Juan Pablo Luna

Political Representation in Latin America: A Study of Elite-Mass Congruence in Nine Countries

The authors combine elite and mass survey data to create indicators of representation for nine nations: Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Mexico, and Uruguay. For the first time, a quantified measure of the extent to which political parties represent voters’ policy preferences in these countries is offered. The authors then examine the political, social, and economic correlates of representation. Consistent with extant literature and theory, they find that party system institutionalization and socioeconomic development are positively related to representation. On the other hand, drastic liberalization efforts seem to be associated with lower levels of representation. Furthermore, the authors find that leftist parties contribute to the representative structures of political systems. They also find that perceptions of fraud in an electoral system are correlated at a fairly high level with the indicator of representation: Citizens’ subjective perceptions of a system are consistent with its reality.

Programmatic structuration and democratic performance

After empirically documenting the varying degrees to which Latin American party systems were programmatically structured in the late 1990s, our study has explained the observed cross-national pattern with a theory of programmatic alignments that emphasizes long-term investments in the development of partisan competition. Beyond this contribution to the research field on parties and party systems, our results gain significance for the comparative study of political systems if they also speak to questions of democratic performance and political economy. Do patterns of programmatic party structuring leave imprints on the democratic process, on political performance, and on the evaluation of democracy? If so, this would provide persuasive evidence that PPS, and more specifically economic PPS, the issue dimension that has the strongest profile in the greatest number of Latin American countries, is a critical intermediary mechanism shaping the empirical quality and possibly the durability of democracy. We thus focus on economic party system structuration as the most powerful dimension of PPS in Latin America that may affect the quality (actual and perceived) and durability of democracies in the region. We address four baskets of phenomena: intensity and modes of political participation; stability and predictability of democratic competition; the quality of policy making and governance; and support for the democratic polity. Concerning the first basket, the presence of programmatic partisan alternatives in elections clarifies the stakes of democratic competition and may tell citizens that it is meaningful and relevant to participate in democratic politics, to exercise their voice, and to turn out to vote.