Partisanship, Ideology, and Representation in Latin America

Sebastián Saiegh

No 6607, IDB Publications (Working Papers) from Inter-American Development Bank

Abstract: This paper uses joint scaling methods and similar items from three large-scale surveys to place voters, parties and politicians from different Latin American countries on a common ideological space. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, the findings reveal that the "median" voter in Latin America is located to the left of the ideological spectrum, and that voter's ideological locations are highly correlated with their partisan attachments. The location of parties and leaders suggests that three distinctive clusters exist: one located at the left of the political spectrum, another at the center, and a third to the right. The results also indicate that legislators in Brazil, Chile, Mexico and Peru tend to be more "leftist" than their voters. The ideological drift, however, is not large enough to substantiate the claim that a representation gap exists in those countries.

Keywords: Ideological drift; Partisanship; Representation gap; Ideology (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C83 O54 Y80 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014-08
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://publications.iadb.org/publications/english ... in-Latin-America.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:idb:brikps:6607

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IDB Publications (Working Papers) from Inter-American Development Bank Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Felipe Herrera Library ().