Political Representation of Redistribution Preferences in Latin America, 2008-2018

Survey data from Latin American democracies analyzes political representation of citizens' redistribution preferences across income levels. The dataset, created by Alejandra Armesto and hosted on Harvard Dataverse, covers the period from 2008 to 2018. It examines how representation is conditioned by the ideology of the governing party and the type of linkage (programmatic, clientelist, or charismatic) parties establish with citizens.

Use Cases

• Modeling the relationship between income decile and support for redistribution based on survey responses.
• Analyzing how governing party ideology conditions the representation of redistributive preferences.
• Investigating the impact of party-citizen linkage types (programmatic, clientelist, charismatic) on policy representation.
• Comparing estimated support for redistribution among low, middle, and high-income groups across countries and years.

Strengths

• Data spans a decade (2008-2018) across multiple Latin American democracies.
• Methodology for constructing the key representation variable is explicitly detailed, following Gilens (2012).
• Individual redistributive preferences are captured using a standardized LAPOP survey question (ros4).

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.
• The binary coding of the 1-7 scale preference variable may oversimplify nuanced attitudes.

Provenance

Source

Harvard Dataverse

Collection Method

Aggregated from various sources, primarily using LAPOP survey data and a constructed estimation procedure.

Time Range

2008 to 2018

Freshness

Last updated 2026-05-11 14:50:37; freshness should be verified.

Geography

Latin America