Abstract
Does structural adjustment increase party system instability in Latin America? We employ the Latin American Presidential and Legislative Elections (LAPALE) database ( http://www.lapaledata.com ) and our own original data set for structural adjustment to assess the effects of structural adjustment and other economic, social, and political variables on legislative volatility in 18 Latin American countries during the period of 1982 to 2016. The results of our study indicate that structural adjustment results in higher levels of within-system electoral volatility and support a broad version of economic voting theory. Extra-system electoral volatility is driven primarily by institutional and demographic factors. Our findings also highlight the importance of disaggregating electoral volatility as within-system volatility and extra-system volatility appear to be largely driven by different factors, or in different ways by the same factors.
Highlights
Electoral volatility is thought to reflect the level of a party system’s stability and is, a prominent topic in the comparative politics literature
Drawing upon the Latin American Presidential and Legislative Elections (LAPALE) database and our own original data set for structural adjustment, we focus on legislative volatility in 18 Latin American countries during the period of 1982 to 2016. (See Table A2 in the Appendix for the countries in the sample and the number of observed elections per country.)
When existing opposition parties provide a credible vehicle for channeling the sentiments of voters dissatisfied with the government, as opposition parties have in numerous Latin American countries, those dissatisfied voters will transfer their support to an established opposition party, giving rise to within-system volatility
Summary
Electoral volatility is thought to reflect the level of a party system’s stability and is, a prominent topic in the comparative politics literature. As Cohen et al.’s (2018) purpose was to introduce their new volatility data set (Latin American Presidential and Legislative Elections [LAPALE]), their study was limited to an examination of only inflation, growth, and nominal exchange rates; importantly, they did not study the role of structural adjustment or model other standard institutional or demographic influences They suggest that future scholars using the LAPALE data set will need to provide a comprehensive analysis of the various economic, institutional, and demographic factors associated with different types of volatility. (In contrast, Weghorst and Bernhard (2014) and Powell and Tucker (2014) find that this type of volatility is declining in Africa and post-Communist Europe, respectively.) In Latin America, Cohen et al (2018, Figure 1) provide evidence that extra-system volatility accounts for a larger share of overall volatility than within-system volatility These trends pose profound challenges for democratic governance. There remains an ongoing need to study the forces that give rise to electoral volatility
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