Electoral resilience of Latin American presidents after the crisis of 2008 and the ebb of the pink tide

Abstract

Introduction: The goal of this article is to explain Latin American presidents' capacity to survive electorally in conditions of political and economic instability. Materials and Methods: I tested three hypotheses. Presidents have higher capacity of surviving when: 1-they control the Legislative Power; 2-they control the civil society, and 3-they are aligned to the radical left. All the variables used in this article are binary and the methodology applied was the Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA). Results: On the one hand, my analysis shows that none of the independent variables are, by itself, either a sufficient or a necessary condition for the electoral survival of Latin American presidents. On the other hand, they show that controlling the Legislative Power and the civil society promotes the survival of presidents identified with any ideology, and that radical leftist presidents survive even when those controls are absent. Discussion: These results help to explain a ringing fact of the Latin American political conjuncture in the post-global crisis of 2008: the strong resilience of some presidents in highly adverse conditions. Whereas alternation in power occurred in several countries ruled by the same party for more than a decade, in others, mechanisms of electoral accountability seem to have failed to promote changes in government.