Renewal of What? Measuring Latin American Elites’ Renewal Through Political Experience Indicators

GABRIEL LEVITA

Buenos Aires

Congreso; 27º Congreso Mundial de Ciencia Política; 2023

International Political Science Association

Latin American political elites’ renewal has been usually measured through legislative experience indicators such as turnover and reelection. However, the accuracy of these variables may be affected when legislative careers are unstable as it is in most Latin American countries, where party systems are less institutionalized and more volatile, and legislators’ ambitions are not mainly static. On the contrary, indicators that capture the entire political experience of legislators including positions in levels and branches beyond the national parliament are more thorough. This data is harder to gather but it ends up being a more accurate measure of elites’ renewal.Based on the PELA database, this research analyzes eighteen national single or lower chamber legislatures over almost a three-decade period constructing three different indicators of legislators’ experience and comparing them: legislative, elective, and complete amateurism. While the first is the lack of prior experience in the national parliament, the second is the absence of elective positions in legislators’ careers. When legislators have no positions at all in their records, we consider them complete amateurs. In other words, complete amateurs are a subset of elective amateurs, which are a subset of legislative amateurs. A complete amateur is inevitably an elective and a legislative as well, although being a legislative does not necessarily mean being an elective or a complete amateur.By means of a cross-country comparison and deepening into selected cases, we show that complete amateurism is a much more accurate measure of political elites’ renewal than turnover, reelection, or legislative amateurism, particularly in Argentina, Mexico, and Colombia, where a considerable part of the legislators has no record in congress in spite of having hold other positions. This way, we propose a more precise indicator that complements the manner elites’ renewal is commonly assessed contributing to understanding regional dynamics and differences between countries.