Murillo, Maria Victoria, Virginia Oliveros, and Milan Vaishnav. 2010. "Electoral Revolution or Democratic Alternation?" Latin American Research Review. 45 (3): 87-114.
- Introduction
- Argument: Left wave is actually just the normalization of democratic politics (87)
- electoral accountability is still the primary mechanism of controlling the executive in the region's democracies (88)
- democratic elections have allowed voters to punish bad performers
- thus the rise of the Left is a result of retrospective voting
- they use Levitsky and Roberts' definition of the left, which is based on overarching redistributive goals irrespective of the strategies pursued to achieve those goals (89)
- Arnold and Samuels (2011...in Levitsky and Roberts) note that the Left turn has not been accompanied by citizens' self-placement on ideological scales (though some authors disagree...)
- other surveys agree, as does authors data, which shows leftward shift in votes, but not a giant shift (89-90)
- thus the authors test to see if voting is related to right-leaning candidates poor performance in the economic arena during the 1990s (90)
- Explaining the rise of the Left
- their take is that the sudden "backlash" and rise of the Left is actually due to the institutionalization of democracy and electoral accountability, not a radical swing to the Left (93)
- My take: so it's not a Marxist revolution, but why does that mean it's not a backlash? or even a radical backlash?!
- Democracy
- Hypothesis 1: failure of prior economic policies and poor economic growth will increase the share of Left voting ONLY WHEN there is a right wing candidate to blame (94)
- dependent on the extent of democratic experience in each country (95)
- Socioeconomic factors
- Inequality hypotheses (2 and 3)
- greater inequality = more left votes (95), OR
- U shaped curve (Debs and Helmke 2008): same as above, but at some high point of inequality rich people start bribing poor to maintain current inequality (95-96)
- Left as a refuge from the economic insecurity of being in the global market, hypothesis 4 (96)
- Crisis of Political representation
- left-wing outsiders will benefit when crisis of representation comes under right wing leader (97)
- Empirical Model (97-100)
- Results
- high inflation under right-wing leader greatly increases likelihood of left-win (100)
- but reaction AGAINST left-wing governments in same situation is slightly stronger (101)
- but right wing governments are not necessarily rewarded for achieving growth (100-101)
- no support for income inequality arguments (101)
- no support for left-votes because of representation crisis under right government (103)
- weak/inconsistent support for globalization argument
- Conclusion
- inflation may be more visible than growth to everyday people, meaning voters may decide their vote on the former but not on the latter (106)
- strong effect of inflation and non-result by other hypotheses shows electoral accountability on economic issues is mostly at work in rise of Left
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