Ryan E. Carlin

Context Counts: The Election Cycle, Development, and the Nature of Economic Voting

Economic perceptions affect incumbent support, but debate persists over whether voters focus on past or future performance and whether they view the economy in primarily sociotropic or egotropic terms. We theorize the nature of economic voting depends on the context. Evidence from 18 Latin American countries (1995–2009) suggest prospective voting predominates early in the election cycle, but retrospective voting gains traction as the incumbent’s record develops. Voters emphasize the national economy over personal finances except in the least developed countries. Thus the contexts in which voters are embedded not only affect the degree of economic voting but also its very nature.

Support for Polyarchy in the Americas

This study measures support for the basic rights, liberties, and practices associated with polyarchy in 12 Latin American democracies. Specifically, it identifies five profiles of support for polyarchy’s core values and norms—public contestation, inclusive participation, limits on executive authority, and institutional checks and balances. Although citizens who fit the polyarch profile accept all of polyarchy’s principles, those who fit one of the four mixed support profiles (power constrainer, power checker, power delegator, power restrainer) accept only some of them while rejecting other core democratic principles. Long-run factors emphasized by modernization and cultural theories (e.g., education, wealth, political engagement) are closely associated with the polyarch support profile. However, short-range performance factors (e.g., economic perceptions; crime, discrimination, and corruption victimization; voting for losing presidential candidates; presidential approval) may better explain why citizens fit one particular mixed profile over another and particularly explain willingness to delegate authority to the executive at the expense of other institutions.

Distrusting Democrats and Political Participation in New Democracies: Lessons from Chile

Distrusting democrats seek accountability and advocate reform in established democracies. Do they behave similarly in new democracies? Using AmericasBarometer survey data, cluster analysis identifies five profiles of democratic support in Chile: democrat, delegative, fair-weather, illiberal, and autocrat. Chilean distrusting democrats are more active in protest politics but less active in electoral politics than other Chileans, especially fair-weather democrats. The support profiles better predict these behaviors than the classic Linzian and Churchillian measures of democratic support. Thus, distrusting democrats in Chile only partially emulate their counterparts in established democracies, suggesting citizen-led democratic reforms in new democracies could be far more challenging.

Natural Disaster and Democratic Legitimacy The Public Opinion Consequences of Chile’s 2010 Earthquake and Tsunami

Can natural disasters undermine democratic legitimacy? This article maps a causal pathway from natural disaster damage to shifts in opinion and behavioral tendencies in less established democracies. It theorizes citizens who suffer damage in such contexts will tend toward lower evaluations of democratic institutions, lower support for democratic values and practices, and stronger dispositions toward action. These expectations are tested with national survey data collected following Chile’s 2010 earthquake and tsunami by analyzing intracountry differences in damage with matching techniques and regression analyses. Results are consistent with expectations, with important implications for Chile and other less established democracies.

Good Democrats, Bad Targets: Democratic Values and Clientelistic Vote Buying

Who do parties target for clientelistic vote buying? Existing research looks almost exclusively at individuals’ socioeconomic and, especially, electoral profiles—which parties and candidates they support, professed ideological leanings, past voting turnout, and choice. We argue party brokers also consider democratic attitudinal profiles. Specifically, they are more likely to avoid full-fledged democrats and target citizens who are ambivalent to or reject core democratic principles. We test this proposition with the 2010 Argentina AmericasBarometer. To address selection bias on observables and unobservables, respectively, we preprocess the data with entropy balancing and employ instrumental variables regression. Results from both strategies are consistent with the notion that democrats are less likely vote-buying targets than their less democratic counterparts. Effect sizes are on par with or exceed other theoretical variables, and the results are robust to a variety of checks and specifications.

Security, Clarity of Responsibility, and Presidential Approval

The importance of institutions in shaping citizens’ ability to punish or reward politicians for economic outcomes is well established. Where institutions divide authority, politicians can blame each other and citizens find it harder to assign responsibility for policy failures; where institutions clarify lines of authority, citizens can better hold politicians accountable. However, this argument assumes that citizens perceive policy responsibility as shared among political actors and this is not always the case. Looking at security policy, we argue that when policy responsibility is concentrated in a single actor the effect of institutions on blame attribution is different from what the economic voting literature predicts. Divided government in this context makes blame-shifting less effective and makes it more likely that citizens will punish incumbents. By contrast, the ability of executives to control the narrative around security failures by blaming the perpetrators, especially during unified government, can help them avoid blame.

Political Competition, Partisanship and Interpersonal Trust in Electoral Democracies

How does democratic politics inform the interdisciplinary debate on the evolution of human co-operation and the social preferences (for example, trust, altruism and reciprocity) that support it? This article advances a theory of partisan trust discrimination in electoral democracies based on social identity, cognitive heuristics and interparty competition. Evidence from behavioral experiments in eight democracies show ‘trust gaps’ between co- and rival partisans are ubiquitous, and larger than trust gaps based on the social identities that undergird the party system. A natural experiment found that partisan trust gaps in the United States disappeared immediately following the killing of Osama bin Laden. But observational data indicate that partisan trust gaps track with perceptions of party polarization in all eight cases. Finally, the effects of partisanship on trust outstrip minimal group treatments, yet minimal-group effects are on par with the effects of most treatments for ascriptive characteristics in the literature. In sum, these findings suggest political competition dramatically shapes the salience of partisanship in interpersonal trust, the foundation of co-operation.

Happy Medium, Happy Citizens: Presidential Power and Democratic Regime Support

Institutional and behavioral theories of democracy abound but rarely intersect. Do executive lawmaking power and prowess condition democratic regime support in presidential democracies? We develop theoretical expectations linking the lawmaking powers of the president and mass regime support and test them by analyzing survey data from eighteen Latin American countries over ten years. As hypothesized, results indicate that preference for, and satisfaction with, democracy is highest where presidents have moderate legislative powers and success and lowest where presidents either dominate policymaking or face gridlock. Hence, a “happy medium” of presidential power promotes the attitudinal foundations of democracy.

Public support for Latin American presidents: The cyclical model in comparative perspective

What characterizes the dynamics of presidential popularity? Research based on the United States of America finds popularity exhibits an almost law-like cyclicality over a president’s term: high post-election “honeymoon” approval rates deteriorate before experiencing an end-of-term boost as new elections approach. We contend that cyclical approval dynamics are not specific to the USA, but rather characteristic of presidential systems more generally, despite heterogeneity in their socio-economic and political contexts. Testing this proposition requires overcoming a key empirical problem: lack of comparable data. We do so by employing time-series inputs from 324 opinion surveys from a new publicly available database—the Executive Approval Database 1.0—to craft quarterly measures of popularity across 18 Latin American contemporary presidential democracies. Our analysis strongly confirms the cyclical approval model for the region. The conclusion identifies avenues for future research on the relationships across approval, presidentialism, and electoral, institutional, and socio-economic factors afforded by the new data resource we present here.