Class and Material Goods

• In Event: How do Latin Americans Vote?

Abstract

Our analysis establishes the limited degree to which five different socioeconomic variables – three of them referring to a voter’s location in the class structure and the other two tapping more directly the dimension of material comfort – influence vote intention across the whole Latin American region. This broad approach is particularly useful since most of the extant literature has tended to focus on a more limited number of socioeconomic variables and to rely on case studies. Generally speaking, in terms of their overall contribution to a vote choice model, socioeconomic cleavages do not seem to matter much to presidential voting behavior in Latin America according to our analysis. That said, three of the five socioeconomic variables examined in this study appear to drive voting intentions to some extent: educational attainment, unemployment status, and property. This seems to be especially true in four of the 18 countries: Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, and Venezuela. The latter two countries particularly stand out since they are the only ones for which we find a significant relationship between presidential support and all five of our socioeconomic indicators. These main findings suggest that the patterns of class voting in contemporary Latin America are related in good part to the emergence of a strong and viable political left that has been able to politicize class issues and mobilize significant support from the most disadvantaged groups of society – the less educated, the unemployed, and the poor. We finally show that the impact of clientelism on voters’ decision making remains limited.

Author

• Eric Belanger, McGill University