Ideología y votación legislativa en América Latina(2006-2019)

Abstract

To what extent can political ideology determine the roll-call voting of representatives in Latin America? This research aims to understand the decision-making mechanisms employed by legislators in seven Latin American countries (Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico, Peru and Uruguay) when voting in their respective parliaments. In open dialogue with studies on legislative voting focused on the influence of political parties, voters, or the rules of the game and institutions, this work attempts to understand how the ideological positions of each legislator interact with those at the time of making a voting decision in the plenary when dealing with various issues. Incorporating contributions from political psychology, two underlying dimensions of political ideology are taken into account: openness to change (conservatism-progressivism) and tolerance to inequality (state-market). In this fashion, votes are collected on bills related to moral and economic issues, respectively. As independent variables, the ideological position in both dimensions and on the left-right scale, indicators of partisan unity and indicators of electoral connection and other control variables are taken into account. The influence of each of the independent variables on voting is estimated by means of multilevel logistic regression procedures (N=1261 for economic voting and N=1320 for value voting). A contribution of this research is to process the bills separately according to their belonging to the aforementioned ideological dimensions, since it is possible to find elements of specific decision schemes of legislators, refining the advances of previous research. In this research, the individual perspective on elites is complemented with the comparative perspective by integrating legislatures from different countries. This comparison allows us to understand how and to what extent individual decision-making schemes are marked by the different political contexts, and how much commonality there is in such schemes for any Latin American legislator. The results show that, controlling for the influence of political parties, which is still present, legislators apply different decision schemes depending on whether they are voting on securities or other bills. When voting on state intervention issues, legislators show a slight inclination toward following district preferences. However, on values issues, both the district's influence and their own ideological positions stand out.