Electoral Geography and Segmented Representation in Urban Latin America

• In Event: Representation, Exclusion and the Consequences

Abstract

Primary and capital cities in Latin America have long been characterized by high levels of income and wealth inequality. Internally, however, their metropolitan areas exhibit stark and differentiated patterns of residential class relations and administrative and electoral divisions, which carve cities up into pockets of relative class integration and segregation. These divisions within and across urban districts have important representational and redistributive consequences in local electoral and political arenas, the most important of which may be the systematic unequal enfranchisement of certain classes of urban voters. This paper explores the effects of electoral geography—jointly, class-based distributions over space, administrative divisions placed atop this distribution, and the electoral rules aggregating votes within and across these divisions—on the representational efficiency of the urban poor. It does so by generating a spatial, panel dataset of micro-level urban segregation for a selection of Latin American cities and conducting a simulated districting analysis which compares artificial divisions within cities against observed electoral boundaries. This procedure reveals the extent to which the representational efficiency of the urban poor in particular cities is sensitive to the number and location of urban boundaries drawn therein. In addition, I analyze local election results from Lima, Peru and Santiago, Chile over the last three decades to help identify the conditions under which poor urban voters have succeeded in electing mayors and legislators intent on representing them.

Author

• Noah Schouela, University of Chicago