Elite Polarization and Demographic-Based Electoral Cleavages in the Americas

• In Event: The Contours of Political Polarization in 21st Century Latin America

Abstract

A large literature has established that electoral divisions on class, religion, and ethnic lines are weakened in advanced industrialized democracies when parties do not take ideologically distinct positions from each other (e.g. Evans 1999, Thomassen 2005, Dalton 2008, Evans and de Graaf 2013, Jansen et al. 2013, Rennwald and Evans 2014). Historically, these kinds of divisions have been weak in Latin America (e.g. Dix 1989) but recent research suggests that these kinds of cleavages do exist in the region (e.g. Carlin et al. 2015, Nadeau et al. 2017) and some emerging research suggests that, just as in the more developed democracies, these divisions are strongest in countries where parties are ideologically different from each other (e.g. Boas and Smith 2015, Morgan 2015, Bargested and Somma 2016). I add to this emerging literature by updating Singer’s (2015) measure of elite left-right polarization through 2019 and then modeling vote intentions in hemisphere-wide surveys between 1995 and 2018. In the average country, poorer voters and indigenous voters tend to support left-leaning parties and religious voters tend to support right-leaning parties. This tendency is significantly stronger, however, in countries where the parties are ideologically polarized. The importance of party strategies in shaping cleavage-based politics is a general phenomena at work in Latin America just as it is in Europe.

Author

• Matthew Singer, University of Connecticut