@era-areas.bsky.social
@ff.unikarlova.cuni.cz

7/ Some electoral years are currently missing from the data, but we are working on adding the missing elections over time. We already have plans on updating the dataset in 2026 with data from all Latin American parliamentary elections taking place in 2024 and 2025, so stay tuned for updates.

6/ We also calculated legislative turnover rates and compared them to other secondary sources, finding a correlation of r = 0.83. As most turnover research does not publish the used data, the reasons of these differences can only be inferred.

5/ Our sources are listed in the supplementary material to the dataset, with most of the data stemming from official documents of national electoral bodies. We validated our data by comparing the shares of female legislators with data from the IPU, finding a correlation of r = 0.98.

4/ Furthermore, we identify legislators across elections, with a unique ID for each individual legislator and each observation of a legislator. This allows us to count consecutive parliamentary terms, chamber switching behavior, and much more.

3/ The dataset itself is publicly available at the OSF under the following link:
👉 doi.org/10.17605/OSF... It contains individual-level data, such as a legislator’s sex, party, electoral district, and parliamentary chamber.

2/ Our comprehensive dataset includes data on elected legislators in 259 elections across 18 Latin American countries since 1978, with more than 30000 observations of more than 20000 unique legislators.

@era-areas.bsky.social
@ff.unikarlova.cuni.cz
@universitypress.cambridge.org
@cambup-polsci.cambridge.org
@poscresearch.bsky.social

4/ This is important especially in Chile 🇨🇱, where such a limit has been imposed in 2020. The country has recently experienced a surge in turnover rates due to changes in the electoral system. As such, it is a great example of the effects of institutional engineering on legislative turnover.

3/ Using multilevel regression models, we make several findings. Longer legislative terms, changes in chamber size and staggered elections all increase turnover. Unsurprisingly, limiting re-election to 3 or 4 subsequent parliamentary elections substantially increases legislative turnover.

2/ Latin American countries experience extremely high legislative turnover. On average, only 3 in 10 legislators are elected to serve a subsequent term. However, this varies greatly as Chile experiences 53% turnover, while Bolivia has 85%, making it almost a complete renewal with each election.