Ideology and the Latin American Voter.

By bundling issues together in identifiable packages, left-right ideologies theoretically can simplify the political arena and efficiently guide citizens toward comparatively more programmatic voting decisions (e.g., Downs 1957). Yet, the extent to which the mass public in Latin America possesses coherent ideological schema, relates these to left-right semantics, and uses these ideological heuristics to make vote choices varies significantly across countries within the region. Two objectives are central to this paper: first, the paper uses national survey data from 18 Latin American countries to take stock of the comparative ideological richness of politics in Latin America; second, the paper assesses two potential determinants of variation in ideological structuration: the presence of comparatively well-defined leftist administrations (brought in as part of the pink tide) and the level of programmatic party structuration developed within countries over time. As the analyses show, the latter is a better predictor of ideological richness at the national level in Latin America than the former. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]