Latin American Congruence. An Analysis in Three Political Representation Levels: Elites, Citizens and Government Programs.

Political congruence allows us to examine the extent to representatives’ stances reflects citizens preferences (España-Nájera and Martínez Rosón, 2020). The works about political congruence in Latin America are multiple (Luna and Zechmeister, 2005; Siavelis, 2009; Otero Felipe and Rodríguez Zepeda, 2010; Morales, 2014; Buquet and Selios, 2017; Lupu and Warner, 2017; Rodríguez Zepeda, 2017; España-Nájera y Martínez Rosón, 2020). Nevertheless, the analysis of these studies has focused in the comparation between elites and citizenry surveys without take into consideration government programs as an element to understand political congruence (Lehmann and Schultze, 2012; Werner, 2019). Government programs are official texts that express party political positions in every election, which offers to citizens different models of public policies, in order to win the elections (Alonso, Volkens y Gómez, 2012; D’Alessandro, 2013; Alcántara y Cabezas, 2013). In this way, programmatic positions that parties offer in government programs should be in tune with political positions of representatives and voters. The goal of this work is to determinate programmatic congruence of parties from four different countries: Mexico, Chile, Argentina and Brazil, through a triangulation of three levels of representation -citizens, legislators and government programs-, using LAPOP (Vanderbilt University), PELA (University of Salamanca) and MARPOR (WZB Berlin Social Science Centre) database, respectively. Analysis period takes from 2008 to 2018, in order to observe possible changes in congruence throughout time.