Abstract
This chapter explores whether a link exists between positions taken by elites and levels of democracy, and specifically the democratic fatigue experienced in recent years. On the one hand, we analyze the positions of political elites from each country, relying on PELA-USAL data and focusing on the ideology of legislators, the trustworthiness of elections, and opinions related to democracy as a political system: stability and satisfaction. On the other hand, we employ the V-Dem database for analysis of the relative levels of electoral, liberal, participatory, deliberative, and egalitarian democracy in Latin America. Results show that leftist elites are better for democracy than rightist ones, except in the case of egalitarian democracy, where, paradoxically, ideology is largely irrelevant; trustworthiness of elections is relevant for all democracies except the deliberative type. We also find that there are almost no democracies whose elites consider their democracy to be unstable for deliberative democracy. Satisfaction with democracy presents mixed results: only in participatory and egalitarian democracies do elites claim to be satisfied.
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Notes
- 1.
However, as of 2019, no woman was serving as president in any of these countries.
- 2.
Regardless of the fact that, in Latin America, three longstanding issues have been emblematic of political behavior, and these continue to have notable impacts on day-to-day political development in the region: conflict between the powers of the state, the role of the military, and the close presence of the United States.
- 3.
We take this term from Mair (2013). In his book, and always under the European political reality, Mair emphasizes how citizens neither trust political parties in general nor identify with any particular political party. The number of registered members has declined enormously; and the percentage of citizens who abstain from voting has increased markedly; calling into question the traditional role of parties in the transmission of citizen interests to the state; while those who continue to vote tend to change their preferences from one election to another, thus increasing volatility, with voters dropping their support for traditional parties and opting for new solutions every time.
- 4.
See Coppedge et al. (2018) for more information on the construction of these indexes.
- 5.
- 6.
Each case is coded with the two/three first letters of the country name, followed by the year when legislators were interviewed. Thus, PAN09 refers to Panama in 2009.
- 7.
Keep in mind that ideology is measured on a Left-1 to Right-10 scale; therefore, higher scores imply positions that are more rightist.
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6.7 Appendix
6.7 Appendix
1.1 6.7.1 Explained Variance and Column Contributions
Tables 6.5, 6.6, 6.7, 6.8, and 6.9 present the combination of only axes 1 and 2. Data from the remaining axes (capturing the remaining variance) is not represented due to limitations of space.
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Bohigues, A., Alcántara, M. (2020). Political Elites and Democratic Fatigue in Latin America. In: Alcántara, M., GarcĂa Montero, M., Rivas PĂ©rez, C. (eds) Politics and Political Elites in Latin America. Latin American Societies. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51584-3_6
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