Rendición de cuentas en las democracias en desarrollo: el votante latinoamericano

Abstract

We now know a good deal about economic voting, but that knowledge comes mostly from research on high income democracies, such as those in North America and Western Europe. Of course, there are serious relevant studies on low income democracies, but they are largely of single country design, frequently employing aggregate data. Multinational, individual level survey designs are all but non existent. Here we examine a 13 nation pool of current Latin American voting surveys. From estimation of a fully specified, and vigorously challenged, voting model, we conclude there are general, and rather strong, sociotropic retrospective economic voting effects. This finding is of normative, as well as scientific importance, indicating that governments in these low income democracies cannot escape electoral sanction for the delivery of poor economic performance.