Jana Morgan

Partisanship During the Collapse Venezuela's Party System

Political parties are crucial for democratic politics; thus, the growing incidence of party and party system failure raises questions about the health of representative democracy the world over. This article examines the collapse of the Venezuelan party system, arguably one of the most institutionalized party systems in Latin America, by examining the individual-level basis behind the exodus of partisans from the traditional parties. Multinomial logit analysis of partisan identification in 1998, the pivotal moment of the systems complete collapse, indicates that people left the old system and began to support new parties because the traditional parties failed to incorporate and give voice to important ideas and interests in society while viable alternatives emerged to fill this void in representation. Los partidos políticos son cruciales para la democracia. Por ello, la creciente incidencia en el fracaso de partidos y sistemas de partidos en diferentes países ha generado en los últimos tiempos inquietud acerca del estado de la democracia en el mundo. A través del estudio cuantitativo de cambios individuales en la identificación y militancia partidaria, este artículo analiza el colapso en 1998 del sistema de partidos políticos en Venezuela, hasta entonces uno de los más institucionalizados de América Latina. Las conclusiones indican que 1998 constituyó un momento crítico en que una serie de venezolanos(as) decidieron abandonar los partidos tradicionales y apoyar a partidos nacientes. Ello fue el resultado de la incapacidad de Acción Democrática y COPEI de incorporar a segmentos importantes de la sociedad y dar voz a posiciones políticas e ideológicas distintas, así como de ofrecer alternativas viables para llenar ese déficit de representación.

Latin American Attitudes toward Women in Politics: The Influence of Elite Cues, Female Advancement, and Individual Characteristics

This article outlines three theoretical arguments—socialization, status discontent, and elite cues—that generate competing predictions about the way context shapes gender attitudes. Using hierarchical analysis, we assess the power of these arguments in Latin America, a region that manifests considerable variation on our central explanatory variables and thus offers important theoretical leverage. We find mens gender attitudes to be highly contingent on elite cues and susceptible to backlash effects in response to womens economic advancement. Also, where women lack national representation, distrust of government promotes support for female leadership as an alternative to the discredited (male) establishment. The analysis supports existing individual-level explanations of gender attitudes and demonstrates a connection between diffuse democratic values and gender egalitarianism. The findings suggest that recent advances for female politicians in Latin America may be susceptible to reversal, and they illuminate strategies for strengthening womens equality in the region.

Conditional Status Quo Bias and Top Income Shares: How U.S. Political Institutions Have Benefited the Rich

This article develops and tests a model of conditional status quo bias and American inequality. We find that institutional features that bias policy outcomes toward the status quo have played a central role in the path of inequality. Using time-series analysis of top income shares during the post-Depression period, we identify the Senate as a key actor in the politics of income inequality. Our findings suggest that the supermajoritarian nature of the Senate and policy stagnation, when coupled with economic and social factors that produce rising inequality, create a situation in which inequality becomes difficult to reverse.

Religious Traditionalism and Latino Politics in the United States

This article examines how and why ethnic context conditions the link between religious traditionalism and the political attitudes and behaviors of Latinos in the United States. Existing research shows that the impact of religious traditionalism on political attitudes varies by policy and religious context. Through an analysis of issue attitudes, ideology, and partisanship, we confirm this existing work and also show that religious traditionalism influences Latino political behavior differently than it influences Anglo politics. The impact of religious traditionalism is not nearly as strong among Latinos as among Anglos. To the extent that traditionalism does influence political attitudes and behavior, it generally produces greater ideological conservatism but does not translate into support for the Republican Party—the latter is quite different from its impact in the Anglo population.

Market Inequality and Redistribution in Latin America and the Caribbean

This article analyzes how politics influences Latin American and Caribbean income inequality. Most studies view the distributional process in two phases with inequality shaped first by markets and then by state redistribution. Typically, cross-national analyses of inequality limit the influence of politics to the redistributive phase. But we argue that a full understanding of how government affects inequality must also consider how politics shapes the market. While redistribution is undoubtedly an important mechanism employed by government to influence distributional outcomes, we find that inequality produced by the market is more responsive to politics than is redistribution. Left partisan power and public investment in human capital significantly reduce inequality in the market phase. In addition, social spending on human capital conditions the effect of economic growth. As human capital investment increases, growth becomes more equality enhancing, providing further evidence of the market conditioning e...

Explaining Public Attitudes toward Fighting Inequality in Latin America

This paper uses the 2008 Americas Barometer survey data from 22 countries to explore the factors that shape Latin American attitudes about the role of the state in reducing inequality. Using multilevel analysis to properly model both the individualand country-level predictors of these attitudes, we find that traditional explanations of public attitudes about government’s redistributive role also carry weight in Latin America. Economic evaluations, personal wealth, trust in government, and assessments of government performance are each associated in predictable ways with attitudes about redistribution. But the analysis also identifies factors that have been overlooked in previous research on the state’s role in combating inequality, which has been primarily conducted in the context of the developed world. Namely, we find that Latin Americans appropriately view crime and inequality as interrelated, and as their perceptions of crime as a problem increase so does their support for government efforts to reduce inequality. This relationship is particularly important in poorer countries where inequality and poverty are widespread social ills. The analysis suggests that in the Latin American context it is appropriate to view pursuing anticrime and anti-inequality policies as compatible rather than competing goals.

Trust in government institutions: The effects of performance and participation in the Dominican Republic and Haiti

This article analyzes theories of institutional trust in Haiti and the Dominican Republic, two developing countries that have shared some historical legacies but currently manifest divergent economic and political trajectories. The evidence confirms that conventional theories emphasizing participation and government performance help us understand institutional trust in both countries. In addition, the analysis emphasizes the analytical leverage gained by exploring the extent to which different facets of engagement have divergent effects on institutional trust. The findings build upon previous research to underscore the importance of considering how context shapes the precise ways in which performance and engagement influence institutional trust, particularly when analyzing the developing world.

Social Patterns of Inequality, Partisan Competition, and Latin American Support for Redistribution

This article argues that social patterns of inequality and structures of partisan competition play central roles in shaping support for redistribution, offering three important insights concerning redistribution attitude formation. First, pronounced income disparities between ethnic/racial groups reduce support for redistribution. Second, for members of marginalized ethnic groups, entrenched discrimination reflected in large between-group inequalities provokes skepticism regarding state redistributive efforts, undermining their generally favorable attitudes toward redistribution. Third, when party systems feature programmatic competition around distributional issues, citizens are more likely to view government redistribution favorably, particularly where meaningful left options are present, while in systems without programmatic parties advocating pro-poor policy, support for redistribution is weaker. The results based on multilevel analysis of survey data from 18 Latin American countries suggest that building political support for redistribution is more difficult when economic and ethnic inequalities overlap and when party systems lack programmatic appeals emphasizing distributive issues.

Market Conditioning, Redistribution and Income Inequality in Latin America and the Caribbean

This article analyzes Latin American and Caribbean income inequality, making three important contributions. First, we show that politics not only shapes redistribution, but also affects inequality produced by the market, with much of the effect occurring through the market conditioning mechanism. Second, multiple facets of politics impact inequality, including partisan power, social spending, and regime type. Third, politics shapes how economic conditions influence inequality. Specifically, economic growth is equity-enhancing where social spending is high, but equity-reducing where such spending is low. We reach these conclusions based on a time series cross sectional analysis of nearly 200 country-years from 19 Latin American and Caribbean countries.