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The degree to which party systems are ideologically and programmatically structured is central to democracy. This article analyzes differences in the extent and nature of programmatic structuration in Latin America and Europe, using a new original data source, the Chapel Hill Expert Survey-Latin America (CHES-LA), in combination with the long-standing CHES-Europe. First, we demonstrate the reliability of CHES-LA in relation to CHES-Europe, and substantiate its validity by comparing it to other expert, elite and party manifesto surveys in Latin America. Using confirmatory factor analysis, we then show that while party system structuration in Latin America is somewhat lower than in Europe, it is also of a decisively different nature. In Latin America economic and socio-cultural policy positions are largely captured in a single overlapping dimension; in Europe, by contrast, competition occurs overwhelmingly along two dimensions, each with distinct clusters of policy positions.

Does the type of democratic regime matter for public evaluations of leaders? We argue two characteristics intrinsic to presidential and parliamentary regimes lead to divergent patterns of executive approval. For presidents, direct elections foster more personal leader-voter linkages; for prime ministers, dependence on the legislature for survival contributes to more institutionalized party systems. These two mechanisms should generate higher approval at the outset of a term—larger honeymoons— for presidents than for prime ministers, but also more rapid decline. Analyses of data from 40 countries produce evidence consistent with these constitutionally-based distinctions. Yet we uncover important within-regime differences. Within presidential systems, approval patterns vary along with paths to power—first-election versus re-election, and elected versus unelected. Within parliamentarism, honeymoons are greater for prime ministers overseeing single-party majoritarian governments. Study findings advance long-standing debates about the relative merits of presidential and parliamentary systems—particularly the tradeoff between democratic responsiveness and stability.

What characterizes the dynamics of presidential popularity? Research based on the United States of America finds popularity exhibits an almost law-like cyclicality over a president's term: high post-election "honeymoon" approval rates deteriorate before experiencing an end-of-term boost as new elections approach. We contend that cyclical approval dynamics are not specific to the USA, but rather characteristic of presidential systems more generally, despite heterogeneity in their socio-economic and political contexts. Testing this proposition requires overcoming a key empirical problem: lack of comparable data. We do so by employing time-series inputs from 324 opinion surveys from a new publicly available database—the Executive Approval Database 1.0—to craft quarterly measures of popularity across 18 Latin American contemporary presidential democracies. Our analysis strongly confirms the cyclical approval model for the region. The conclusion identifies avenues for future research on the relationships across approval, presidentialism, and electoral, institutional, and socio-economic factors afforded by the new data resource we present here.