Representación en elecciones municipales en América Latina: Partidos políticos nacionales y otras candidaturas a alcaldías

Latin American countries allow for the political participation of different types of candidates in local elections. Institutional reforms in recent decades have tended to open up local electoral competition, allowing for a greater presence of alternative candidacies to parties. This article explores the presence of mayors from national political parties versus alternative candidacies and their relationship with national legislation on the type of electoral candidacies allowed in each country. The study argues that while there is much variation across countries, party-governed mayorships are the most common and local executives led by alternative candidacies are not necessarily as numerous. On the one hand, using descriptive statistics, the findings show that the presence of new actors is rather concentrated in urban and more socio-economically developed areas. On the other hand, using secondary literature from different Latin American countries, the article shows that the perceived crisis of representation is due to three aspects of national party candidacies, related to the type of people who form them, their relationship with political parties, and the relationship of local party branches with their national counterparts. The research is based on the electoral results of almost 10,000 municipalities in 15 Latin American countries in the mid-2010s.