Abstract

YEDWAB, Benjamín Temkin  and  CISNEROS YESCAS, Gerardo Isaac. The Road to Partisan Independence: An Extension and Empirical Test of the “Running Tally” Approach in Latin America. colomb.int. [online]. 2018, n.96, pp.3-27. ISSN 0121-5612.  https://doi.org/10.7440/colombiaint96.2018.01.

This article presents an analytical extension to Fiorina’s “running tally” approach to party identification through empirical testing using Latin American data, in order to include partisan independence as a possible outcome of negative retrospective evaluations of governmental performance. Voters who evaluate government performance more negatively have a higher propensity to not identify with any political party. An instrumental probit model shows that, when controlling for the possible inverse causality between partisan independence and a negative assessment of government performance, the latter variable provides the strongest prediction of the lack of partisan identification in comparison with sociological, cultural, modernization and political-institutional variables. A theoretical explanation is offered based on the “principal-agent” model.

Keywords : Latin America; Partisan independence; Partisan identification; “running tally” approach; Fiorina; government performance; institutional trust; principal-agent model..

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