Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: In November, 2006, the leftist Sandinista Party and Daniel Ortega won back the presidential office of Nicaragua, after sixteen years in the opposition. However, the Ortega victory was based on a slender plurality of 38% which now requires Ortega and his Sandinista party to work to build a coalitional government in cooperation with a powerful single-chamber legislature where the Sandinistas do not hold a majority of seats. Analysis of the 2006 legislative vote shows that the hard-core Sandinista left witnessed very little split ticket voting in which voters supported Ortega for the presidency and some other party in the legislature. However, all the other parties who ran candidates in the 2006 election experienced some split ticket voting and this pattern was particularly predominant among supporters of the two centrist candidates, Eduardo Montealegre of the National Liberal Alliance and the Herty Lewites/Edmundo Jarquin ticket of the Sandinista Renovating Movement.

This paper uses the analysis of split ticket voting and other types of ambivalence toward a presidential choice to explore lines of cleavage and other opinion differences within the Nicaraguan electorate in the 2006 election. In a setting where split ticket voting is normally absent and is not generally studied, this analysis shows that voters who planned to split their vote or who considered doing so early in the electoral campaign represent a new kind of voter who may be more thoughtful and selective in his/her vote choice, less ideologically rigid, and who may be interested in moving away from polarized politics and toward a politics of greater policy pragmatism. Split ticket voting thus may be a sign of movement toward moderation in partisan sentiments that could foster a lessening of extremist divisions and a step forward toward democratic consolidation.