Accountability y voto económico en América Latina: Un estudio de las pautas de comportamiento electoral entre 1996 y 2004

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to assess the influence of economic voting in Latin American between 1996 and 2004. The main question is whether the perception of the economic situation is having in mind when citizens vote. In this paper I argue that citizens act punishing and rewarding rulers by the means of the vote. To achieve such aims statistical techniques will be selected according with the dependent variable, such as crosstabs and simple logistic regression analyses. Firstly, I will test the existence of economic voting as an average tendency of population using pooled data from 16 LatinAmerican countries, for 1996, 2000 and 2004 years. Secondly, I will assess the deviations by country of this average tendency. The Public Opinion Survey of Latino barometer will be used. This made it possible to control the comparability of data across countries. The results support the economic voting approach and the accountability theory as well. A logistic regression analyses was performed and the existence of a clear pattern of economic voting across years was demonstrated. The outcomes also contribute to understand the existence of one aspect of accountability mechanism; it is the vote as control. The results suggest that those Latin American citizens with better perception of the economy increase their probability to vote for the incumbent more than those citizens with worse perceptions of the economy.