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Stability of Pre-Electoral Coalitions in Latin America

Comparative Politics
Latin America
Political Parties
Coalition
José Zurita-Tapia
Universitetet i Bergen
José Zurita-Tapia
Universitetet i Bergen

Abstract

Latin American multiparty politics provides voters with many options to choose from, especially when it comes to presidential elections. In this sense, and closely linked to the collapse of the party system across Latin America, coalition politics -especially at the electoral level- remains an important issue. To solve this issue, parties under certain circumstances, engage in presidential pre-electoral coalitions to combine efforts towards one common goal: to win the presidency while guaranteeing political representation. Despite the extant literature and research on pre-electoral coalition formation in Latin America, the question of why some, but not other, pre-electoral coalitions persist over time remains unanswered. In this research, I analyse nine Latin American countries since their transition to democracy as part of the third wave of democratisation until 2022. As shown in previous research on pre-electoral coalition formation, I expect factors such as party size, party ideology and previous interactions to be statistically significant when explaining the stability of pre-electoral coalitions. To do so, I perform a series of logistic regression analyses with random intercepts at the election level. These analyses prove that party ideology and previous interactions have a significant statistical effect when explaining why some, but not other, pre-electoral coalitions persist over time. The results prove to remain consistent even after introducing a series of control variables Overall, the key takeaway of this research is that previous interactions among parties, especially the existence of party conflict while in government, affect the strategy of parties when it comes to renewing or dissolving the coalition for the next electoral cycle.