Parties and Political Inclusion: Representing Gender, Race, and Ethnic interests in Latin America

While substantial research from the U.S. and Europe points to the importance of descriptive representation and left parties for the substantive representation of women’s, ethnic and racial minority interests, there is growing research that suggests that in Latin America left parties may not be equally supportive of the interests of these different historically marginalized groups. (On Europe and the US, see for example Bratton 2002; Espírito-Santo, Freire, and Serra-Silva 2018; Hodžić and Mraović 2015; Mazur 2002; Swain 1995; Saalfeld and Bischof 2013; Wallace 2014. On Latin America, see Blofield, Ewig, and Piscopo 2017; Friedman 2009; Kampwirth 2008; Lind and Keating 2013). In this paper, I develop a theoretical framework based upon the specificities of the Latin American historical and political context for understanding why we should see different patterns of party support for women’s, compared to ethnic and racial interests in Latin America. Due to the significant overlap between race, ethnic, and redistributive interests in Latin America, we should expect left parties to be supportive of Indigenous and Afrodescendant interests. Only some women’s interests, by contrast, intersect with class-based interests, making women’s interests, on the whole, less likely to get strong support from any one ideological party grouping. Finally, Latin American parties are not always ideologically consistent on economic and social issues; they can be especially reticent to support policies such as reproductive rights, that may pose a challenge to the Catholic Church. I then test the theory with original data composed of all legislation proposed over a twenty-year period in Colombia, Ecuador and Peru. I selected these countries due to their significant Indigenous or Afrodescendant populations coupled with the variation they represent in party dynamics. The data show that in all three countries, descriptive representation is consistently important for the substantive representation of women, Indigenous peoples and Afrodescendants, but the role of left parties is very different. Indigenous and Afrodescendants benefit from the support of left parties in introducing legislation, while for women’s issues, the role of the left is only significant in one country, Colombia, and even in Colombia the effect of ideology on advancing legislation to support women is much smaller than it is for Indigenous and Afrodescendant interests. I discuss the reasons for country-level differences, but on the whole, the empirical analysis demonstrates that where identity interests and class cleavages are reinforcing, substantive representation by left parties is more likely. Moreover, certain kinds of women’s interests face greater challenges than others.