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Reevaluating the Role of Ideology in Chile

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 May 2021

Giancarlo Visconti Open the ORCID record for Giancarlo Visconti [Opens in a new window]
Giancarlo Visconti*
Affiliation:
Giancarlo Visconti is an assistant professor of political science at Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana, USA. [email protected].
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Abstract

Voters’ ideological stances have long been considered one of the most important factors for understanding electoral choices in Chile. In recent years, however, the literature has begun to call this premise into question, due to several changes in the Chilean political landscape: the current crisis of representation, the high programmatic congruence between the two main coalitions, the decline in the political relevance of the dictatorship, and the rise of nonprogrammatic electoral strategies. In addition to these transformations, Chile switched to voluntary voting in 2012. This article studies whether ideology still informs electoral choices in Chile in an era of voluntary voting. It implements a conjoint survey experiment in low-to-middle-income neighborhoods in Santiago, where voters would be expected to be less ideological. It shows that candidates’ ideological labels are crucial for understanding the electoral decisions of a large part of the sample, particularly among likely voters.

Keywords

Ideologypolitical behaviorelectoral choicesconjoint experimentChile
Type
Research Article
Information
Latin American Politics and Society , Volume 63 , Issue 2 , May 2021 , pp. 1 - 25
Copyright
© The Author, 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the University of Miami

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Footnotes

Conflicts of interest: I declare none.

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