Carlos Mendoza of The Black Box has two articles on the September 11th election in Guatemala. The first one appeared in Plaza Publica on Wednesday. This article took a look at the strengths and weaknesses of the two candidates that will advance to November's runoff.
In the first round vote, the Patriotic Party's Otto Perez Molina attained the highest vote in 222 of the country's 333 municipalities. Manuel Baldizon of Lider, on the other hand, won a plurality in 83 municipalities. Medoza finds that Perez performed better in more violent, urban, wealthier, and non-indigenous municipalities than he did in less violent, rural, poorer, and indigenous municipalities.
On Friday, he broke the data down into somewhat more precise categories based upon what quartile the municipality occupied relative to the rest of the nation. The tables here help to better visualize Perez' strength across the board and also appear to undermine some of the initial reads on Perez' performance.
For example, Perez performed better in the more violent municipalities (combine violento and muy violento) than he did in the less violent municipalities (pacifico and poco violent). However, he performed nearly equally as well in muy violento, violento, and pacifico municipalities which leads one to believe that Perez' mano dura platform was not much more effective where he probably thought it should have been (very violent municipalities).
Keep in mind that these municipalities were separated based on each one's murder rate (murders per 100,000). If we were able to categorize the municipalities by perceptions of insecurity, one might get a different understanding of how Guatemalans voted a few weeks ago. Not to mention that if you were able to look at individual level data.
What's interesting to me, at least, is that Perez received between 32% and 38% no matter how you slice the data - dimensions of insecurity, rural/urban divide, wealth, ethnicity, and human development.
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