Accountability in Changing Scenarios: assessing the impact of electoral reforms in Latin America

• In Event: Electoral reforms and changes in party fortune: Explaining instability in Latin American elections

Abstract

The steadiness of rules is the key element to make rational calculations, but the stability of the electoral system was not the rule in Latin America (Benton 2005; Remmer 2008). Moreover, numerous political and electoral reforms were implemented in many Latin American countries during the 1990s. The accountability mechanism is likely to be affected by this changing process. The specific questions to be addressed in this paper are whether these electoral or political reforms has led to an increase or decrease of accountability, whether these changes impact on the waning of partisanship and whether parties or rather party leaders became held more or less accountable by voters. This paper argues that institutional variables condition the process of accountability. As Powell and Whitten (1993) established, political factors shape the process of how responsibilities are attributed to the government for economic outcomes. I studied how different institutional contexts affect the attribution of government’s responsibility for economic outcomes in Latin American. The research implemented the multilevel statistical technique in order to compare the performance of several contextual country variables over the economic perceptions of individuals.

Author

• María Celeste Ratto, CONICET