The degree to which party systems are ideologically and programmatically structured is central to democracy. This article analyzes differences in the extent and nature of programmatic structuration in Latin America and Europe, using a new original data source, the Chapel Hill Expert Survey-Latin America (CHES-LA), in combination with the long-standing CHES-Europe. First, we demonstrate the reliability of CHES-LA in relation to CHES-Europe, and substantiate its validity by comparing it to other expert, elite and party manifesto surveys in Latin America. Using confirmatory factor analysis, we then show that while party system structuration in Latin America is somewhat lower than in Europe, it is also of a decisively different nature. In Latin America economic and socio-cultural policy positions are largely captured in a single overlapping dimension; in Europe, by contrast, competition occurs overwhelmingly along two dimensions, each with distinct clusters of policy positions.

This article analyses how religious orientations and ideological preferences have coevolved in Chilean society between 1998 and 2014. On the basis of the premise that people experience religion heterogeneously, we develop four hypotheses that describe possible changes in the association between these two variables. Using data from yearly national probability surveys and multinomial regression models, we obtain two general results. First, we observe a general process of political "dealignment," whereby the proportion of the population, religious and irreligious, that ceases to identify with ideological positions strongly increases. Second, the magnitude of this dealignment is moderated by religious denomination and frequency of church attendance. Irreligious people have ceased to identify with ideological positions at higher rates than Evangelicals and Catholics, whereas frequently attending Catholics have become more reluctant than nonattending Catholics to abandon their traditional right-wing preferences. These results imply that as Catholics have reduced their size in the population, they have also become more politically heterogeneous.

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Between 1990 and 2018 Chile experienced one of Latin America’s most dramatic declines in party identification, from 80% in the early 1990s to under 20% in 2016. This decline seems puzzling given a highly institutionalized and programmatic party system, and low levels of ideological convergence. This paper argues that, to a large extent, the decrease in partisanship can be understood as a consequence of the erosion of the main political cleavage that articulated the political landscape throughout this period: the dissolution of the conflict between the supporters of the previous military regime (1973–1990) and the advocates of democracy. Because this conflict was the key driver of political identities following the dictatorship, as it faded overtime, particularly after conservative parties distanced themselves from the military regime for electoral reasons, partisans lost an important reason to feel attached to political parties. More broadly, the paper argues that unless political identities are continually reinforced by political actors, they are unlikely to remain stable sources of identification.

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