Social Inequalities, Identity, and the Structure of Political Cleavages in Argentina, Chile, Costa Rica, Colombia, Mexico, and Peru, 1952–2019

Abstract

This paper combines electoral surveys to analyze the transformation of the structure of political cleavages in Argentina, Chile, Costa Rica, Colombia, Mexico and Peru over the last decades. We document that Latin American countries are characterized by personalist leaderships (e.g., Fujimori in Peru, Uribe in Colombia) and important historical cleavages (e.g., anti vs. pro-PLN in Costa Rica) that blur class-based voting patterns and have led in some cases to the emergence of competing pro-poor and ethnic-based competing coalitions (e.g., PRN-PLN in Costa Rica, Fujimori-Humala in Peru) over the last decades. The party systems of Costa Rica, Colombia and Peru have thus generated volatile political socio-economic cleavages, while in the more institutionalized party systems of Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Mexico they have been less volatile. *Oscar Barrera (World Inequality Lab): odbarrera@gmail.com; Ana Leiva (University of Oslo, UiO): leiva.vernengo@econ.uio.no; Clara Martínez-Toledano (Imperial College London, World Inequality Lab): c.martinez-toledano@imperial.ac.uk; Álvaro Zúñiga-Cordero (Paris School of Economics, World Inequality Lab): a.zuniga-cordero@psemail.eu. We are grateful to Lavih Abraham, Ronald Alfaro-Redondo, María Julia Blanco, Francesco Bogliacino, Nicolás Dvoskin, Ignacio Flores, Gustavo García, Amory Gethin, Kyong Mazaro and Thomas Piketty for their useful advice.