What political, economic, and social issues shape the political arena of Latin American legislatures? During the past two decades, dramatic changes have altered the economic and political makeup of Latin American societies, perhaps shifting the ideological bases of party competition. Though comparative researchers have delved into the deep cleavages that might shape politics in the region (cf. Dix 1989; Collier and Collier 1991), we know little about how these divides are mapped into political preferences at the elite level. Party systems are shaped by both societal cleavages and political institutions such as electoral rules (Lipset and Rokkan 1967; Cox 1997). In the stage set by cleavages and institutions, strategic politicians devise political programs to capture votes, sometimes energizing dormant societal divides to garner electoral support, sometimes reactively aligning their political platforms to shifting preferences in the electorate. In any case, politicians “map” multiple issues on essentially “either-or” propositions, in order to convey their own political preferences to cognitive misers in the electorate. The spatial analysis of politics refers to these issue bundles as “ideologies.” This chapter explores Latin American legislatures by analyzing the structure and contents of issue bundles.

We begin our empirical analysis of programmatic structuration by focusing on the attitudes, values, and opinions of legislative elites. In doing so, we confirm that the contents and structures of what we call ideological and partisan spaces vary immensely throughout the region.