Candidates or Parties? Ethnic Cleavage at the Peruvian Subnational Level
A relatively new and important feature in Latin American third-wave democracies has been the rise of ethnic politics. Previously excluded indigenous groups throughout the region have shown renewed determination to participate in the political life of their countries and to demand a say in the democratic decision-making process. The analyses on indigenous politics so far have placed an emphasis on the development of indigenous social movements as they turn to political parties, especially in South America. Prominent scholars such as Donna Lee Van Cott, Deborah Yashar, Raúl L. Madrid, and Roberta Rice have all focused their attention on how and why ethnic politics have gained momentum in Latin America since the beginning of the 1990s. However, few studies have focused on how indigenous identity can be activated as an electoral cleavage. In this paper, we utilize two original datasets that disaggregate preferential voting at the district level for the last three Peruvian legislative elections and we utilize an original survey conducted on candidates on the latest (2018) subnational election. This project takes a different approach from prior research in that we center our analysis on the identity of the candidates instead of the political parties, which allows us to know if an indigenous cleavage is activated by the presence of a co-ethnic in the election, or if this is a product of the campaign strategies of the candidate.