Birds of a Feather? Elite Polarization and Ideological Cohesion in Latin America

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

Abstract

Some degree of ideological polarization of political elites, understood as the extent to which they spread towards extreme ideological preferences (ideological extremism), has been considered positive for democracy as it provides clearer “party differential” and “programmatic content” from the party supply. However, this ignores the party-level variance, or ideological spread between party elites within a certain political party (lack of party ideological cohesion), which undermines the effect of party supply differential. In this paper we identify four scenarios of polarization at the trends in country-level variation over time based on the combination of individual representatives’ polarization (within country/year variation), and representatives’ party ideological cohesion (within party variation). Among these scenarios, we observe a negative situation that combines high individual ideological polarization in the context of a lack of party ideological polarization, which contrasts, in comparison to a scenario with high individual ideological polarization but strong ideological party cohesion. In the rest of the paper, we try to identify the individual (within year/country variation), party (within party/country variation) and time variables (within country variation) that might explain the four scenarios and the trends over time in each country. This study is based in a multilevel longitudinal REWB model of the PELA Dataset that includes 18 countries, 196 parties, 8 waves, and 7,892 representatives in national parliaments.

Authors

• Mariano Torcal, Universitat Pompeu Fabra

• Emily B Carty, University of Salamanca