Atlas Electoral Latinoamericano (review)

It happens frequently that, when traveling through Latin America, we find ourselves hard-pressed trying to sort out who is the momentary señor Presidente, is, which were the constituencies that brought her/him to power, which parties are at the helm, and which issues dominate the political discourse of the respective countries. While we can glean some information from the newspapers about the current political debate and on the achievements or the failures of the party that won the last presidential election, we are usually in a fog as to the location of the strongholds of the incumbent government and the bastions of the opposition.

To fill this information gap the Atlas Electoral Latinoamericano comes in handy. It provides a wealth of information about recent elections in twelve countries, spanning from Mexico to Argentina. The work is the product of French political scientists and Latin American co-authors for whom ideology is not the only motivator of voting decisions, but who also recognize the influence of place and locale on electoral choices. Socio-geographical traits of a population, such as education, employment, income, gender, male/female ratio, age, place of residence, or quality of life, play a decisive role in electoral decision-making, transcending- at times - ideology alone. Identifying the weight of these non-ideological variables has been hampered by the lack of suitable statistics, and thus, their role has been neglected in the analyses of Latin American elections. Most political analysts limit their discussions to national results —leading their audiences to infer a monolithic response by the national electorate – disregarding the fact that disaggregation into regions is more helpful in revealing particular demographic and socio-economic characteristics. Through the use of those regional indicators, political geographers are opening avenues of analysis that were not considered in previous studies on voters' behavior.

The Atlas is a collection of monographs on presidential and congressional contests held in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, El Salvador, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua and Peru, from 2003 through 2006. Although the snapshots are not suitable for establishing trends among voters, they are a first step in establishing tendencies in the regional support for any specific political current. Nevertheless, the large number of maps illustrating the backing of candidates or coalitions, or the rational for party alliances, and the detailed accounts of the electoral campaigns, render this volume a valuable resource for understanding the electoral dynamics and making projections for future outcomes.

Since the chapters were written by authors with varying degrees of interpretative skills and proficiency in methods of representation, the contributions differ substantially in quality. While some are conventional reports about the national vote for candidates or parties, others contain direct or at least oblique references to socio-economic or socio-political conditions that might motivate for voters' preferences. Frequent allusions are made to the backing of certain parties or candidates in the larger regional units of some countries, but there is little elaboration as to the socio-geographical substance on which such support is based. This reveals that despite the rapprochement of spatial analysis with political science explanatory avenues, geographical realities, and political tenets have yet to converge sufficiently to support interpretations that will satisfy both disciplines.

Notwithstanding these limitations, the volume is quite useful in providing novel insights, such as in which Bolivian regions Evo Morales had his most faithful supporters, which Brazilian districts supported president Inacio Lula in the runoff election of 2006, or what regions provided the electoral edge to conservative candidates such as Alvaro Uribe in Colombia and Felipe Calderón in Mexico. Focusing on the southern cone of South America, it is interesting to learn that the victories of moderate center-left candidates like Néstor Kirchner in Argentina and Michele Bachelet in Chile reveal the surge of the middle class and the electoral muscle of urban female voters. The interpretation of the two rounds of the presidential election in Chile...