Data for: “The politics of polarization: Governance and party system change in Latin America, 1990-2010”

This is an Active Citation data project. Active Citation is a precursor approach toAnnotation for Transparent Inquiry (ATI). It has now been converted to the ATI format. The annotated article can be viewed on the publisher's website. Project Summary This project develops and tests a new theory to explain left-right polarization in newer democracies, emphasizing the quality of governance and how it shapes incentives for radical parties to moderate. High-quality governance increases the relative salience of left-right programmatic appeals and makes coalitions with status quo parties attractive, creating centripetal incentives for radical parties and empowering moderate factions within those parties. Low-quality governance decreases the relative salience of left-right programmatic appeals and makes coalitions with status quo parties potentially poisonous, creating centrifugal incentives for radical parties and empowering extremist factions. The project employs a nested research design. Case studies of Venezuela and Brazil illustrate the mechanisms of the theory and evaluate its key propositions through process-tracing. These cases were selected because they capture significant variation on the dependent variable, because they are seen as particularly critical for understanding subjects such as the rise of the left in Latin America and the dynamics of programmatic polarization, and because they were the first three countries in the region where the left came to power. In the large-n portion of the research design, statistical analysis is utilized to assess the relationship between governance levels and left-right programmatic polarization across Latin America between 1994 and 2010. This relationship is substantively strong and robust to a variety of different modeling choices. Data Abstract The author primarily draws upon two original databases of qualitative materials collected for the project: a collection of roughly 500 “left party-related” sources (party documents, editorials and memoirs of left party leaders, etc.) and a compilation of roughly 900 news sources related to left parties and their factional conflicts. The data were collected from 2008 and 2013 and cover the period from 1985 and 2010. The “left party-related” sources were gathered through archives and libraries. A substantial archive of documents related to the Partido Dos Trabalhadores is housed at the Fundacao Perseu Abramo, in Sao Paolo, Brazil. The University of Notre Dame acquired a microfilm copy of this entire archive (93 reels). The author examined the whole archive at Notre Dame, searching for documents and other information that bore directly on the concerns of the project. Because in Venezuela no central archive existed for the left parties involved, the author collated party-related documents and other information from diverse sources, mainly relatively rare books (usually published in Venezuela with small presses) that collected these documents. The database of news articles was generated in the following manner. For each country a newspaper or weekly magazine was selected that was known to provide in-depth political coverage from a relatively centrist perspective: El Universal in Venezuela and Folha de Sao Paulo in Brazil. The author then defined the time period for each case during which major factional conflicts within left parties occurred and were resolved: 1993-1998 in Venezuela and 1994-2002 in Brazil. The next step was to collect all stories from each news source in the defined time period that related to left parties, with an emphasis on their factional conflicts and its resolution. The process of doing so differed somewhat according to the medium in which the news source was available. Venezuela’s El Universal was only available on microfilm, requiring the author and a research assistant to review each daily issue, capturing stories to PDF according to defined criteria. Brazil’s Folha’s archives are available online, allowing its database to be searched by sets of key words, downloading the group of stories produced by these searches, and then including the individual stories in the database according to defined criteria. The interviews the author conducted as part of the broader project are not being shared at this time, but might be included in a planned second deposit to QDR of a larger stand-alone data collection. Files Description Each case study for which data are being shared contains a two-stage causal argument: (1) governance levels decisively affected factional dynamics within the major left party of that country; (2) the resolution of factional conflict bore strongly on the level of polarization in the emerging party system. For each case, each stage of this argument is supported by several pieces of diagnostic evidence original to the project – both party-related and news sources – that were either scanned (if available only in hard copy) or printed to PDF (if available on microfilm or the Web). The underlying sources will not initially accompany the active citation project (the TRAX will not be hyperlinked to the sources that compose the active citation compilation); the author will provide the sources later. Logic of Annotation and ActivationAll citations that involve reference to this kind of evidence in these sections of the paper are activated and all the citations chosen for activation are annotated.