Segmented Party-Voter Linkages in Latin America: The Case of the UDI

Abstract

By analysing the socially segmented party voter linkages deployed by the Union Democrata Independiente (Independent Democratic Union, UDI), a Chilean conservative party, this article demonstrates the usefulness of combining Kitschelt's party voter linkage framework with Gibson's conceptual approach to conservative party electoral coalition-making. In Latin America, parties take advantage of social fragmentation and the availability of non-state campaign financing to combine multiple linkage types and thus attract socially diverse constituencies. Although it is an opposition party, UDI's historical trajectory and organisation have enabled it to receive private funds from its traditional and party-identified core constituency (business and conservative sectors), whose programmatic preferences and interests it represents, and then use these resources in a 'charismatic' mobilisation approach and particularistic exchanges with a non-core constituency (low-income, non-traditional voters of the radical right), in a segmented, but nationally integrated, electoral strategy.