Chapter 8

Explaining Support for the Incumbent in Presidential Elections*

Carlos Gervasoni
María Laura Tagina

Scholarship on the determinants of electoral behavior in Argentina has a relatively long

history. The 33 years of continuous democracy since 1983 coupled with the increasing

availability of electoral surveys has led to renewed efforts to understand Argentine voters.

Researchers, however, have typically had to make do with the limited secondary evidence

available: either ecological data (Canton and Jorrat 1980; Mora y Araujo and Llorente 1980) or

individual data obtained from commercial cross-sectional surveys (Canton and Jorrat 2002;

Gervasoni 1998; Tagina 2012b), generally not designed to test academic theories of voting

behavior.

The APES provides an excellent opportunity to overcome these data limitations. It

produced individual survey data for a nationally-representative panel of Argentine voters who

were asked questions specifically designed to better understand their political and electoral

preferences. The questionnaires contain items linked to every major approach to explaining

electoral behavior, which permits a comprehensive test of alternative hypotheses regarding the

drivers of presidential voting in the 2015 election.

Taking advantage of the richness of the data, in this chapter we adopt a causes of effects

approach to explain the determinants of supporting (or not) the incumbent party’s presidential

candidate. We do not emphasize any particular explanatory factor, but test a large set of potential

*
We thank Andy Baker, Ernesto Calvo, Ken Greene, Noam Lupu, Eugenia Mitchelstein, Victoria Murillo, Virginia
Oliveros, Julia Pomares, Luis Schiumerini, Rebecca Weitz-Shapiro, Matt Winters, and Elizabeth Zechmeister for
useful comments on earlier versions of this chapter. Malena Lapine and Adam Wolsky provided excellent research
assistance.
1
explanations for the decision to vote for or against Peronist Daniel Scioli, the candidate of the

Partido Justicialista (Justicialist Party—PJ)-led Frente para la Victoria (Front for Victory—

FPV), in the first round of the presidential election. This race contained elements of both

continuity and of change. As in every free presidential election in Argentina since 1945,

Peronism obtained substantial popular support. Moreover, as in the previous three presidential

elections, more than one Peronist ran: primary candidates Sergio Massa, José Manuel de la Sota,

and Adolfo Rodríguez Saá either belonged to or had recently left the PJ. Together the four

Peronist candidates obtained 61 percent of the vote in the primaries and 57 percent in the first

round of the general election. The main element of change was that, partly due to this

fragmentation (Calvo, this volume), the official PJ ticket had its worst performance ever (Scioli’s

37.08 percent was slightly below the previous low of 38.27 percent by Eduardo Duhalde in

1999).

Theoretical Approaches to Explaining Incumbent Support

In this section we review the literature on electoral behavior and support for the

incumbent’s party candidate, to derive causal hypotheses. The order in which we introduce

explanatory approaches and variables reflects our assumptions—based on theoretical

considerations and our own assessment of the context of the 2015 Argentine election—about

levels of exogeneity, causal order, and mediation relationships. For example, we believe

socioeconomic status is a distal, highly exogenous cause of voting decisions, which exerts part of

its influence through its effects on other less exogenous, mediating variables such as party

identification and clientelism.

2
Long-Term Factors: Socio-demographic Characteristics and Political Identities

For a long time voting decisions were understood to be largely a function of voters’

demographic characteristics, material interests, and social and political identities. Durable factors

such as social class, religion, and party identification, explained the stability of electoral

preferences (Miller and Niemi 2002). More recent research, however, has documented the

decline of these factors in advanced industrial democracies during the second half of the

twentieth century, in a context of rising living standards and new postmaterial values (Clark and

Lipset 1991; Clark, Lipset, and Rempel 1993; Nieuwbeerta and De Graaf 1999). At the same

time, new political parties have entered the electoral arena and electoral volatility has increased

(Dalton and Wattenberg 2001), a process that has been more marked in younger democracies

(Mainwaring, Gervasoni, and España-Nájera forthcoming). For the case of Argentina, Lupu and

Stokes (2009) describe a party system structured around a class cleavage since 1946. The PJ has

been associated with support from the working class in the large industrial cities of the Pampas

and of other “popular” sectors in the less developed areas of the country since its origins (Canton

and Jorrat 2002; Mora y Araujo 1980). Jorrat and Acosta (2003) document a PJ-working class

electoral affinity throughout the twentieth century in the metropolitan area of Buenos Aires, with

some erosion since 1995. Even in the midst of the PJ’s conservative turn, however, Carlos

Menem obtained more support among poor voters than among the middle and upper classes

when he was reelected in 1995 (Gervasoni 1998).

We operationalize social class through the voter’s level of education and an index of

socioeconomic status. In line with previous findings, we expect support for the incumbent PJ

candidate Scioli to be stronger, other things being equal, among poorer and less educated voters.

3
 Long-term predispositions are also connected to social identities. Party identification was

found to be a powerful predictor of voting decision in early studies conducted in established

democracies. However, Miller and Niemi (2002: 176) report a slow decline in levels of party

identification in those countries. Case studies point to a weakening of party identities in Latin

America (Moreno and Méndez 2007; Sánchez 2007), and to the related phenomenon of the

dilution of party brands (Lupu 2014, 2015). In Argentina the percentage of citizens who identify

with a political party has declined in recent decades (with a partial reversal during the Kirchners’

administrations), but in spite of this, party identification has remained an important factor in

explaining the vote for Peronist candidates (Canton and Jorrat 2002; Tagina 2012b). Hence, we

expect a positive association between this variable and the vote for Scioli. The notion of party

identification, however, has become muddled in Argentina, as the party system has grown

increasingly complex and de-institutionalized (see Gervasoni forthcoming). In fact, during the

presidencies of the Kirchners, the PJ label was downplayed in favor of the FPV label.1 Sectors of

the party not especially close to the Kirchners were more likely to keep the PJ or Peronist

identification, both in their speeches and in the formal labels they used in elections (e.g., the

dissident PJs of La Pampa and Córdoba). Therefore, we used two different Party ID items

available in the APES questionnaires, identification with Peronism and identification with the

FPV.

Regarding the ideological cleavage, most research has focused on testing the electoral

relevance of the left-right dimension. For Latin America, and for Argentina and other countries

with little programmatic structure in their party systems, ideology is often a dimension of little

1
FPV is the name of the alliance that took Néstor Kirchner to the presidency in 2003, and under which the PJ and
its smaller allies competed in national and most provincial elections between 2003 and 2015. On the similarities and
differences between the PJ and the FPV, see Gervasoni (forthcoming).
4
relevance to citizens, and of limited capacity to explain their votes (Zechmeister 2015). Although

the Latin American “left turn” put ideology back on the agenda as a potential explanatory factor,

it is likely that support for the left reflected the disenchantment with the performance of previous

right-wing governments rather than an ideological conversion (Murillo, Oliveros, and Vaishnav

2010; Wiesehomeier and Doyle 2013). In the case at hand, the PJ is legendary for its ideological

heterogeneity and plasticity, so much that it has contained from far left to far right factions, and

from neoliberal to neopopulist presidents. Previous studies have not found ideology to be a

significant predictor of voting for the FPV (Tagina 2012a).2 We do include the APES’ left-right

self-placement as an explanatory factor, expecting to find no significant left-Scioli association.

We include in our models controls for gender and age. We do not have clear theoretical

expectation in this respect, but note that previous research shows a negative correlation between

age and vote for Kirchnerism (Tagina 2012a).

State Dependence and Clientelism

Patronage, clientelism and other situations in which voters engage in particularistic

exchanges with political elites are present in all political systems, and are especially prevalent in

less developed democracies. Part of the aforementioned continuous success of the PJ in attracting

poor voters appears to be explained by its successful adaptation to the post-1970s context of

deindustrialization, increased poverty levels, and informalization of the labor force, brought

about by the many economic crises Argentina suffered since the 1970s, and by global economic

and technological trends. In response to these developments, the PJ downplayed its union-party

2
For an analysis of the role of ideology in the 2015 election, see Schiumerini (this volume).

5
profile and started to rely more heavily on clientelistic links to the new poor (Levitsky 2003).

More generally, it has been increasingly common to see national, provincial and municipal

political leaders distribute jobs and particularistic goods and services in exchange for political

support. An extensive recent literature has explored these issues in Argentina (Auyero 2000;

Calvo and Murillo 2004; Oliveros 2016; Stokes, et al. 2013; Szwarcberg 2015; Weitz-Shapiro

2014; Zarazaga 2014). Diverse forms of clientelism and patronage involve a significant

proportion of Argentine citizens and, we surmise, make them more likely to vote for the

(typically incumbent) party that controls access to particularistic benefits. Moreover, we also

expect that other, less particularistic but increasingly prevalent forms of economic dependence

on the state might help incumbents in Argentina. In the spirit of the literature on conditional cash

transfers and voting (e.g., Bohn 2011; Hunter and Power 2007; Zucco 2013), we believe that

receiving one of the many planes sociales that exist in Argentina predisposes voters to support

the incumbent. We also apply this reasoning to beneficiaries of the moratoria previsional, the

program that allowed uncovered retirement-age people to join the state-run pension system. To

test these hypotheses, we created an index of economic ties to the state based on APES questions

regarding the employment (public or private) of the interviewee and of his/her spouse, and about

whether or not a family benefits from the Asignación Universal por Hijo (Universal Allocation

per Child—AUH), planes sociales (the general name for many other existing welfare payment

systems), or the moratoria previsional. We test separately an indicator of clientelistic exchanges.

Economic and Government Performance Evaluations

The link between the evaluations of the current administration and of the economy, on

the one hand, and voting decisions, on the other, is related to the dimension of accountability in

6
political representation. Evidence in favor of economic voting is strong, not only in established

democracies, but also in new ones (Lewis-Beck and Stegmaier 2008), in Southern Europe (Fraile

Maldonado 2005; Maravall 2003), Latin America (Echegaray 2005; Gélineau and Singer 2015;

Lewis-Beck and Ratto 2013; Nadeau et al. 2015b; Ratto 2011), and Argentina (Canton and Jorrat

2002; Montero and Ratto 2013; Nadeau et al. 2015a; Tagina 2012a, 2012b).

One of the most widespread typologies of economic voting distinguishes between

“pocketbook” personal evaluations—which refer to the personal and family finances—and

“sociotropic” assessments—related to the country’s economy (Kinder and Kiewiet 1981). In line

with previous findings, we expect that a positive assessment of the national economy (but not

necessarily of one’s personal finances) will increase the likelihood of supporting the incumbent

candidate.

Likewise, the evaluation that voters make of the incumbent administration is generally

considered one of the most central factors in deciding whether to support the incumbent party or

the opposition. De Ferrari (2015) argues that voters weigh the past executive’s performance

differently, depending on the degree to which the presidential candidate is identified with the

outgoing administration. In the case of Argentina, we would expect this factor to be important

for the 2015 elections, given the strong positive and negative feelings that kirchnerismo

generated among opinion leaders and many citizens. The 2007, 2011, and 2015 elections were, to

a significant extent, a referendum on the Néstor and Cristina Kirchner administrations,3 and

Scioli held key positions under them.4 However, the referendum quality of the 2015 election

3
Tagina (2012a) shows that the assessments of Néstor Kirchner’s administration was by far the most important factor
to explain his wife’s performance in the 2007 presidential election.
4
Scioli was Néstor Kirchner’s vice-president (2003-7) and the FPV governor of the Province of Buenos Aires in
both of Cristina Kirchner’s presidencies (2007-15).
7
may have been weakened by the fact that the incumbent candidate was neither a Kirchner, nor a

politician especially close to them. Scioli did not receive Cristina Kirchner’s clear and full

support, and was not held in high esteem in Kirchnerist circles. Not long before the election, he

was routinely accused by cadres of the president of not being loyal to her and of being too close

to her nemesis Grupo Clarín. Scioli had in fact consciously constructed a differential public

image of his own, much more centrist in content and moderate in style than that of the Kirchners.

Therefore, some voters could have well decided voting (or not) for him independently of their

feelings towards Cristina Kirchner. We use a president’s approval item in APES to evaluate this

explanatory factor. We anticipate a positive impact on the likelihood of voting for Scioli, but do

not have clear expectations about the magnitude of this impact.

Positional Issues and Media Effects

Media influences on voters are likely to be significant in most campaigns, and they are

widely studied in high-income democracies. However, we still known little about the influence

of the media on voters in Latin America. Some studies find powerful media effects, substantially

stronger than those previously found for established democracies, in Mexico (Lawson and

McCann 2004) and Brazil (Mundim 2010).

Including a media influence variable seems particularly important in the election we

analyze: under President Cristina Kirchner, the press became sharply polarized around the

Kirchnerist/anti-Kirchnerist cleavage, and the media itself (and its regulation) became a matter of

widespread political debate. The public media displayed a strong pro-government bias, which

had the effect of promoting the polarization of the media system (Balán 2013). A recent study of

the 2011 presidential elections confirms this biased content in TV newscasts, concluding that

8
television exercised asymmetric effects on its audiences (Tagina 2014). These findings, along

with the hostility of Kirchnerism towards the critical press and the appearance of private media

companies controlled by allies of the Kirchners and favored by the selective allocation of

government advertising (Ruiz 2016), make us expect to find some impact of media consumption

patterns on the likelihood to support the incumbent candidate.

To test this hypothesis we took advantage of APES items on the media outlets used by

respondents to obtain information about politics, and combined them with an expert survey of

our own that allowed us to code media outlets in terms of their level of support for (or opposition

to) Cristina Kirchner’s administration (see survey details in the online appendix).

In this section, we have introduced the main independent variables we use in the

statistical models below. Table 8.A1 in this chapter’s appendix lists all of them, indicating the

theoretical approach they belong to, and the APES item(s) they are based on, including the

question wording.

Empirical Strategy

The dependent variable we model is Vote for the incumbent party presidential candidate.

We used the presidential vote intention question in the second wave of the APES, to create a

dichotomous variable coded 1 for respondents who indicated having voted for Scioli (wave 2

was carried out after the October 22 general election), either in the open-ended version of the

question or in the closed-ended follow up (in which a list of the candidates was read to the

respondents who did not remember who they voted for). Those who indicated voting for any

other candidates in these two questions (mostly for Macri and Massa) and the few who voted

9
blank/null, were coded 0. Those who did not vote, did not remember, or did not answer the

question, were treated as missing values.

Most independent variables (see previous section and Table 8.A1 in the appendix) were

measured in wave 1 of the panel to minimize endogeneity bias in our estimates. One can imagine

that variables such as approval of the president or the choice of preferred media outlet can be

influenced by the interviewee’s vote response. For a few independent variables that appear free

from this type of problem, we use their wave 2 measurement (if available). These were

Economic ties to the state (W2) and Clientelism (W2).

Because we use data from both waves, our sample is the full panel of the APES. The total

number of panel respondents is 780, but our models have fewer cases because of missingness in

both the dependent and the independent variables.

Given the dichotomous dependent variable, we estimate our models using logistic

regression (logit) models, with standard errors clustered by province. All analyses below are

weighted to correct for sample deviations from population parameters in terms of gender, age,

and education.5 All independent variables except for Age, Education, and SES have been

rescaled to vary between 0 and 1 so regression coefficients can be readily compared across

variables.6 Table I in the online appendix shows (weighted) summary statistics for all variables.

5
We use the weight variable provided in the APES dataset. For details, see the methodological appendix to Lupu,
Oliveros, and Schiumerini’s introductory chapter (this volume).
6
Age is best interpreted in its natural scale in years. We use the volume’s common measures of education and SES,
which are scaled to vary between 0 and 5 and 1 and 5, respectively.
10
Results

Figure 8.1 summarizes the results of our analysis. This combines the results of five

statistical models, which are shown individually in Table 8.A2. The figure plots the change in a

respondent’s probability of voting for Scioli as we shift each variable from its sample minimum

to its sample maximum (holding other variables in the model constant at their sample mean). For

each variable, we report its total effect.7 That is, the plotted values derive from the statistical

model in which the variable is first introduced.8

If we had drawn these values from the full model where all of these predictors are

included simultaneously (model 5 in Table 8.A2), we would likely face problems of

“overcontrol” or, using experimental jargon, post-treatment bias.9 This issue arises because some

of the independent variables are likely to be mediators, that is, both effects of other independent

variables and causes of the dependent variable. Examples abound: a voter’s party identification

may influence her assessment of the president; voters who like (do not like) the president may be

more prone (less prone) to obtain political news from pro-incumbent media outlets. From this

point of view, the coefficients in models with more covariates should underestimate the effect of

7
Lupu (2015) uses a similar strategy for graphically representing regression results.
8
Because of differential missingness of different variables, this means that the different models reflected in Figure
8.1 draw on different samples. Pro K media consumption has an especially high number of missing values because
of respondents who do not identify any source of information or mention social media (which were not included in
the expert survey we carried out to assess the political orientation of media outlets). To control for this threat to
comparability, we re-estimated all models using the final sample once all of the variables are included (see Table III
in the online appendix). The only finding that is sensitive to the changes in the empirical base is the coefficient on
Clientelism: it is statistically indistinguishable from zero in our models, but positive and statistically significant in
the restricted samples. That is, some of our models suggest a strong electoral effect of clientelism, while others do
not. Notice that even if we take the large coefficient of this variable as essentially correct, and interpret it causally,
the relatively low incidence of clientelism implies that only a modest proportion of votes respond to this effect.
9
Another potential problem in a model with many predictors is multicollinearity. The VIFs for most variables in all
the models we present, however, is modest. In model 5 (the largest and therefore most collinear) the mean VIF is
1.33, varying between 1.03 (Clientelism) and 1.92 (Presidential approval).
11
some of the explanatory variables (those whose effects are mediated by other independent

variables).

There are no clear methodological guidelines to deal with these issues beyond avoiding

mediating variables in regression models (see Gelman and Hill 2007: 188-194). The problems

are even more challenging “when causal ordering among predictors is ambiguous” (King 2010),

which is exactly our situation. We do not really know, for example, whether voters’ party

identification influences their assessment of the president, whether their opinions of the president

shape their party identifications, or both (theory and the highly significant 0.42 Pearson

correlation between the variables PID FPV and Presidential approval suggest they are causally

related in some way). King (2010) indicates that there is no known solution for this problem in

the context of observational data. Our approach is to assume a certain causal order among the

variables and present regression models sequentially, so that the first one (model 1 in Table

8.A2) includes only the most exogenous explanatory factors – those that, like gender, are not

expected to be influenced by other independent variables – while the last model (model 5)

includes all factors (in this approach we follow Nadeau et al. 2017). The variables we add to our

models sequentially are assumed to partly mediate the effect of those included in the previous

models. For example, Party identification with Peronism (included in models 2 to 5) is seen as

partly driven by socioeconomic status (one of the very exogenous variables included in model 1).

Our assumptions about causal order (or any other alternative assumptions) are disputable and

certainly a simplification of a highly complex underlying reality.10 If they are reasonable

10
Moreover, different causal orders may apply to different voters. We believe, for example, that some voters first
decide what they think of the government and then orient their patterns or media consumption accordingly, while
other voters do the opposite. Likewise, some voters are likely to support the president because they hold a
government job, while others may have obtained a government job because they support the president.
12
approximations to real-world processes, however, the regression results we present shed light on

the magnitude of the direct and indirect effects of the explanatory variables.11

Figure 8.1. Determinants of Vote for Incumbent Presidential Candidate Scioli

Notes: Values represent the change in predicted probability of voting for Scioli as we shift each
variable from its sample minimum to its sample maximum, with all other variables held constant
at their sample means. Lines represent a simulated 95% confidence interval. Hollow circles
represent those estimates that do not achieve statistical significance. All plotted values are total
effects, meaning they draw on the statistical model in which the variable is first introduced. The
full regression results are provided in Table 8.A2 in the chapter´s appendix.

11
Notice that because the “full” model 5 likely contains a significant amount of “overcontrolling;” the independent
variables that remain statistically significant are likely to be –in a causal interpretation of regression coefficients–
important drivers of vote choice: their association with the dependent variable survives holding constant many other
explanatory factors, including some that may be mediating variables.

13
 Gender and age are not associated with vote choice but, as expected, education and

socioeconomic status are (education is statistically significant at the 90% level): the higher a

voter’s education and material well-being, the less likely she is to vote for Scioli. Both those who

identify with Peronism and those who identify with the FPV were more likely to vote for Scioli,

although the magnitude of the association is considerably larger for the latter.12 Moreover, PID

FPV remains significant as we add additional variables, whereas PID Peronism does not,

suggesting that only the former has a direct effect. This result is to be expected: the Kirchners

adopted and promoted the FPV label from day one, and Scioli always ran under it, including in

2015. Even though the PJ was by far the most important political party in the FPV, the Kirchners

downplayed it and at times even derided it. They hardly ever referred to Peronism or to its

founder in their speeches.

These findings may also reflect the fact that many non-Kirchnerist and anti-Kirchnerist

factions of the PJ resisted the FPV label (and even competed electorally with the FPV in some

provinces), emphasizing their association with the PJ.13 In fact, in the first round of the 2015

election there were two other Peronist options on the ballot, Cristina Kirchner’s former Chief of

Cabinet Sergio Massa, who ran with the support of many other non-Kirchnerist Peronists, and

Adolfo Rodríguez Saá. Not surprisingly, when we ran regressions using voting for Massa as the

dependent variable (see Table IV in the online appendix), identification with the PJ (but not the

12
If we add ideology (left-right self-placement), the resulting coefficient is not statistically significant and has an
unexpected sign: the more to the right the voter, the more likely she is to vote for the FPV’s candidate (see Table II
in the online appendix). Since a considerable number of APES respondents did not answer the ideology item,
including this variable in our regressions significantly reduces the sample size (665 to 551 cases). Moreover,
ideology is not significant in any of the regressions we have run. Therefore, we decided to exclude it from our
models.
13
For an account of the complex relationships between the PJ and its factions, on the one hand, and the FPV and its
PJ and non-PJ members, on the other hand, see Gervasoni (forthcoming).
14
FPV) was positively and statistically significantly correlated. Voters seem to have followed elite

cues regarding party labels.

Two variables measure the economic relationship of the voter (or her household) to the

state. The index Economic ties to the state results in a significant coefficient in the expected

direction: those voters whose households largely depend on streams of income originating the

public sector were—ceteris paribus—more likely to vote for Scioli than those who were

economically autonomous from the state. This supports our hypothesis regarding the pro-

incumbent effects of state dependence.14

Which of the several components that goes into this index was more influential? We

reran our models replacing Economic ties to the state with each of the APES dichotomous items

that we used to construct it (for details see Table 8.A1). Both of the items for receiving a plan

social and the AUH are positively associated with voting for the FPV. Being employed in the

public sector (the respondent or her spouse) or benefitting from the moratoria previsional, on the

other hand, do not produce statistically significant coefficients. Of course, the higher

multicollinearity arising from including the individual items in the regression,15 plus the higher

measurement error of individual items reduce precision, thus making statistically significance

more difficult to achieve. Given these methodological considerations, it is highly likely that most

or all of the items mentioned above do have a real positive association with support for Scioli,

14
Adding the two variables assessing the voters’ level of state dependence (see model 3 in Table 8.A2) has
practically no effect on the party identification variables, but makes education and SES lose their statistical
significance (although their signs remain negative), suggesting that any electoral effects of these long term
characteristics are mediated (at least partially) by the level of economic dependence on the state (see Lupu, this
volume).
15
For example, the correlation between receiving a plan social and receiving the AUH is 0.57.

15
although there is more evidence of a pro-incumbent effect for direct cash transfers to (typically

poor) voters than for public employment for (typically middle-class) voters.

The item measuring clientelism—which we see as an alternative form of state

dependence—is indistinguishable from zero, although it does appear to have a statistically

significant direct effect in models ran on the restricted sample (see Table III in the online

appendix). All in all, our models show considerable evidence that the conventional wisdom

about state dependence is correct: incumbents benefit electorally from patronage, clientelistic

exchanges, planes sociales and other economic relationships between the state and voters,

although it is statistically difficult to tease out the individual contribution of each particular form

of state dependence.

The variables tapping economic and government evaluations yield the expected results.

National economy (sociotropic evaluations) and Presidential approval are very strongly and

significantly associated with vote choice. On the other hand, Personal finances obtains a

negative and weakly significant coefficient, confirming previous findings that positive

pocketbook economic evaluations are not associated with more support for the incumbent. In this

respect, the 2015 election seems to have followed typical patterns of voting, in which citizens do

not use information about their own economic situation to make electoral decisions, but rather

look at the overall state of the country’s economy: those who consider the national economy has

been doing well are more likely to try to reelect the incumbent party, while those that assess their

own finances positively are not. The inclusion of government and economic evaluations

noticeably increases the regression’s goodness-of-fit (pseudo R2 increases from 0.15 to 0.26

between models 3 and 4 in Table 8.A1), indicating that citizens’ assessments of the economy and

of the president add significantly to the model’s capacity to predict (and maybe explain) vote

16
choice.

Furthermore, the inclusion of these variables makes PID Peronism statistically

insignificant and sharply reduces the magnitude of the coefficient for PID FPV (see model 4 in

Table 8.A2). If our causal-order assumptions are roughly correct, this means that much of the

effect of partisan identities on voting is mediated by their impact on citizens’ assessments of the

performance of the national economy and of the president. These two factors appear as the

dominant variables in the model, with substantive effects much larger than those for the other

two significant variables (PID FPV and Economic ties to the state). In particular, Presidential

approval has the largest substantive effect in Figure 8.1, suggesting that positive (negative)

evaluations of Cristina Kirchner were the main driver of voting (not voting) for Scioli. Of course,

even such a strong statistical association does not necessarily imply a causal relationship, but it is

reasonable on theoretical grounds to interpret this coefficient (and that of National economy)

causally.

Finally, we consider the variables most endogenous in our causal-order assumptions: the

extent to which voters agree or disagree with typical Kirchnerist-owned issues (such as the AUH

and the restrictions in the foreign exchange market), and the extent to which they obtain political

news from media sources supportive or critical of the Kirchner administration (model 5 in table

8.A2). Both variables obtain the expected positive sign, although only Pro K media consumption

is statistically significant. This fact that Issues K does not achieve statistical significance –

together with the irrelevance of left-right self-placement – suggest that programmatic/ideological

considerations were not important in the minds of most voters, in spite of the official rhetoric

claiming for itself a place on the left of the ideological spectrum. Interestingly, when respondents

were asked in wave 1 to place parties on a 0-10 scale, they did not put the FPV on the left: of six

17
parties that were evaluated, the FPV is the third most to the right (5.44), leaving to its left the

UCR (4.95), Massa’s Frente Renovador (4.88), and the Socialist-led Frente Amplio Progresista

(4.33). The only party labels (slightly) to the right of the FPV are Peronism (5.79) and the PRO

(5.56).16

As expected, PID FPV and Presidential approval have coefficients that are somewhat

smaller once we account for issue positions and media consumption, suggesting that part of the

influence of these variables on voting is mediated by media consumption patterns. Voters who

identified with the FPV and/or with the president were more likely to obtain news from pro-

Kirchnerist media outlets, which in turn made them more likely to vote for Scioli (even after

holding constant other explanatory variables). Yet, even in this overcontrolled model,

Presidential approval is by far the most important predictor of voting for the incumbent party’s

candidate. Its coefficient remains highly significant and substantively very large, even though, in

a causal interpretation, the impact of this variable is in all likelihood mediated by other

independent variables in model 5 (according to our assumptions, this is the case for Issues K and

Pro K media consumption only).

The dominant role of assessments of the incumbent president in explaining the vote for

the candidate of her party is far from an obvious finding, more so when the candidate was neither

Fernández de Kirchner nor a close ally of hers. Surveys conducted prior to the campaign showed

that Scioli obtained significant support among voters critical of Kirchnerism. For example,

during 2014, about 50 percent of voters who disapproved of Cristina Kirchner’s administration

had a positive opinion of Scioli, a figure much higher than that of any other Kirchnerist leaders.17

16
For a closer look at the parties’ ideological positions according to voters, see Schiumerini (this volume).
17
Source: Isonomía national polls. We thank Juan Germano and Rodrigo Martínez for providing the data we
summarize here.
18
During the campaign, however, Scioli moved closer to the president. The content of his

discourse became much more aligned with hers, and his style became harsher, including very

sharp attacks on Macri. This change was initially interpreted as a strategic move to diminish

Cristina Kirchner’s resistance to his candidacy, but once Scioli secured the FPV nomination, he

persisted in his staunch, if newly acquired, Kirchnerism. As 2015 went on, Scioli’s support

among those critical of the president progressively declined to about 15 percent by the time of

the October election.18 The substantively large effect of Presidential approval likely reflects in

part Scioli’s strategic turn, but such a strong statistical association was not at all obvious at the

beginning of the campaign, given the tensions between Kirchner and Scioli.

The pattern of media consumption is statistically significant in the expected direction:

voters who obtained their news from strongly Kirchnerist media outlets such as the Televisión

Pública, Página 12, or “semi-public” cable network C5N, were more likely, other things being

equal, to vote for Scioli than voters relying on media critical of the government, such as Grupo

Clarín’s cable network TN, or the newspapers La Nación and Perfil. Recall that the measurement

of media consumption patterns (wave 1) took place several months prior to the measurement of

the dependent variable (wave 2), which should help mitigate endogeneity problems. Moreover,

the large set of control variables in our final model reduces the probability that the indicator of

media consumption is capturing the effect of other explanatory variables correlated with it.

Taken together, these variables boast remarkable explanatory power. For example, a

female voter who identifies with the FPV, participates in a clientelistic exchange, and is at the

next to most pro-FPV level in all other variables that predict voting for Scioli is estimated to

18
Source: see footnote 17.
19
have a probability of voting for the incumbent of 0.98.19 The opposite voter – a male not

identified with the FPV, not part of a clientelistic exchange, and at the next to least pro-FPV

level in all other variables – has an estimated probability of voting for the FPV of 0.15. That is,

moderate differences in a few explanatory variables can account for very large differences in the

predicted probabilities of voting for the incumbent Peronist. As Figure 8.1 makes clear, one does

not even need to simulate differences in many independent variables to explain wide differences

in the likelihood of supporting the incumbent Peronist candidate, as Presidential approval by

itself commands remarkable explanatory power: keeping all other variables at their means, a

voter who strongly disapproves of the president’s job has a probability of voting for Scioli of just

12 percent, while for one who strongly approved of the president that probability soars to 81

percent. Knowing just one fact about a voter—her assessment of the president several months

before election day (i.e., at wave 1 of the APES) —goes a long way toward explaining her

decision to support (or not) Scioli.

Conclusions

This chapter adopts a causes of effects approach to explaining the decision to vote (or

not) for the incumbent presidential candidate Daniel Scioli in Argentina’s October 2015 general

election. It tests many and diverse hypotheses, coming to one main conclusion: the election was

largely a referendum on the performance of outgoing President Cristina Kirchner (or, in an

alternative interpretation, of Kirchnerism in general). The probability of voting for Scioli is –

ceteris paribus– positively and strongly associated with voters’ assessments of the president’s

19
These calculations are based on the results of model 5 in Table 8.A2 in the chapter´s appendix.

20
job.

Such strong statistical association should not be taken for granted. In previous Argentine

presidential elections, the assessment of the president did not have such a dominant role

(Gervasoni 1998; Tagina 2012a; Montero and Ratto 2013). Our finding would not be surprising

if the candidate had been Cristina Kirchner herself, or a person closely identified with her. Scioli,

on the contrary, was an uncomfortable and reluctant ally. Her attitude towards him in the years

before the campaign oscillated between lukewarm and downright hostile. Scioli—a relatively

popular governor of the most important province in the country—was able to muster significant

support for his candidacy in the PJ, but was derided and resisted in the inner circles of the

presidency. Cristina Kirchner did not sponsor an alternative candidate, but never threw her full

support behind Scioli either, not even in the critical days before the second-round election that he

narrowly lost.

Voters seem to have ignored the political tensions between the FPV’s main leaders. Our

results show that they largely saw the presidential election as a venue to express their support for

or opposition to Kirchnerism’s surviving leader, Cristina Kirchner. This is consistent with

analyses of Argentine politics that have emphasized the deep rift (la grieta) between Kirchnerists

and anti-Kirchnerists. From this point of view, Scioli, even if he was not fully identified with the

Kirchners, was the only candidate minimally acceptable for their followers. His late-hour

alignment with the populist discourse and harsh rhetoric of Néstor and Cristina Kirchner during

the campaign may have contributed to increasing the statistical association between presidential

approval and vote choice. This consideration notwithstanding, it seems reasonable to conclude

that the long and controversial twelve years during which Néstor and Cristina Kirchner

controlled the presidency led, in 2015, to a type of referendum election in which people’s votes

21
were to a large extent retrospective pass/fail decisions on the controversial Kirchners’ legacy.

Other factors related to the three terms of Néstor and Cristina Kirchner also had a

significant statistical association with (and we surmise impact on) voting decisions. Assessments

of the state of the national economy (or retrospective sociotropic voting) and identification with

the FPV are the second most important predictors of vote choice. Notice that, unlike Peronism or

Radicalism, the FPV label is a recent creation that did not become widely known until the mid-

2000s. No citizen of voting age in 2015 could have been socialized into a FPV identity from her

early years. Identification with the FPV, then, is likely to be for many voters more an expression

of approval of kirchnerismo than a deep-seated social identity. To the extent that the statistical

associations between assessments of the president, assessments of the economy, and

identification with the FPV on the one hand, and voting for Scioli, on the other, are causal,

retrospective evaluations of kirchnerismo and its performance in office seem to be the key to

explaining voting behavior in the 2015 presidential election. Of note, party identification with

the FPV predicts voting for Scioli much more strongly and consistently than identification with

the PJ. This is surely in part due to the strong association between the FPV label and

kirchnerismo, and partly to the fact that many leaders and factions in the PJ were critical of the

Kirchners, to the extent that sometimes they faced them electorally in national and provincial

races. In fact, presidential candidates Sergio Massa and Adolfo Rodríguez Saá had as much of a

claim to being Peronists as Scioli did. In any case, it is certainly striking that in our models with

more controls, party identification with Peronism does not increase the probability of voting for

the official PJ candidate.

An important and original contribution of our analyses is documenting a significant

association between state dependence and voting for the incumbent party’s candidate. Voters

22
whose household income was disproportionally composed of public sector salaries, planes

sociales and retirements via moratoria previsional—all sources of income that were significantly

expanded under kirchnerismo—were more likely to support Scioli. It seems that incumbents do

benefit from the social policies implemented under their mandates and, more generally, that

dependence on public sector sources of income is one of the drivers of incumbency advantage

(Hunter and Power 2007; Manacorda, Miguel, and Vigorito 2016; Zucco 2013). The effect of

clientelism is less clear, as its association with voting for Scioli depends on details of the model

specification.

Additionally, we present evidence that education and SES (socioeconomic status) do

influence voting behavior, but that their effects are to a large extent mediated by state

dependence: voters of less privileged social backgrounds are more likely to be dependent on

diverse streams of state-originated income, and this income appears to make them more likely to

support the incumbent. The capacity of education and SES to predict voting, however, is quite

limited, clearly smaller than that of the more political factors discussed above.

A potential causal factor that has received little attention in the literature provides some

additional explanatory leverage: media consumption. Another of our original findings is that,

ceteris paribus, in the polarized media environment that characterized Argentina since the late

2000s, obtaining political information from one of the many pro-Kirchner public or government-

funded private media outlets increased the likelihood of voting for Scioli.

Programmatic or ideological variables seem to have had little or no role in explaining

voting for Scioli. Our results indicate that the 2015 Argentine presidential election was much

more about positive and negative assessments of the Kirchners and of their legacy than about

policy positions or ideological preferences.

23
 Our conclusions echo those of Murillo, Oliveros, and Vaishnav (2010), but in the

opposite political and ideological context. In the same way that electoral support for the Latin

American left in the 2000s was driven much more by (negative) retrospective assessments of

right-wing governments than by ideological considerations, our findings imply that the defeat of

the incumbent statist Peronists at the hands of a center-right coalition had little to do with

ideological shifts in public opinion (see Schiumerini, this volume) and much to do with electoral

accountability. Voters decided to either support or vote against a fourth consecutive FPV term in

office largely as a function of how they evaluated Cristina Kirchner’s performance as president

and, to a lesser extent, how they evaluated the economic performance of the country under her

watch.

24
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Appendix

Table 8.A1. Theoretical Approaches, Variables, Associated APES Items, and Question Wording
Theoretical Explanatory Variable APES item ID Question Wording
approach factor name
Long-term Class/Socio- Education P89b Standard “Level of education variable” (edu) in dataset (P89b recoded in five
factors: Socio- economic levels)
demographic Status SES P125_1-P125_10 and Standard “Socioeconomic status” (SES) in dataset: ¿Podría decirme cuáles de
characteristics P136_1_w2- los siguientes objetos tiene el en hogar? heladera con freezer, teléfono fijo,
and political P136_10_w2 teléfono celular, auto, lavarropas, moto, computadora, servicio de internet,
identities televisor de pantalla plana, gas de red
Party ID PID FPV P38, P39 & P40 Independientemente de por cuál partido votó en la elección pasada o votará en
PID Peronism la que viene, en general, ¿simpatiza usted con algún partido político en
particular?
(Si dijo “no”) ¿Siente usted un poco más de simpatía por algún partido político
que por los otros? ¿Con/por cuál partido?
Ideology Ideology P36 En política la gente habla de “izquierda” y “derecha.” Usando otra escala,
donde 0 significa IZQUIERDA y 10 DERECHA, ¿dónde ubicaría usted se
ubicaría usted?
Gender Female Sexo Female=1 Male=0
Age Age Edad Age in years
State Economic ties Economic ties P107_w2 (respondent ¿En su ocupación usted es …?: Empleado del estado o empresa estatal
dependence of respondent to the state public employee)
and clientelism and her (wave 2) P121_w2* (partner ¿En su ocupación principal su pareja es …?: Empleado del estado o empresa
household to (index) public employee) estatal
the state P131_w2 (plan social
in the household)
P132_w2 (AUH in the ¿Usted o alguna persona en su hogar es beneficiario de algún plan social?
household)
P133* (beneficiary of ¿Usted o alguna persona en su hogar es beneficiario de la Asignación
moratoria previsional Universal por Hijo?
in the household)
¿Usted o alguna persona en su hogar se benefició con la moratoria previsional?
Clientelism Clientelism P54_w2 Durante este año, ¿recibió usted alguna ayuda material – como ropa o comida
(wave 2) – o favor personal de algún candidato o referente político?
Economic and Position on Presidential P2 Hablando en general acerca del gobierno actual, ¿cómo calificaría la gestión de
government government- approval la Presidenta Cristina Fernández de Kirchner: Muy buena, buena, ni buena ni
evaluations mala, mala o muy mala?
29
 opposition
dimension
Economic National P7 ¿Diría usted que durante los últimos 12 meses la situación económica de
voting economy Argentina ha mejorado mucho, ha mejorado, ha permanecido igual, ha
(retrospective) (sociotropic empeorado, o ha empeorado mucho?
voting)
Personal P9 ¿Considera usted que su situación económica actual es mejor, igual o peor que
finances la de hace 12 meses?
(pocketbook
voting)
Positional Position on Issues K P15_1 a P15_6 Ahora le voy a preguntar sobre políticas públicas. Le voy a pedir que en cada
issues and issues of the (index) caso me diga si usted está muy de acuerdo, algo de acuerdo, ni de acuerdo ni
media effects Kirchnerist en desacuerdo, algo en desacuerdo o muy en desacuerdo. ¿Cuán de acuerdo
agenda está usted con …
- la AUH - la regulación precios
- Permiso e impuestos para comprar dólares
- Impuestos para transferir dinero a otro país
- Impuestos para comprar productos importados
- Limitaciones a las inversiones extranjeras en el sistema financiero
Media effects Pro-K media P84, P86 & P88 ¿Cuál es el principal canal de TV que mira para informarse sobre la situación
consumption** del país?
¿Cuál es el principal diario que lee para informarse sobre la situación del país?
¿Cuál es la principal radio que escucha para informarse sobre la situación del
país?
Dependent Vote for incumbent’s party P27_1 & P27_2 ¿A qué candidato votó en las elecciones generales (25/10/2015)? (Scioli=1)
variable candidate
*
Economic ties to the state includes two items from wave 1 because they were not included in wave 2.
**
The score for this variable is the mean position of the respondent’s top source of political information on the dimension “support/opposition to the government
of Cristina Fernández de Kirchner,” obtained in our survey of experts (see survey’s details in the online appendix).

30
Table 8.A2. Logit Models of Scioli Vote
(1) (2) (3) (4) (5)
Long-term factors: Socio-demographic characteristics and political identities
Female 0.096 0.148 0.137 0.296 0.237**
(0.192) (0.179) (0.195) (0.214) (0.120)
Age -0.005 -0.008 -0.005 -0.000 -0.000
(0.007) (0.007) (0.007) (0.006) (0.006)
Education -0.127* -0.115* -0.099 -0.019 -0.029
(0.073) (0.069) (0.068) (0.081) (0.084)
SES -0.219** -0.203* -0.169 -0.141 -0.192
(0.104) (0.110) (0.103) (0.120) (0.129)
PID Peronism 0.906** 0.893** 0.106 0.090
(0.428) (0.415) (0.391) (0.364)
PID FPV 2.199*** 2.210*** 0.973** 0.834*
(0.461) (0.459) (0.473) (0.469)
State dependence and clientelism
Economic ties to the state (wave 2) 0.781*** 0.598** 0.844***
(0.228) (0.280) (0.302)
Clientelism (wave 2) 0.297 -0.002 1.291**
(0.893) (0.826) (0.512)
Economic and government evaluations
Personal finances -0.552* -0.430
(0.296) (0.387)
National economy 1.838*** 1.673***
(0.506) (0.612)
Presidential approval 3.437*** 3.002***
(0.538) (0.541)
Positional issues and media effects
Issues K 0.501
(0.589)
Pro-K media consumption 0.914**
(0.377)
Constant 1.25* 0.699 0.211 -2.57*** -2.81***
(0.704) (0.720) (0.683) (0.800) (0.905)

Pseudo-R2 0.031 0.142 0.153 0.261 0.284

AIC 901 803 791 688 538
Observations 665 665 660 649 511
Note: Values are unstandardized logit regression coefficients. Standard errors clustered by
province are in parentheses.
*
p<0.1, ** p<0.05, *** p<0.01

31