🔎 What was measured and how:
This study applies joint scaling methods to comparable items from three large-scale surveys to place voters, parties, and politicians from multiple Latin American countries onto a single, common ideological space. The common-space approach enables direct comparison of political actors across disparate surveys and national contexts.
📊 How the common space was built:
- Joint scaling techniques were used on similar survey items drawn from three large-scale cross-national surveys.
- The scaling locates voters, parties, and political leaders together on one ideological dimension, allowing cross-country comparison.
- Country coverage includes multiple Latin American cases, with specific analysis highlighting Brazil, Mexico, and Peru.
📈 Key findings:
- Ideology is a significant determinant of vote choice across Latin America.
- The electoral success of leftist leaders corresponds to the preferences of the voters who support them — leftist victories reflect voter views rather than a mere elite takeover.
- Parties and leaders form three distinct clusters on the common scale: a left cluster, a center cluster, and a right cluster.
- Legislators in Brazil, Mexico, and Peru are generally positioned to the left of their national electorates, indicating a leftward tilt among legislators relative to voters.
- The observed ideological drift of legislators, however, is not large enough to substantiate the claim that a disconnect between voters and politicians explains the success of leftist presidents in these countries.
🔍 Why this matters:
- Using a common-space scale is crucial for valid comparisons of ideology and representation across countries and surveys.
- Findings challenge interpretations that attribute leftist presidential success to elite-voter disconnect and call into question recent studies of Latin American politics that do not adequately account for cross-survey comparability.
