Voter Turnout in Central and South America

We examine explanations of aggregate voting turnout among the voting age population and registered voters across Central and South American political systems. Models of voting turnout typically applied in Western industrialized contexts contain a number of assumptions regarding connections between institutional, political and socioeconomic variables and voter mobilization. We consider these specific conditions, but include the concentration of executive power, socioeconomic inequality, and clientelism in the Central and South American context, to formulate our theoretical expectations. Our analysis includes presidential and legislative elections beginning in 1990 through 2004. We use a cross sectional time series random effects regression model for estimation. The Central and South American application provides some unique theoretical arguments and empirical findings about some conventional effects on voting turnout. Mainly, we find that institutional variables linked to perceptions of government effectiveness are not significant while those linked to electoral rules are. Further, we find that socioeconomic and political variables influence turnout, but these associations are often constrained by context.