Wednesday, June 16, 2010

Elections and horse races in Latin America

There has been a lot of talk in the political science corner of the blogosphere about how the media wants to portray elections as horse races, whereas political scientists show how short term swings matter little to the ultimate outcome--see The Monkey Cage, Christopher Beam, Daniel Drezner, Matthew Yglesias).

This is also relevant for Latin America.  Check out Andres Oppenheimer's really bad article on how the World Cup will affect presidential elections in Colombia, Brazil, Argentina, and Mexico.  

1 comments:

Randy Paul 9:41 PM  

It's not just bad, it's really patronizing. Case in point: brazil won the WC in 2002 and Lula was elected. Brazil got knocked out in the quarterfinals and badly at that in 2006 and Lula was reelected.

In 1994 Brazil won the WC and Cardoso was elected. In 1998 Brazil lost in the final to France (badly as well) and Cardoso was reelected.

I can assure that WC results had zero influence on these four elections.

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