Does the economy matter? Assessing electoral behavior in Latin America.

MARÍA CELESTE RATTO

Barcelona, España

Conferencia; 2nd ECPR Graduate Conference (European Consortium of Political Research); 2008

European Consortium of Political Research

ABSTRACTThe purpose of this paper is to assess the electoral behaviour of Latin American citizens in 1996 and 2000. The main question is whether the perception of the economic situation is having in mind when citizens vote. In this paper I argue that citizens act punishing and rewarding rulers by the means of the vote. To achieve such aims statistical techniques will be selected according with the dependent variable, such as crosstabs and simple logistic regression analyses. Firstly, I will test the existence of economic voting as an average tendency of population using pooled data from 16 Latin-American countries. Secondly, I will assess the deviations by country of this average tendency. The Public Opinion Survey of Latinobarometer will be used. This made it possible to control the comparability of data across countries. The results support the economic voting approach and the accountability theory as well. A logistic regression analyses was performed and the existence of a clear pattern of economic voting across years was demonstrated. The outcomes also contribute to understand the existence of one aspect of accountability mechanism; it is the vote as control. The results suggest that those Latin-American citizens with better perception of the economy increase their probability to vote for the incumbent more than those citizens with worse perceptions of the economy. KEY WORDS: Economic voting, Accountability, Latin-AmericaPaper to be delivered in 2nd Graduate Conference of European Consortium of Political Research (ECPR). 25-27 of August 2008. University of Barcelona, Spain.