stimating the Political Space in the Southern Cone and Brazil: the Presidential Elections in the Left-Right Scale

Abstract

The estimation of the policy position of political actors lies at the heart of political competition of modern democracy. This article uses content analysis and the codes of the Comparative Manifesto Project (CMP) to study the policy positions of presidential candidates in the last election of Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay and Chile. One of our main aims is to investigate national and cross-national dynamics underlying candidate positioning on a leftright ideological continuum. To improve the explanation of presidential competition the paper also estimated the spatial characterizations of candidates’ preferences on economy and welfare. The CMP methodology proved suitable for cross-national analysis of presidential candidates in Latin America, but the right-left index misses some of the contextual features of Latin American democracies.