Many scholars have attempted to estimate minority support for political parties in various countries worldwide. These measures can help researchers understand the extent to which minorities are included in government and the institutions that can promote minority inclusion. This project contributes to this research by estimating the voting behavior of ethnic minorities in Peru and Panama. For Panama, I used data from the 2019 election and the 2023 census. For Peru, I used the 2021 election and the 2017 census. Much of the focus was on gathering and cleaning census and election data from Panama and Peru, focusing on ethnic populations and party vote totals from each political unit. Separate R programs had to be developed to organize the raw data into files that could be quickly sorted by political unit and minority group. I could then use this data to perform ecological inference analysis, which gave estimates of the percentage of each ethnic group that voted for a political party. In general, minority groups in Panama, including indigenous groups and Afro-Panamanians, voted at relatively similar rates to non-minorities. In Peru, the situation was different—the Free Peru party, the winner of the 2021 election, saw much more significant support from indigenous groups than the rest of the population. These results suggest that minorities in Panama vote based on values and interests much more aligned with the rest of the population than minorities in Peru. However, more research should be done to fully understand the implications of these results on minority inclusion.
Voting Behavior of Minorities in Panama and Peru
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Student Abstract Submission