Columbia International Affairs Online: Working Papers

CIAO DATE: 10/2012

Elections in Latin America 2009–2011: A Comparative Analysis

Manuel Alcántara

June 2012

The Helen Kellogg Institute for International Studies

Abstract

This paper addresses from a comparative perspective the national elections (legislative and presidential) held between 2009 and 2011 in seventeen Latin American countries. There are five key issues that guide this analysis: the institutional conditions of electoral competition, the electoral offer, election results, party systems, and post-electoral executive-legislative relations. The political consequences of these electoral processes—except perhaps in the cases of Honduras and Nicaragua, where some minor negative trends have arisen—reveal a pattern of apparent normality and political alternation, with a change in the presidential elite and winning proposals that were articulated via institutions. The paper concludes by outlining how countries in the region have successfully overcome challenges of a varying nature and importance, that until recently generated a degree of uncertainty in their respective political systems. This paper is also concerned, from a temporal perspective, with some of the constants of voting behavior and party systems in the different countries of Latin America. Voter turnout, electoral volatility, the numeric format of the party system, and the ideological positioning of the political parties are indicators laid out for the last twenty years. Again, the constants are more persistent than any profound changes in these indicators.