Why do party systems collapse? We know parties play a crucial role in the electoral processes of established democracies. We know much less on how this role can fade away when party systems collapse. In this paper we study the case of Chile, a country that, until a few years ago, has been cited as an example of stable and institutionalized party system. We study how the phenomenon of ‘independent’ candidates has shaken the national party system. For this we run two separate measures. First, we measure the marginal effect of ‘independent’ label, compared to other party labels in a conjoint experiment. Our findings show that candidates that are presented as independent have a significant increase in the probability of being chosen when the alternative is a candidate from a traditional party in either ends of the political spectrum. We find that the positive effect of the independent label dissipates in competition with more moderate parties. Second, we measure whether this electoral effect of party labels relates to party identification. We find that respondents show low animosity towards independent candidates and high animosity for traditional parties in the extremes of the political spectrum. Furthermore, when analysing the small population that does show a clear preference for labels, independent label is the preferred one. These findings point to the recent emergence of independent candidates as a result of negative views on parties, that do not find channelling in traditional radical parties in the left nor in the right