2023-07-02 06:58:54
Julian Borba/Latinoamerica21*
Hoy 03:58
Can the feeling of citizen insecurity collapse the credibility of a president? Or, on the contrary, could the perception of violence under control, in a security context that is increasing, strengthen the prestige of rulers? Or do only the successes and failures in the economic field count to understand the popularity or unpopularity of the Executive in our region?
According to public opinion polls, Latin American voters are immersed in pessimism. The Latinobarómetro study shows that the proportion of people dissatisfied with democracy went from just over half in 2008 to three out of four people in 2020. The reasons are well known. With the exception of 2020 and 2021, when the world was immersed in the covid-19 pandemic, all the polls show that for Latin Americans the main problem is the economic situation, especially unemployment and low wages, followed by crime. and corruption.
Specifically on the issue of citizen security, 38% of Latin Americans say they live in places where there is organized crime, armed groups, drug traffickers or “gangs”, and more than half say they change their schedules out of fear.
For some time now, insecurity and the feeling of imminent threat or violence have become a threat to their authority for rulers, comparable to the devaluation of power caused by inflation and other economic uncertainties. What impact can the centrality of the problem of the lack of security and predictability of physical and patrimonial integrity have on the evaluation of rulers?
The impact that both the feeling of insecurity and the objective experience of crime have on public opinion with respect to Latin American presidents is, according to studies, devastating. Hence, the “firm hand” and decision-making positions, controlling the perception of threat and transmitting a public sense of order that the rulers seek to imprint.
A key issue in determining this effect is the degree of constitutional allocation of responsibility for maintaining order and controlling crime, which may be exclusive to the national government or shared. It would be natural to expect that the popularity of national governments, with exclusive responsibility for security, would be more affected by feelings of personal or financial vulnerability and the feeling of victimization. In other words, voters would be more likely to punish or reward those who hold office in contexts where their responsibility for public safety is clear.
This suspicion goes beyond academic consideration to the extent that it can radically shape the destinies of a government, since the perception of its ability –or inability– to build a generalized notion of control can represent the difference between its survival or fall and – even more so – between conformity or not, with the functioning of democracy.
Surveys such as Lapop, carried out before the outbreak of covid-19, indicated that almost half of the Latin Americans interviewed said they felt insecure and, in some countries, this contingent reached 67%, as in the case of Panama in 2016. Meanwhile, the regional average of victimization affected one in four Latin Americans, although in countries like Mexico, Honduras and Brazil this percentage exceeded 30 points.
How much, then, do these sensations explain the tremendous variation in presidential popularity that we found in the pre-pandemic period among presidents, capable of ranging from as extremely low as barely 10% for then-president Michel Temer in Brazil in 2016 to a incredibly high extreme with more than 70% approval for the government headed by AMLO in Mexico in 2018?
Analyzes of the relationship between these measures show the strong dependence of the ability to govern with the sense of security of the population. Citizens who feel insecure, but also those who declared having been victims of crime in recent months, tend to present more negative evaluations of their respective mandates.
More specifically, insecurity limits presidential approval ratings to 24%, thus pulverizing the president’s powers of command and direction. The experience as a victim has a lower impact (since it is less widespread than the perception of risk and danger) and reduces the credibility of the governments in power by 13%.
These results are sharpened when the attribution of responsibilities to the president for insecurity is very clear. The difference in the weight of insecurity on the credibility of a ruler, between a country where the maintenance of public order is concentrated exclusively in the national Executive and another where this power is shared with the state or municipal administrations or with the Legislative and Judicial, it can be 15%. It is the cost of a widespread perception of risk.
Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign popularized the expression “it’s the economy, stupid!” The belief then was that the fluctuations of political support, including the popularity of the president during his administration, depended to a great extent on the success or failure in the field of material and financial well-being.
This assumption was soon imported into Latin America. However, the results of the aforementioned studies offer a perspective that goes further. In other words, the government’s performance on economic issues such as inflation and unemployment are fundamental, but insufficient, to explain the state of mind of the electorate. In the Latin American context, marked by alarming indicators of violence and crime, government action in matters of public security cannot be ruled out in order to understand the course of governance.
Not in vain some political leaders, from Jair Bolsonaro to Nayib Bukele, have reaped high electoral dividends with their public order speeches!
*Professor at the Federal University of Santa Catarina and researcher at CNPq (Brazil).
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