Errázuriz and González

The article ran in El Mostrador, Errázuriz and González: Chile’s dilemma, and it’s about how discrimination reaches all the way to the internet.

I don’t know if you remember Citizen Pérez, a study that tested how willing members of congress were to answer, by email, the questions sent in by an ordinary citizen, Citizen Pérez.

As is publicly known, a 2001 UNDP study on new technologies included an inquiry from a fictitious citizen called Juan Pérez, who emailed questions to members of the lower house to check how far the people’s representatives had taken up technology, and how well they listened and connected with citizens through new tools. This time the researchers added variables to the exercise and made the task more complex, turning Juan Pérez into two people, now called Pedro González and José Errázuriz. The names were no accident: they were meant to tie each surname to the social and cultural meanings it carries.

The study’s director, Pedro Güell, said on a TV show that there has been progress compared with the answers obtained in 2001. Juan Pérez got replies from 9 deputies; in 2005 Pedro González got replies from 21 and José Errázuriz from 31.

Now, where there is a finding, given the debates about the cultural matrix of inequality in our country and the weak presence of a meritocratic culture, is that González got fewer replies than Errázuriz, and the replies to González were formal, unlike Errázuriz, who received a third more messages, the legislators’ cell phone numbers and even invitations to coffee.

As you can see, the gap isn’t digital, it’s cultural.