Electoral reform and political representation in Peru and Latin America.

Abstract

The objective of this article has been to investigate the relevance of the electoral reform for the political representation of the Peruvian and Latin American parliament. The study was basic, non-experimental, cross-sectional and descriptive. A structured qualitative interview, observation, analysis, interpretation and triangulation was carried out, applied to ten specialists, including political scientists, professors and representatives of civil society, regarding electoral reform and political representation in the Peruvian parliament. He was associated with electoral and democratic theories. The instruments were the interview guides, being the Lima Metropolitan study scenario, with ten participants according to the saturation of data. The main conclusion was that the electoral reforms of the last thirty years in Peru and Latin America were alien to citizen participation, prioritizing political and economic interests instead of strengthening representative democracy. Political representation has focused on the debate on the ethical and moral issues of the congressmen, such as corruption, the limited internal democracy of political parties, the negotiation of votes in the congress and the social insignificance of the laws passed, which do not they allow to improve political representation in parliament.
Keywords: Electoral reform, political representation, representative democracy, citizen participation.