The Electoral Success of the Left in Latin America: Is There Any Room for Spatial Models of Voting?

Abstract

Why have moderate electorates elected and reelected leftist governments in Latin America over the last twenty years? Scholars who rely on the classic Downsian logic of the median voter theorem have observed a process of ideological moderation among the most salient left-wing parties in the region. However, there have been no systematic attempts to evaluate the moderation thesis at the comparative level, either across Latin America or within cases over time. This article uses a directional model in the spatial modeling tradition to argue that the success of the left rests on the provision of clear leftist programmatic cues to voters. Data coming from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems for five Latin American countries during 1994 and 2014 show that left-wing parties won on left-wing platforms across the region, while an in-depth study on Brazilian elections reveals that leftist voters of the Workers’ Party in 2002 were driven by programmatic cues that largely disappeared during the 2010 elections.

Electoral volatility and political polarization in developing democracies: Evidence from Latin America, 1993–2016

“…Yet, this expectation colludes with empirical models and studies, which suggest that newcomers provide clear ideological signals away from the center or moderate positions where the median voter usually locates (Lupu 2016;Roberts 2013;Seawright 2012;Schofield and Sened 2005;Singer 2016;Zur 2021). Furthermore, anecdotal evidence from Latin America suggests that some of the most successful "newcomers" in the area have achieved substantial electoral success by locating away from the center (Moraes and Luján 2020). Among other examples, these cases include Alberto Fujimori in Perú, Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, Evo Morales in Bolivia, Rafael Correa in Ecuador, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, Nayib Bukele in El Salvador, and Andrés Manuel López Obrador in Mexico.…”

“…First, this research shows that parties in highly volatile systems have incentives to use polarization as a mobilization tool. As such, the results presented here not only allow us to better understand the behavior of parties and elites in developing democracies, but also to explain why parties and politicians make decisions that often seem at odds with the dominant prediction of the median voter theorem (Moraes and Luján 2020;Zur 2021). Second, this research sheds light on the determinants of a phenomenon that has not only increased over the past two decades in most developing democracies, but also has created instability and democratic reversals in some of those countries.…”