Holding the government accountable A Comparative Study of Economic Voting across institutional contexts in Latin America

MARÍA CELESTE RATTO

Santiago

Congreso; VI Congreso Latinoamericano de la Asociación Mundial Para la Investigación en Opinión Pública (WAPOR); 2014

Asociación Mundial Para la Investigación en Opinión Pública (WAPOR-Latinoamérica)/ Universidad Diego Portales

Numerous economic reforms were implemented in many Latin American countries during the 1990s. The consequences of these reforms were: increase in unemployment, poverty and stagnation of the social budget. In face of these negative results, the punishment at the polls of those politicians that had implemented such reforms was predicted. Oddly enough, many of the presidents who implemented the reforms were reelected. What are the factors then that account for the paradoxical electoral behavior of 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.