with scores of 0, there are almost no old democracies (three out of
eighteen).
The left–right cleavage is a social construction, and it makes sense
that a long experience with democratic rule is more likely to produce a
public with a coherent understanding of what it means. In the Middle
East and Africa, for instance, where all of our cases except Israel are
either non-democratic or semi-democratic, one is not surprised to find
limited evidence of a conventionally ideological public. This broad-
brush institutional explanation, however, is not sufficient to explain
all variations of significance. It fails to make sense, in particular, of
the remarkable difference between Latin America and the former
Soviet sphere of influence.
Both regions experienced democratization in the period that Samuel
Huntington famously called the “third wave of democratization,”
between 1974 and the late 1990s.^21 Latin America was first, with
most transitions from military to democratic rule taking place in the
late 1970s and early 1980s,^22 and the Soviet sphere of influence came
later, at the turn of the 1990s. Relatively older and presumably
more established, Latin American democracies nevertheless seem to
have electorates that are less structured along the left–right dimension
than East European publics. Among our eleven Latin American cases,
six have a 0 score and only one has a score of 1 (Uruguay). No country
has a score of 0.66. In comparison, in the former Soviet bloc, there are
only two 0s out of twenty-three cases, and sixteen scores of 0.66 or
above. How can we account for these differences?
Consider, first, the case of Latin America. Until the recent process of
democratization, many Latin American countries simply did not have
(^21) Samuel P. Huntington,The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late
Twentieth Century, Norman, University of Oklahoma Press, 1991. Adam
Przeworski and his co-authors fail to discern distinct “waves” and question
Huntington’s periodization and “oceanic metaphor.” Whatever the case, this
period was certainly critical for democracy in Latin America and Eastern
Europe. Adam Przeworski, Michael E. Alvarez, Jose ́Antonio Cheibub, and
Fernando Limongi,Democracy and Development: Political Institutions and
Well-Being in the World, 1950–1990, Cambridge University Press, 2000,
22 pp. 40–45.
Scott Mainwaring and Frances Hagopian, “Introduction: The Third Wave
of Democratization in Latin America,” in Frances Hagopian and Scott
P. Mainwaring (eds.),The Third Wave of Democratization in Latin America:
Advances and Setbacks, Cambridge University Press, 2005, pp. 1–3.
A worldwide value divide 51