Latin America’s Neocaudillismo: Ex-Presidents and Newcomers Running for President . . . and Winning Javier Corrales ABSTRACT Latin Americans have been voting for a surprisingly large number of ex-presidents and newcomers in presidential elections since the late 1980s. This article looks at both the demand and supply sides of this phenomenon by focusing on economic anxieties and party crises as the key independent variables. Sometimes the relationship between these variables is linear: economic anxieties combined with party crises lead to rising ex-presidents and newcomers. At other times the relationship is symbiotic: the rise of ex-presidents leads to party crises, economic and political anxieties, and thus the rise of new- comers. This article concludes that the abundance of ex-presidents and newcomers in elections—essentially, the new face of Latin America’s caudillismo—does not bode well for democracy because it accelerates de-institutionalization and polarizes the electorate. P residential elections in Latin America since 1988 exhibit an unusual trend. A large number of former presidents have been running for office and often winning. Counting only candidates who are not triv- ial—that is, who obtain more than 10 percent of the vote—at least one ex-president has run in roughly half the elections in which ex-presidents were constitutionally allowed to compete. They have won in almost 40 percent of the races. At the same time, the number of political new- comers—that is, candidates with virtually no political experience—is also large: nontrivial newcomers have competed in almost 20 percent of all elections. Latin Americans are displaying an electoral preference for two quite distinct candidates: ex-presidents and newcomers. This is an odd phenomenon. The electoral salience of ex-presidents and newcomers is a departure from the experience of democracies in Europe, where these types of candidates are infrequent. This trend also contradicts prominent theories about electoral choice, such as the view that electoral choice is contingent on economics and curricula vitae (Alesina 1994). In moments of economic downturn, according to this theory, voters tend to prefer candidates with resumes that combine reli- ability (i.e., a proven record of experience in office) with some detach- ment from the status quo that presumably makes the candidate more able to pursue change (Dalton and Wattenberg 1993). In Latin America, © 2008 University of Miami