Replication Data for: The Malapportionment-Generating Process in Latin America: A Decomposition Analysis of Electoral Inequality in Argentina, Brazil, and Chile

Malapportionment is considered a type of political inequality. The malapportionment-generating process (MGP) can be divided into demographic and political processes. Previous studies have conceptualized the malapportionment caused by the demographic process as demographic-driven malapportionment and the one caused by the political process as politically engineered malapportionment (Snyder and Samuels 2004; Kamahara, Wada, and Kasuya 2021). Compared with other regions, Latin America is plagued with a more severe state of malapportionment. Snyder and Samuels (2004) qualitatively clarified that malapportionment in Latin America, especially in Argentina, Brazil, and Chile, is perennially caused by political elites because they exploit it as an electoral strategy for their political survival. Meanwhile, this article quantitatively analyzes the MGP in the recent Argentine, Brazilian, and Chilean elections by employing a new malapportionment measure (and its decomposition property), proposed by Kamahara, Wada, and Kasuya (2021). The decomposition analysis demonstrates that Argentina and Brazil continued to suffer from a relatively higher degree of malapportionment because they did not adopt appropriate policy interventions against electoral unfairness. Chile, meanwhile, overcame its severe state of malapportionment by introducing a more proportional electoral system, leading to a dramatic decline in the degree of malapportionment in the postreform period.