The National Council for Culture and Arts (NCCA) is the public agency responsible for the implementation of cultural policies in Chile. It was created in 2003 as part of a group of public organisms designed to promote democracy in post-dictatorship Chile, and its objectives include the encouragement of citizen participation in the national culture. This paper aims to call into question the scope and limits of citizen participation in the Chilean cultural field, through a systematisation of paradigms implicitly developed by the NCCA. Those paradigms include participation on the political level, the creation of symbols, recognition of cultural manifestations and access to reception and symbolic appropriation. It identifies challenges of these paradigms regarding representation, recognition, access to creation and reception of cultural manifestations.