Recovering a Basic Space from Elite Surveys: Evidence from Latin America.” Legislative Studies Quarterly 34

This paper applies a scaling method developed by Aldrich & McKelvey (1977) to the Political Elites in Latin America surveys in order to map the ideal points of legislators, as well as to recover the basic space in nine Latin American countries. The representation of the ideological configuration of each of these countries matches very well the way in which their political landscapes have been described both in the popular press and in the scholarly literature. These findings buttress the validity to the estimates obtained using the A-M procedure. The results in this paper also show that survey data can be reliably used to locate legislators ’ ideological positions in a multi-dimensional ideological space in a manner analogous to roll call-based methods that are commonly used in the scholarship on the U.S. Congress. The main advantage of this method is that it does not rely on recorded votes, so is not affected by the validity of roll call data as unbiased indicators of legislator’s preferences. Most importantly, because it does not require access to voting records, the approach suggested in this paper can be applied anywhere around the world