With electoral democracy becoming the dominant type of regime in Latin America, attention has shifted from the factors explaining transitions to democracy to those capable of accounting for differences in the quality of democracy. This paper focuses on the congruence of representation as a vital aspect of the quality of democracy, potentially also affecting other dimensions of democratic rule. I extend on recent work in this domain by anchoring the quantitative analysis of political representation in a historical cleavage account of party system formation. Combining the PELA-surveys of Latin American legislators with mass-level survey data, I assess the congruence of representation (1) along historically rooted conflicts and (2) along the dimensions that empirically structure the positions of legislators aggregated at the party level. Covering eleven Latin American countries at three points in time since the mid-1990s will also shed light on the consequences of the emergence of new, ideology-based parties in Brazil and Mexico, where party mobilization has traditionally been highly clientelistic.
