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17184 results in Latin American government, politics and policy

Page 307 of 860

  • 6 - Voters’ Preferences and Parties’ Electoral Offers

  • Ernesto Calvo, University of Maryland, College Park, Maria Victoria Murillo, Columbia University, New York
  • Book:
    Non-Policy Politics
    Published online:
    25 January 2019
    Print publication:
    14 February 2019, pp 107-130

  • Summary

    This chapter focuses on the determinants of vote choice, which are crucial to assessing the heterogeneity on voters’ sensitivity to parties’ policy and non-policy offers. We provide evidence that ideological proximity, competence for managing the economy, distributive expectations, and connections to partisan networks shape electoral behavior in both countries. Subsequently, we introduce a utility function that models the weight that voters attach to the policy and non-policy determinants of their vote choice. We then present a model that estimate separate parameters for voters in each socioeconomic category. We show that richer voters care more about ideological distance in both countries, although Chilean voters allot more weight to this dimension than their Argentine counterparts. Whereas Chilean better-off voters value macroeconomic competence more than poorer voters, poorer Argentine voters care more about parties’ ability to manage the economy than their richer counterparts. Even for distributive expectations, we show different patterns across countries in terms of the weight assigned by poorer and richer voters to public-sector job expectations in their electoral decision, which are more salient for poorer Argentine voters and middle-class Chilean voters.

  • 4 - Mapping Voter Preferences in Argentina and Chile

  • Ernesto Calvo, University of Maryland, College Park, Maria Victoria Murillo, Columbia University, New York
  • Book:
    Non-Policy Politics
    Published online:
    25 January 2019
    Print publication:
    14 February 2019, pp 64-81

  • Summary

    This chapter describes the political attitudes of Argentine and Chilean voters based on the data collected in our original surveys. We provide evidence here of socioeconomic heterogeneity in voters’ policy views and perceptions of parties’ ideological positions, managerial competence, and capacity to generate expectations of targeted distribution in each country. Our survey results provide evidence of large asymmetries in the perceived non-policy endowments of Argentine parties. Argentine voters perceive the Peronists as having significant non-policy advantages in terms of macroeconomic competence and capacity to deliver selective incentives, which provides the party with opportunities not available to its rivals. More importantly, these non-policy endowments are perceived in a similar fashion irrespective of voters’ ideological position. By contrast, Chilean voters perceived the policy location and non-policy endowments of parties as intertwined, with voters on the left and right of the political spectrum perceiving parties that are ideologically closer as more competent managers of the economy, but without significant cross-party differences in non-policy endowments.

  • 10 - Non-Policy Politics and Electoral Responsiveness

  • Ernesto Calvo, University of Maryland, College Park, Maria Victoria Murillo, Columbia University, New York
  • Book:
    Non-Policy Politics
    Published online:
    25 January 2019
    Print publication:
    14 February 2019, pp 214-228

  • Summary

    Non-policy politics is critical for electoral success. Parties routinely signal managerial competence, mobilize their activists, and deliver selective incentives to win elections. Here, we illuminate our conceptualization of electoral responsiveness with empirical information about voter preferences and politicians’ strategies in Argentina and Chile to show that voters’ demands constrained politicians in the short term but that supply politics matters as well in the long term. We assume that democracies with working political parties, which allow free flows of information, generate the incentives that make vote-seeking politicians operate as our framework suggests: combining distinct strategies to attract diverse groups of voters. In doing so, we seek to bridge the divide between the literature on advanced democracies, more focused on policy and competence, and the scholarship on new democracies, more centered on targeted distribution. Our broader conceptualization of electoral responsiveness can be extended to widely different democracies, adapting the dimensions of non-policy politics used to explain the incentives generated by electoral competition on politicians as well as the categories of voters they identify for targeting their offers. We conclude by discussing the normative implications of this broader conceptualization of electoral responsiveness.

  • 7 - Party Activists and Their Conditional Effect on the Vote

  • Ernesto Calvo, University of Maryland, College Park, Maria Victoria Murillo, Columbia University, New York
  • Book:
    Non-Policy Politics
    Published online:
    25 January 2019
    Print publication:
    14 February 2019, pp 131-159

  • Summary

    This chapter test implications of our theory regarding the allocation of non-policy benefits. Partisan activists persuade voters and deliver targeted benefits providing parties with crucial resources to target individual voters with distinct policy and non-policy offers. The deployment of activists is heavily influenced by prior legacies of recruitment and specialization, since party organizations—and social relationships—take time to build and time to change. Partisan networks operate differently in Argentina than in Chile, with the former specializing on territorial activists and the latter on ideological ones. Here we focus on the conditional effect of partisan networks on both distributive expectations and ideological preferences and how these effects influence the electoral behavior of poorer and richer voters in the two countries we study. Extending the models from chapter 6, we measure the electoral benefits of expectations about targeted distribution and ideological distance conditional on network proximity, distinguishing the effects for poorer and richer voters. Our results also contribute to core-swing debate in the literature on clientelism showing that parties target distribution at core voters when they have informative partisan networks and otherwise seek to deliver to swing voters.

  • 5 - Party Organization

  • Ernesto Calvo, University of Maryland, College Park, Maria Victoria Murillo, Columbia University, New York
  • Book:
    Non-Policy Politics
    Published online:
    25 January 2019
    Print publication:
    14 February 2019, pp 82-106

  • Summary

    Partisan networks are a crucial non-policy resource granting political parties the capacity to connect with voters. Party activists serve a variety of important party functions. Party activists provide a mechanism for reaching voters and implementing the electoral strategies defined by politicians. We distinguish ideological activists specialized in policy persuasion and territorial activists dedicated to serving the wants and needs of voters in their own communities. We rely on our surveys and in-depth interviews with politicians and local campaign managers to describe the size, structure, and type of activist networks in each country, emphasizing variation across and within countries. Our measures show symmetry in network size across Chilean party organizations in contrast to the larger size of the Peronist and even Radical networks in Argentina (compared to those of newer parties). Chilean partisan networks are also more connected with ideologically akin voters and more connected to richer voters than those of the Argentine PJ and UCR.

  • 2 - A Demand-Side Model of Non-Policy Politics

  • Ernesto Calvo, University of Maryland, College Park, Maria Victoria Murillo, Columbia University, New York
  • Book:
    Non-Policy Politics
    Published online:
    25 January 2019
    Print publication:
    14 February 2019, pp 35-47

  • Summary

    This chapter presents our explanatory framework and introduces a statistical model of vote choice, with individual-level variation on policy offers and non-policy endowments. In our framework, voters assess the non-policy endowments of parties and their policy offers. Heterogeneity in the weight that voters attach to benefits results in some groups of voters providing larger electoral returns to parties. Therefore, responsiveness should be biased toward those voters that feel more intensely about distinct policy and non-policy benefits in the portfolio of parties. Furthermore, our model shows that parties with a comparative non-policy advantage will benefit from taking policy positions that are closer to the median voter whereas parties lacking such advantage should advertise more extreme policy offers. As parties are constrained by their different non-policy endowments, they will deliver different combinations of benefits to distinct groups of voters, thereby biasing electoral competition, to the benefit of more intense voters and better-endowed parties.

  • 8 - Targeting Patronage in Argentina and Chile

  • Ernesto Calvo, University of Maryland, College Park, Maria Victoria Murillo, Columbia University, New York
  • Book:
    Non-Policy Politics
    Published online:
    25 January 2019
    Print publication:
    14 February 2019, pp 160-179

  • Summary

    In this chapter, we focus on public-sector wages to measure whether wage premiums conform to the varied sensitivities of voters of different socioeconomic groups in each country. In chapter 6, we show that distributive expectations about patronage have larger electoral effects in Argentina than in Chile and that electoral sensitivity toward public jobs is higher among poorer voters in Argentina and among middle-class voters in Chile. Therefore, we expect policymakers to use public-sector employment to reward the most sensitive voters in each country. Using household income data, we analyze wage differentials between public- and private-sector jobs to identify wage premiums paid by public revenue and how are these targeted. Indeed, Argentine lower-income and lower-skilled public-sector employees receive wage premiums that are significantly larger than those received by moderate-to-high-skilled/income workers. By contrast, in Chile, medium- and high-skilled public-sector employees receive larger premium wages than those of lower-skilled workers. Moreover, when we run our analysis separating by income (and controlling for education), we also find that wage premiums are targeted to lower-income workers in Argentina but not in Chile.

  • 3 - Tracing Political Preferences and Party Organization in Argentina and Chile

  • Ernesto Calvo, University of Maryland, College Park, Maria Victoria Murillo, Columbia University, New York
  • Book:
    Non-Policy Politics
    Published online:
    25 January 2019
    Print publication:
    14 February 2019, pp 48-63

  • Summary

    We trace the origin of party organizations and voters’ political preferences in Argentina and Chile adding background information that is critical for placing our empirical cases in their historical context. Whereas in the short-run, the preferences of voters and the endowments of parties are fixed, in the long run, the historical evolution of electoral competition shapes parties’ non-policy endowments and linkages to voters. In Chile, multiparty competition generated incentives for ideological differentiation sustained by the cleavages generated by democratic transition and the electoral system. Valuable ideological shortcuts facilitated their connection to party organization and competence evaluations in the minds of voters whereas good economic performance and limits to discretionary spending maintained even competence evaluations and distributive expectations. Argentina’s catch-all parties embarked on policy switching after democratization in response to economic volatility, thereby weakening the informational value of ideological shortcuts. Because two major economic crises happened under Radical incumbents, perceptions of economic competence were biased in favor of the Peronists whereas the combination of access to subnational offices and discretionary resources granted them better distributive expectations and capacity to sustain activists’ networks.

  • 1 - Non-Policy Politics

  • Ernesto Calvo, University of Maryland, College Park, Maria Victoria Murillo, Columbia University, New York
  • Book:
    Non-Policy Politics
    Published online:
    25 January 2019
    Print publication:
    14 February 2019, pp 6-34

  • Summary

    Political parties can select the policies they offer, but have different reputations for competence, unequal capacity to mobilize activists, and different resources to deliver pork and patronage. These are crucial non-policy resources shaping their electoral success. We show how these non-policy resources also shape parties’ ideological positions and which type of electoral offers they target to poorer or richer voters. Hence, non-policy politics shapes both electoral success and which voters get what. We describe how the book assesses voters’ non-policy preferences with detailed survey and administrative data from Argentina and Chile, including a novel methodology for measuring partisan networks, and how those preferences shapes parties policy and non-policy offers. The book organization is described.

Page 307 of 860