The Latin American Left's Mandate: Free-Market Policies and Issue Voting in New Democracies

Abstract

The rise of the left across Latin America is one of the most striking electoral events to occur in new democracies during the last decade. Current work argues either that the left's electoral success stems from a thoroughgoing rejection of free-market policies by voters or that electorates have sought to punish poorly performing right-wing incumbents. Whether the new left has a policy or performance mandate has implications for the type of policies it may pursue in power and the voting behavior of Latin American electorates. Using a new measure of voter ideology called vote-revealed leftism (VRL) and a time-series cross-sectional analysis of aggregate public opinion indicators generated from mass surveys of eighteen countries over thirteen years, the authors show that the left has a clear economic policy mandate but that this mandate is much more moderate than many observers might expect. In contrast to the generalized view that new democracies are of low quality, the authors reach the more optimistic conclusion that wellreasoned voting on economic policy issues and electoral mandates are now relevant features of politics in Latin America.

Fighting Past Economic Wars: Crisis and Austerity in Latin America

“…On one side of these debates, scholars contend that economic integration (Rudra 2002), global markets (Mahon 1996;Mosley 2000;Wibbels, 2006;Kaplan and Thomsson 2017), and international institutions (Thacker 1999;Vreeland 2003;Winters 2010;Dietrich 2013) have contributed to a retrenchment of Keynesian-style countercyclical fiscal policies and social safety nets. In support of this view, scholars find that a variety of factors, including a weak labor movement (Roberts 2002), party-brand dilution (Lupu 2014), strong business interests (Thacker 2000;Schneider 2004;Fairfield 2010), centrist and noneconomic voters (Baker and Greene 2011;Hellwig 2014), and reform-seeking politicians (Corrales 2000) helped facilitate a broad-based acceptance of this neoliberal consensus (Stokes 2001;Murillo 2002;Levitsky 2003). Other scholars, however, find that neoliberal reforms have not been uniform.…”

Oversized Government Coalitions in Latin America

“…Despite changes in some coefficients, the principal findings persisted. Second, given that the criteria utilized to classify the parties on an ideological scale, taken from Coppedge (1997), could contain measurement errors, I reassessed model 01 using another ideological classification, taken from Baker and Greene (2011), which updates and expands Coppedge's (1997) original classification (the Pearson correlation coefficient between the polarization variables in congress calculated with these different criteria is 0.84). Once again, despite some alterations, the principal findings remain evident.…”

¿Por qué la Gente Vota a la Izquierda? Clivajes, Ideología y Voto Retrospectivo en Bolivia y Uruguay en Perspectiva Comparada

“…Los trabajos empíricos cuantitativos que han intentado explicar la llegada de los gobiernos de izquierda al poder en América Latina (Debs y Helmke, 2010;Murillo, Oliveros y Vaishnav, 2010;Baker y Greene, 2011;Remmer, 2012;Blanco y Grier, 2013) han puesto a prueba, en su mayoría, los argumentos adelantados por los trabajos más cualitativos publicados entre 2005 y 2010 (Panizza, 2005;Castañeda, 2006;Cleary, 2006;Lanzaro, 2006;Lynch, 2007;Levitsky y Roberts, 2011). Sin embargo, la mayoría de estos análisis toman los gobiernos de izquierda como si fueran un fenómeno homogéneo, intentando encontrar los factores que explican su surgimiento y, a veces, el timing en los diferentes casos nacionales.…”

“…Por otro lado, aunque varios trabajos han intentado explicar la llegada de la izquierda al poder utilizando modelos de comportamiento electoral con datos agregados (Murillo, Oliveros y Vaishnav, 2010;Debs y Helmke, 2010;Baker y Greene, 2011;Remmer, 2012;Blanco y Grier, 2013), pocas investigaciones se han centrado en las bases de apoyo de estos gobiernos y las razones del voto a nivel individual 1 . Tampoco se han explorado las razones de la reelección de estos gobiernos y las lógi-cas a las que responde a nivel individual y el tipo de vínculo entre los votantes y los representantes 2 .…”