The Constitution Committee considered an agenda that included both human rights questions and other more standard legal reforms dealing with issues common to many industrialized democracies, from drug enforcement to domestic violence. Of all of the Chilean Senate's committee jurisdictions, the issue area most affected by sixteen and a half years of military rule was that of human rights. During the period of military government, a number of decree laws dramatically expanded the jurisdiction of the military courts and reduced the scope for judicial appeal. In addition, there were numerous antiterrorist measures written into decree laws which expanded the policing powers of the armed forces, including the Carbineers. Because of this, the very first legislative initiatives of the Aylwin Administration were in the ambit of human rights, with executive-sponsored bills proposed to abolish the death penalty, protect freedom of speech, and reform various statutes, such as the internal security law and the weapons control law. These were followed by later proposals from members of the legislature, mostly on the right, to restore or further strengthen the antiterrorism laws.

The committee was sufficiently active in both the human rights and social policy areas of its issue domain that separate sets of parameter estimates for each of these two issue areas can be obtained. This permits a direct test of whether both areas map into the same ideological dimension based on the estimated preferred outcomes of the four Senators who cast a substantial number of votes on both sets of issues.