How Prevalent are Colortocracies in Latin America?

Abstract Recent scholarship has significantly advanced social scientific understanding of the socioeconomic consequences of skin tone and ethnoracial identity in several Latin American countries. We update and extend this literature by conceptualizing colortocracies as countries that exhibit a preference for Whiteness as evidenced by lighter-skinned individuals enjoying higher levels of socioeconomic status than their darker-skinned counterparts. Specifically, we test the preference for Whiteness hypothesis using data from the 2018 Latin American Public Opinion Project (LAPOP)—a nationally representative dataset covering approximately 90% of the Latin American population (about 578 million people) across sixteen countries. We find strong evidence that wealth-based colortocracies are three times as prevalent throughout Latin America as occupational-based colortocracies. Interviewer-rated skin tone is a stronger predictor of inequality than self-designated racial categories, but the magnitude of its strength is far greater when predicting wealth than occupational status. We conclude that the extent to which colortocracies (e.g., preference for Whiteness) exist in Latin America simultaneously depends on the outcome measure and the country under consideration. We document this cross-national variation and discuss the implications of our findings for future research.