill to reduce the parliamentary allowance, while the presidents of both chambers proposed freezing allowances for a period of four years. This initiative was accepted by the Executive Branch and incorporated into the 2016 Budget Law.
As a contribution to this discussion, the Bicameral Commission on Transparency requested from the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), within the framework of the project “Strengthening Ethics and Transparency in the National Congress,” a comparative analysis of parliamentary salaries and allowances, contextualized in relation to per capita income and the salaries of other authorities in the country.
The information contained in this report comes from two sources: (1) data actively published on the websites of other parliaments around the world, and (2) information provided by various UNDP Country Offices that have projects with their respective legislative branches.
Since not all legislative branches provide updated information on the salaries (per diems) of their respective legislators, and since there is no database from any international organization that provides this data, the evidence presented in this document is not exhaustive. However, its coverage is sufficiently extensive to shed light on Chile’s relative position in the international context.
For the purposes of this document, the parliamentary per diem refers exclusively to gross salary; that is, it does not consider allowances associated with the position or deductions for social security or other laws. For data comparability, the amounts of parliamentary per diems and allowances presented in the graphs were converted into dollars adjusted for purchasing power parity (PPP). Since there is insufficient information from other countries regarding Senate per diems and allowances, this study covers only per diems and allowances for deputies.
Finally, it is important to mention that allowances are more susceptible to comparison than allocations. Differences in the structure and functioning of the various legislative branches, as well as the mandates and responsibilities of legislators, also entail fundamental distinctions in the ways in which resources are allocated.
Parliamentary versus presidential systems, types of electoral systems that imply different logics of relationships between voters and representatives (proportional or majoritarian representation), and types of voting and list voting (open and personalized versus closed and list voting, for example), in addition to organic laws, resource allocation and control mechanisms, among other factors, impact the existence or absence of allocations and the way in which they are distributed. In many congresses, for example, allocations are not given to individual legislators; instead, all expenses of the legislative function are covered corporately or allocated by legislative groups.
Publishing: Programa de las Naciones Unidas para el Desarrollo – PNDU | Year: 2016 | Pages: 14 | Download PDF