Baker and Greene 2011

Baker, Andy, and Kenneth G. Green. 2011. “The Latin American Left’s Mandate: Free-Market Policies and Issue Voting in New Democracies". World Politics. 63 (1): 43-77.

• Introduction
• Left Turn has been described as both a repudiation of economic POLICY, and a repudiation with economic PERFORMANCE (43)
• but if the Left came to power because of economic instability unhappiness between 1998 and 2002, then Left ha been given a PERFORMANCE mandate, not a programmatic mandate (44)
• left has only a moderate policy mandate
• Argument:
• the Left rose thanks to declining enthusiasm for market reforms, NOT by negative evaluations of previous government’s economic performance
• BUT voters policy opinions haven’t shifted radically, either
• There is now a preference for centrism:  people life free trade, but don’t like privatizations, for example
• Authors suggest there is a correspondence between public opinion (in favor of moderation) and many Left governments’ more moderate economic policies (45)
• this is a more optimistic picture, as voters are shown to be able to influence government policy
• How Sharp a Left Turn?
• Authors use a measure call “vote-revealed leftism” (VRL) which allows them to distinguish between leftist parties of different bents.  For example, Chavez’s radical party is scored as farther left than the Brazilian PT (47)
• Uses elections between 1995 and 2008 (48)
• Obviously see that voting for left has increased, not simply because of some alchemy of coalitions, etc (48)
• BUT the change in VRL is moderate, meaning the average Latin American voter moved from preferring a center-right candidate to preferring a center candidate (50)
• the left’s growing proportion of votes came at the expense of center and center-right voters, not from the right
• ALSO: the Left turn in Latin America has ONLY been a phenomenon of the PRESIDENTIAL races, not of the legislatures
• Why Has the Left Turn Occurred?
• Two scholarly trends:
• Radical policy mandate:  repudiation of market reforms (51) (Hunter 2007, Cleary 2006)
• Performance mandate:  simply democratic alternation (51) (Bruhn 2006; Haber 2005; Murillo, Oliveros, and Vaishnav 2010; Levitsky and Roberts 2011)
• But radical policy mandate problem: new leaders didn’t abandon entirely old Washington Consensus (51-52)
• ALSO: Left wave gathered force while economies were RECOVERING, not sinking, so performance mandate argument weakened as well (52)
• This article:
• Left has moderate policy mandate (52)
• citizens are moderate about views on Washington Consensus
• “Voter enthusiasm for market reforms declined moderately beginning in the late 19902 as utility prices increased (ME: due to privatizations) and the gains to consumers from trade liberalization (ME: lower prices, more goods) remained static, having accrued during the reform-initiation phase but fading from memory by the late 1990s.” (54)
• Research in public opinion finds the causal link between macroeconomic trends and support for market reforms to be modest at best (Baker 2009: Graham and Sukhtankar 2004) (54)
• Defining and Detecting Mandates
• In the 1990s voters elected statist candidates who subsequently initiated market reforms, so we cannot assume there will be policy agreement between electorates and winning candidates (55)
• The comparison focuses on aggregate-level attitudes and election outcomes across countries and over time (57)
• they test whether changes in public opinion over time leads to corresponding shifts in the ideological profile of voting behavior (56)
• If the policy mandate argument holds, then leftist candidates should be more successful and the polls in countries and in election years when market-oriented economic policies are less popular (57)
• If the performance mandate argument holds, then leftist challengers to non-leftist incumbents should be more successful in countries and election years with worse economic growth
• Measuring Mandates
• Policy mandate tests: (58)
• impact of economic policy preferences
• impact of mandate re: relations with USA
• Performance mandate tests (59)
• evaluations of general and personal economic situation
• crime (especially since right parties are usually “law and order” parties)
• perceptions of corruption
• support for mass democracy (e.g. when right candidates ruled during time of masses frustrated with current democratic process)
• a lot of these interact (60)
• test other scholars’ explanations as well:
• left should win where there has been a lot of market-driven volatility
• size of state spending (as percent of GDP)
• income inequality
• have right/other non-left parties disintegrated? i.e. no other functioning party to vote for (61)
• as democracy becomes more consolidated, people more willing to express their “true” feelings
• Determining the Latin American Left’s Mandate
• They collective electoral preferences of Latin Americans have moved left since 1995 (62)
• there is at least a strong temporal coincidence between declining enthusiasm for the market and increasing propensity to vote for the Left
• voters moved to the left after the economy started rebounding, so economic performance mandate takes a hit (62), voters likely did not vote left simply to punish poorly performing right incumbents
• many of the policy mandate variables were significant (64), including anti-Americanism
• none of the performance mandate variables were significant
• none of the “other explanations” variables were significant (68)
• The results thus far do not have any explanatory power, cannot tell why left rose in each country (69)
• When one takes Venezuela out, variation in mass support for the market explains a lot of the shift toward the Left (69, 72)
• ALSO, authors suggest: legislatures haven’t moved left because they have less to do with economic policymaking (ME: Do voters really make this distinction?!) (72)
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