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This article examines how socioeconomic context & status affect intrinsic & overt support for democracy among Latin American publics. The relationship is important since many theorists have long proposed that citizens' attitudes matter for democratic stability &, more recently, the quality of democracy. The empirical results indicate that educated & wealthy individuals are most likely to support democratic governance & the values of "self-expression" that democratic institutions embody & protect. At the macro level, economic development fosters intrinsic support while inequality & poverty have negative effects on overt support for democratic governance in Latin America. Based on this analysis, I argue that aggregate & individual socioeconomic conditions play crucial roles in the formation of support for democracy. I conclude with a call for more explicit research into the connection between democratic support & the quality of democracy in post-authoritarian Latin America. Tables, References. Adapted from the source document.

The shifts from state-led development to neoliberalism in Latin America have prompted debates on the quality of democracy. Although most discussions focus on responsiveness, we examine how economic policy regimes influence accountability. How do policy regimes affect citizens' ability to hold executives to accounts? This ability, we argue, strengthens where policy regimes are more statist and weakens where policy regimes are more market oriented. Time-series analyses of policy orientations, economic conditions, and presidential approval in 17 countries support this proposition, whereas complementary analyses at the individual-level are consistent with claims that policy regimes influence accountability via a responsibility mechanism. Findings from this study imply that by embracing heterodox policy regimes, recent Latin American executives have improved accountability compared with the era in which the "Washington Consensus" held sway.

ObjectiveWe test one untested influence on whether Hispanics will assimilate into American society in a "straight line" or remain "segmented." The type of assimilation hinges on both how non‐Hispanics treat Hispanics and whether Hispanics desire assimilation. We argue that these behaviors depend on the social construction of Hispanics' identity, which in turn may depend in part on their skin tone.MethodsWe compare these two theoretical competing models in two ways. First, to a nationally representative sample, we randomly assign four images of Hispanic males who are two standard deviations apart in skin tone and gauge respondents' social acceptance of them. Second, using objective skin‐tone measures from the 2012 ANES oversample of Hispanics, we determine if skin tone correlates with beliefs over assimilation.ResultsFor the experimental evidence, we discover that whites and blacks do not discriminate across this range of skin tone for Hispanics. For the ANES data, we find no evidence that skin tone affects Hispanics willingness to assimilate into America.ConclusionThus, the typical skin tones of Hispanics do not affect the assimilation ideas of either non‐Hispanics or Hispanics.

AbstractThis paper conducts an experimental test of the theory of ideational populism in a most‐likely case: a well‐known Chilean populist presidential candidate, Roxana Miranda. At the time of our study, Chile had the necessary conditions for ideational populism: corruption scandals and a crisis of political representation that lowered citizens' trust in establishment elites. The stimulus was a speech that included the core elements of ideational populist discourse. Despite the careful experimental design and a ripe political atmosphere, we found no effects of populist discourse on voting intentions or evaluations of Miranda among the research participants. We discuss the possible reasons for these null findings. Rather than disqualifying the theory of ideational populism, we conclude that our research calls theorists to incorporate other elements – ideology, gender, issue positions, strategic voting – into their models of ideational populism.

We advance a theory of pigmentocratic executive approval that accounts for both skin color-based group attachments and deviations in skin tone between citizens and leaders. We argue that such deviations will decrease approval most strongly for those lighter in complexion than the incumbent. We further argue that individuals will most strongly punish incumbents for poor economic performance when their skin tone is lighter than the executive's. To test our theory, we assess the skin tone of dozens of leaders from the Americas, and we couple the resulting measure with mass survey data from the leaders' countries. Our findings demonstrate that executive approval throughout the Americas replicates patterns of "pigmentocracy"—inequalities and hierarchies that privilege lighter skin tones.