Structural cleavages, electoral competition and partisan divide: A Bayesian multinomial probit analysis of Chile's 2005 election

The transformations in Chile's party structure since 1989 have led several authors to examine the main cleavages shaping partisan divisions and the impact of different factors on citizens' party preferences. Previous studies, however, failed to analyze the effect of these variables on actual vote choice and neglected the influence of election-specific factors. In order to address these issues, we implement a Bayesian multinomial probit model to analyze Chile's 2005 election. We show that, while both socio-demographic variables and attitudes towards democracy affected voter behavior, the latter were the main determinants of the choice between Chile's two main political coalitions. In addition, we find that the presence of a second conservative candidate, together with voters' strategic considerations, significantly affected candidate choice. These results cannot be accounted for by analyses focused on citizens' party identification or by methodologies that ignore the effect of substitution patterns between candidates on voters' electoral behavior.