Combining deductive and inductive elements to measure party system responsiveness in challenging contexts: an approach with evidence from Latin America

Abstract

Contexts outside the advanced developed democracies present a challenge to assessing how well party systems reflect voter preferences across over-arching policy dimensions because not all electorates readily interpret political conflict in dimensional terms. In this contribution, I advocate an approach suited for such contexts that combines deductive and inductive elements: It starts out with what observers consider the most important dividing lines in a party system, and then goes on to operationalize these dimensions in an inductive fashion by drawing on all theoretically relevant items that are available in mass and elite surveys. I devise a relative-fit measure of responsiveness that can be compared across space and time, even if positions at the elite and mass levels are measured on different scales. To illustrate the usefulness of the strategy, I show how it leads to novel contrasts in terms of programmatic responsiveness among four Latin American countries, namely, Chile, Brazil, Venezuela, and Bolivia.

Clivagens no Brasil? Um estudo longitudinal das dimensões que nos dividem

“…Essa lacuna se dá, em especial, na tentativa de mobilizar quais são as clivagens de opinião pública que divisam a sociedade brasileira. O trabalho de Bornschier (2020) O que aqui propomos é inovador no sentido de tentar verificar a presença de divisões no público no Brasil, algo não realizado, ao menos dessa forma, desde o trabalho de Moreno (2019) com dados dos anos 1990. Para isto analisamos uma vasta diversidade de issues, considerando que fatores contextuais poderiam afetar essa configuração, portanto, enquadrando este trabalho como um paper exploratório.…”

Mass–elite differences in new democracies: Tunisia as a case study (2010–2016)

“…2 Position identifies where actors, masses and elites in our case stand in relation to a particular issue, while salience estimates the importance each actor attaches to such an issue (Laver 2003: 66). In addition to new methodological approaches proposed by Bankov and Gherghina (2020) and Bornschier (2020), this article suggests an inductive approach to measuring mass-elite policy congruence by studying issue positions and issue salience of masses before turning to elites. Starting with the masses is grounded in the "delegate model" of political representation according to which political representatives should represent the views and interests of their constituency (Mill 1869;Pitkin 1967;Pettit 2009).…”