Left and right: Way to define them, Latin American case and their implications

Left and right (or liberal and conservative) are widely used concepts for analyzing parties and other political objects, but they have at least two problems. First, it is unclear whether they are useful outside rich democracies. Second, they are not defined in a single way; there are two broad approaches. On one side an historical-analytical tradition, and on the other side, an approach based on spatial theories of party competition. This paper: a) compares two classifications of Latin American political parties on the left-right scale according to those approaches, finding that they are very different; b) suggests a plausible explanation for those differences based on systematic patterns found in the data, explanation which leads to several testable hypotheses, and c) shows that available evidence and current literature support those hypotheses, hence the explanation itself.