Party System Responsiveness and Left-Wing Populist Success in Latin America

This paper sets out to explain the highly uneven breakthrough of the populist radical left in Latin America since the late 1990s. I argue that populist anti-establishment mobilization falls on fruitful ground where party systems do not adequately represent citizen preferences. This is a necessary, though not a sufficient condition for populist success. Combining data on party positions with mass-level surveys for three cases of populist success and three cases of failure, I determine the relevant dimensions of political conflict in each country, and then analyze how well parties represent voters along these dimensions. At the party level, I use data from the Salamanca Parliamentary Elites Surveys (PELA) and from the Brazilian Legislative Surveys. Whereas the state-market dimension uniformly structures party competition across cases, the analysis of the dimensionality of political conflict also shows that regime divides encompassing judgments of past military dictatorships play an important role in some countries. I first locate parties and voters on these dimensions by drawing on multiple issue items in the elite and mass surveys, allowing me to operationalize latent dimensions that can be compared across the party and voter levels. At the voter level, I rely on the World Values Survey (WVS) and the Latinobarómetro. To measure party system responsiveness, I use an innovative measure based on ordered logit regressions to determine how well individuals’ policy preferences explain the policy position of their preferred party. This results in a measure of congruence that can be compared across competitive dimensions, countries, and time. The paper shows that party systems in Venezuela, Bolivia, and Ecuador lacked responsiveness in the mid-1990s, prior to populists’ successful bids for the presidency. In Uruguay and Chile, and to a lesser degree in Brazil, on the other hand, the close correspondence between voter preferences and party positions along the economic and political regime divides explains the lack of success of new populist actors. Data from the mid-2000s demonstrates that the differences between these two groups of countries persist, and testifies to a persistent lack of political space for the populist left in Chile, Uruguay and Brazil. At a more explorative level, I also assess to which degree the populist left has altered representation in Venezuela, Ecuador, and Bolivia. Overall, the results underscore that the quality of representation is crucial in determining the chances of success that populist anti-establishment actors face.