A voter casts his ballot during the presidential primaries in Santiago, Chile, on June 29. Photo by Elvis Gonzalez/EPA
A far greater percentage of voters over 60 have turned out to vote than younger voters, often by margins of 10 to 25 percentage points, in recent elections across Latin America, including Argentina, Mexico, Chile and Brazil, an analysis shows.
This persistent gap is a clear sign of a crisis of representation that especially affects younger generations and fuels abstention as a form of political disengagement across the region.
Voter abstention has been a growing trend since 2010 in national and regional elections. The reasons behind this disengagement vary, but a crisis of representation and rising distrust in political elites — especially among young people — stand out.
“The representative system is in crisis. Society is increasingly distrustful of elites, especially politics as a profession,” Argentine political scientist Adrián Rocha said. He warned that voters between the ages of 18 and 30 are showing growing indifference toward traditional democratic values.
Even in countries where voting is mandatory — such as Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Peru and Uruguay — low turnout remains common in regional and internal party elections.
In Argentina, for example, only 53.2% of voters participated in Buenos Aires City’s legislative elections in May 2024. In the 2023 primaries, just 43% of voters between the ages of 18 and 29 cast ballots, compared to 71% of those over 60.
In Chile, only 9.16% of registered voters took part in the left-wing presidential primaries this past June. Just 35% of voters aged 18 to 24 turned out for the 2020 constitutional plebiscite, when voting was voluntary.
Similar patterns have emerged in other countries. In the Dominican Republic, abstention in the 2024 presidential election topped 46% — a steady rise compared to previous cycles.
Dominican attorney Allen Peña said the high abstention rate in his country is due “in large part to the lack of quality proposals from candidates — a perception that’s especially widespread among young voters.”
In Guatemala, turnout dropped from to 54% in 2023 from 61% in 2019, with the lowest participation among voters aged 18 to 29.
In Mexico, the judicial election held in June 2025 — the first of its kind in the country — set a record for low turnout: only 10% of eligible voters cast a ballot. While there are no official age breakdowns, analysts and international observers estimate that abstention among young voters exceeded 85%.
In Brazil, despite compulsory voting, more than 30% of voters aged 18 to 24 did not go to the polls in the 2022 presidential election.
Jorge Cruz, vice president of the Esquipulas Foundation, said “electoral abstention in Latin America is a growing phenomenon closely tied to the crisis of democracy. New generations show deep apathy toward politics, which they see as distant, bureaucratic and ineffective at solving their everyday problems.”
He added that many voters no longer see their ballot as a path to tangible change.
The 2024 Latinobarómetro confirms the trend. Although support for democracy rose from 48% to 52% across the region, one in four Latin Americans say they are indifferent to the type of political system.
The generational gap is also striking — only 45% of those under 25 support democracy, compared to 56% of those over 60. Preference for authoritarianism nearly doubles among younger respondents, rising from 13% among those over 60 to 21% among those under 25.
