1 Claims of Ownership, Claims of Dignity: Moral Narratives on the Right to Housing in Chile’s Constitutional Referendum Raimundo Frei Universidad Diego Portales Rodrigo Cordero Universidad Diego Portales Benjamín Lang Universidad Diego Portales Juan Rozas Centro de Estudios Públicos Juan Pablo Rodríguez Universidad Católica Silva Henríquez Abstract In September 2022, Chileans overwhelmingly rejected the draft proposal of a new constitution, intended to replace the contentious socio-legal order inherited from Pinochet’s dictatorship. Existing explanations attribute the failure to a mixture of ill-designed procedures, political dynamics, and ideological distortions and fake news. However, we argue for a different interpretation, emphasizing the collision of normative worlds in the struggle for demarcating rights. Through a narrative analysis of social media stories during the referendum campaign, we investigate the formation of distinct moral economies around the constitutional debate on the right to housing. These narratives reveal a deep tension between divergent right claims, one anchored in the value of “ownership” and the other in the value of “dignity”. Within these almost unbridgeable normative universes, the concept of private property becomes a focal point condensing meanings and evaluations across all narratives. It conveys the value of personal effort to become a homeowner and, simultaneously, the collective aspiration for access to decent and dignified housing. While not inherently incompatible, these narratives evolved into polarizing channels through which property ends up being the defining moral boundary that underlies the stories shaping Chile's constitutional struggle over rights. Keywords: moral economy, narratives, homeownership, rights, constitutional referendum, Chile.