Who represents? Political parties and other types of candidacies for municipal executives in Latin America

Latin American countries allow the political participation of different types of political organizations and candidacies (quasi)independents in local elections. Over the the last decades the reforms have tended to open local competition electoral spaces, allowing a greater presence of candidacies not partisan and together with the decentralization reforms contributed to the disconnection of the dynamics of competition politics among those of the political system. Thus, we are interested in answering to what extent are you non-partisan candidacies control the mayoralties in the countries Latin Americans? The aim of this paper is to explore the presence of mayors of political parties against alternative candidacies and its relationship with national legislation on the type of electoral candidacies allowed in each country. the findings show that while there is much variation between countries, and the mayors belonging to national political parties (or to coalitions around them continent) are the most common. This shows that the predominance of new actors is not albeit as broad as the literature suggests. However, reviewing the secondary literature on national cases, the paper suggests that the perceived crisis of representation is due to the characteristics of these mayors who in many cases are people alien to politics, without much relationship with the parties and where the latter are characterized by few relationships between levels within the same party organizations. This reinforces the personalization of local politics and accentuates the problems of political representation, channeling of citizen demands and within the coordination of political systems. the investigation is based on the review of legal frameworks on recognition of candidacies and electoral results in the last elections municipalities in 15 Latin American countries. The evidence comes from complementary secondary literature and review newspaper on the importance and nature of the candidacies local.