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Full-Text Articles in Latin American Studies
Explaining The Rise Of The Left In Latin America, Luisa Blanco, Robin Grier
Explaining The Rise Of The Left In Latin America, Luisa Blanco, Robin Grier
Luisa Blanco
Latin American politics has taken a left-hand turn in the last decade, with an increasing number of chief executives hailing from left-of-center parties. We investigate the political and socio-economic factors explaining political ideology of the chief executive in a sample of 100 elections taking place between 1975 and 2007 in eighteen Latin American countries. We find that the commodity booms in agricultural, mining and oil are positively and significantly related to the probability that a country will have a chief executive from a left-of-center political party. However, for oil exports, we observe that this effect only holds for Venezuela. We …