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THE new millennium has ushered in leftist governments across Latin America. With the election of Fernando Lugo as Paraguay's president in April 2008, every country in South America except Colombia and Peru had elected a left-of-center president during the prior decade. In Central America, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua also elected left-leaning presidents, and Mexico's 2006 election saw a leftist candidate lose by just half a percentage point.1
Observers have interpreted the electoral success of left-of-center presidential candidates as everything from a sign of electorates' wishes for the "final unraveling of the so-called Washington consensus"2 to an endorsement of free trade.3 Still others have argued that Latin America's "left turn" does not have roots in economic policy per se but rather in economic performance, stemming from a raft of anti-incumbent votes cast against right-of-center incumbents who presided over sluggish economic growth as the twentieth century ended.4
The distinction between these competing accounts is of more than just academic interest. Many supporters of the left wave are excited by the prospect that the new breed of electorally oriented leftists will do what the socialist and communist left of the past could not: reverse the market-oriented Washington Consensus policies of the past two decades and move the region consequentially toward socialism. For their part, conservative forces, including domestic political actors, capital interests, and foreign policymakers, have reacted with heightened concern that this radical policy-mandate interpretation of Latin America's pink tide may be accurate.
But if conventional wisdom among scholars is correct, and leftists have been elected as punishment against right-wing incumbents who governed during the so-called "lost half-decade" of economic stagnation from 1998 to 2002, then voters have granted the left a performance mandate to deliver economic recovery regardless of its policies in office. As a result, the left's tenure in government would be more vulnerable to economic performance and might be particularly threatened if the current financial crisis spreads southward.
We show that both existing interpretations fail to account for the rise of the left and argue that voters have granted new leftist leaders a moderate policy mandate. Using a variety of measures and structural variables that span more than a decade of elections in eighteen Latin American countries (Argentina, Bolivia,...