Social Cleavages, the Anchoring of the Vote, and Party System Stability: Latin America and Western Europe.

This paper has three objectives. In this article, we examine the differences in electoral volatility between Western Europe and Latin America and we studied whether these differences can be explained through the social cleavage theory and by arguments about party system stability based on the left-right schema. We use these theories to see if differences in individual level long term voting factors can help explain differences between less stable (or more volatile) and more stable party systems. Our second objective is to advance the use of theoretical approaches and methodological tools for Latin America that have been used for studying voting and party systems in the advanced industrial democracies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]