Cultural Battles and/or Distributive Conflicts? Unpacking the Processes of Polarization in Latin America

GABRIEL KESSLER; GABRIEL VOMMARO

Conferencia; REPAL Red para el Estudio de Economia Política en América Latina; 2022

Studies on political preferences and vote in Latin America historically emphasized the weight of socio-economic factors. In contrast, American literature on polarization focused on the strength of cultural and moral factors. Latin America is currently undergoing a process of polarization in many countries. How do economic-distributive and cultural-moral factors play a role in the current polarization scenarios? In this paper we show, first, that the general process of secularization is widespread in most of the countries studied, although resilient and very active conservative segments persist. Second, that cultural-moral issues acquire salience in polarized conflicts by virtue of the relationship between the acceleration of changes in positions on cultural issues (accelerated secularization) and the influence of variables associated with the politicization of these issues: ideology and religion. Third, economic-distributive issues continue to structure political preferences and remain as an arena of polarization in Latin America, although positions in this field are less consistent and correlate more with class than with ideology. Our paper studies the cases of Argentina, Brazil, Colombia and Mexico, which account for 80% of the continent's population. It is based on an analysis of the historical series (from the 1980s to the present) of the World Values Survey and incorporates data from a comparative study based on focus groups.