Located along the Pacific coast of South America, Chile is a politically stable, upper-middle-income nation of 18 million people. The country declared independence from Spain in 1810 but did not achieve full independence until 1818. Chile enjoyed mass electoral democracy from 1932 until 1973, when the Chilean military, under the control of General Augusto Pinochet, deposed the democratically elected Marxist government of President Salvador Allende (1970-1973). More than 3,200 people were killed or "disappeared" and some 38,000 people were imprisoned and/or tortured during Pinochet's 17-year dictatorship. Chile ultimately restored democratic governance in 1990. A center-left coalition of parties, known as the "Coalition of Parties for Democracy" ( Concertación ), governed Chile for two decades after the return to democratic rule. While the Concertación governments were significantly constrained by authoritarian provisions in the Pinochet-era constitution, they were able to enact incremental political, economic, and social reforms. They largely maintained the market-oriented economic framework they inherited from Pinochet and built upon it by negotiating a broad network of trade agreements designed to foster export-led development. Chile has implemented trade agreements with some 60 countries and now has open and reciprocal access to major consumer markets, such as China, Japan, the European Union, and the United States. The Concertación also institutionalized countercyclical fiscal policies and gradually strengthened Chile's social safety net. Sebastian Piñera of the center-right "Alliance for Chile" ( Alianza ) coalition broke the Concertación's hold on power, serving as president from 2010-2014, but his administration largely maintained the same policy mix. Analysts credit Chile's policy framework for the significant economic and social gains that the country has made over the past 25 years. Real annual economic growth has averaged over 5% since 1990, lifting Chile's gross domestic product (GDP) to $258 billion and per capita GDP to $14,480 in 2014. The percentage of Chileans living below the national poverty line fell from 39% in 1990 to 8% in 2013, and the percentage of Chileans living in extreme poverty fell from 13% to 2.5% during the same time period. Nevertheless, many Chileans have expressed discontent with the socioeconomic situation in their country. They are dissatisfied with the country's high level of inequality and believe that the country's economic gains have not translated into better living conditions and public services for most Chileans. The Gini coefficient, which is used to measure income concentration, has barely changed over the past decade, remaining near 0.53. Although it falls to 0.50 when taxes and government transfers are taken into account, it is well above the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) average of 0.31. Moreover, intergenerational social mobility is low since the education system tends to replicate existing class disparities. Chileans have also become increasingly dissatisfied with their political leaders and institutions, which have proven unable or unwilling to address these socioeconomic concerns. The country's unique binomial electoral system, a legacy of the Pinochet dictatorship, significantly limits the responsiveness of the Chilean government. Under the binomial system, deputies and senators are elected from two-member electoral districts that require a coalition to win by two-to-one margins in order to secure both seats. Since it effectively ensures a relatively equal distribution of power between the two major political coalitions regardless of voters' preferences, elections are extremely limited in their ability to produce change. Moreover, municipal and regional governments have little authority and few resources to address local concerns since political power is heavily concentrated in the central government. Given these constraints on electoral democracy, many Chileans have taken to the streets in recent years to voice their demands and hold their leaders accountable. Students calling for the government to guarantee free, high-quality education have organized the largest and most persistent of the protests. Seeking to capitalize on popular discontent and return to power, the four parties of the Concertación joined with various social movement leaders, the Communist Party, and other left-leaning groups to form the "New Majority" ( Nueva Mayoría ) coalition for Chile's 2013 general elections. The coalition selected former President Michele Bachelet (2006-2010) as its presidential candidate and pledged to implement a series of ambitious policy changes designed to reduce inequality and improve social mobility. The three pillars of Bachelet's platform were a major fiscal reform, an overhaul of the education system, and a new constitution. Bachelet easily defeated the Alianza's Evelyn Matthei, 62%-38%, in a second round runoff election. In legislative elections held concurrently with the first-round presidential vote, Bachelet's coalition secured one of the largest congressional majorities since Chile's return to democracy, with 67 of 120 seats in the Chamber of Deputies and 21 of 38 seats in the Chilean Senate (see Figure 1 ). President Bachelet has quickly moved forward with her policy agenda since assuming office for a four-year term in March 2014. Her first major initiative was a fiscal reform, which she signed into law in September 2014. It will be phased in over four years and is designed to increase revenues by 3% of GDP ($8.2 billion) by 2018. The majority of the new revenues will come from increasing the corporate tax rate from 20% to at least 25%. The reform also abolishes a business tax credit, taxes stationary sources of pollution such as fossil fuel power plants, increases taxes on tobacco and alcohol, reduces the top individual tax rate from 40% to 35%, and offers new incentives to small- and medium-size enterprises for savings and investment. Bachelet intends to use the additional revenue resulting from the fiscal reform to finance changes to Chile's education system, ensure the government budget is structurally balanced, and strengthen public health, pension, and social protection programs. Since the enactment of the fiscal reform, much of the political debate in Chile has focused on overhauling the education system. President Bachelet signed into law several initial education reforms in May 2015. Those changes, which are scheduled to take effect in March 2016, will cut off government funding to for-profit educational institutions and forbid primary and secondary schools that receive government funding from selectively admitting students. The Chilean Congress is still debating additional education reforms, including measures to strengthen teacher training, transfer school supervision from municipalities to the central government, and guarantee free post-secondary education for most students. The Bachelet Administration's 2016 budget proposal would enable 200,000 students whose families are in the bottom half of the income distribution to attend accredited nonprofit higher education institutions without paying tuition. In October 2015, President Bachelet announced a process for fulfilling her third major electoral pledge, the adoption of a new constitution. Over the course of the next year, the Bachelet Administration intends to educate citizens about the issues involved, hold a national dialogue to hear what Chileans would like to include in the constitution, and send a measure to the Chilean Congress that would authorize the next Congress—scheduled to take office in 2018—to select a mechanism for considering a new constitution. The new constitution would need to be approved by congressional supermajorities and a national referendum. The current constitution was adopted in 1980 under the Pinochet dictatorship. While many provisions have been amended since the reestablishment of democracy, some sectors of Chilean society still view it as illegitimate. Bachelet highlighted a number of potential constitutional changes in her electoral platform, including the recognition of various citizen rights and decentralization of power to regional governments. As a result of an overhaul of the electoral system that President Bachelet signed into law in April 2015, the next Chilean Congress will be elected through proportional representation. Under the new system, each of Chile's 15 regions will elect between two and five senators, and Chileans will be divided into 28 multi-member electoral districts that will elect between three and eight deputies, depending on their population. The electoral reform will increase the number of seats in the Chamber of Deputies from 120 to 155 and the number of seats in the Senate from 38 to 50. It will also require political parties to ensure that no more than 60% of their candidates are the same gender. While advocates of the previous binomial electoral system maintain that it fostered political stability and consensus-based politics, detractors note that it significantly limited the ability of Chilean citizens to enact policy changes and hold their leaders accountable. In addition to these large-scale reforms of Chile's tax, education, and political systems, Bachelet and her New Majority coalition are pushing ahead with a number of other notable policy initiatives. These include a union-empowering labor reform, the creation of a state-run pension fund to compete with private retirement plans, decriminalization of abortion in certain circumstances, and repeal of the amnesty law that shields members of the Pinochet regime and security forces who committed human rights abuses between 1973 and 1978. They have already enacted a law establishing civil unions for same-sex couples. Many of these policy changes only require simple majorities in Congress and are likely to be enacted in some form. In the aftermath of a series of scandals that have tarnished much of the Chilean political establishment over the past year, the Bachelet Administration has focused on advancing anti-corruption policies. Chilean authorities have brought charges against several business executives and politicians from the right-wing Independent Democratic Union party—part of the opposition Alianza coalition—who allegedly were involved in a scheme to illegally finance the party and evade taxation. Other corruption scandals have implicated members of the governing New Majority Coalition. One case involves Bachelet's son, who is accused of using his influence during the presidential campaign to secure a $10 million real estate loan from one of Chile's most prominent businessmen.