A classification of Latin American political parties (original) (raw)
Party Systems in Latin America
Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics, 2020
Since the beginning of the third wave of democratization in the late 1970s, Latin American party systems have confronted several challenges, and they have frequently been transformed. There have been various types of changes. While some systems collapsed in the 1990s (e.g., Venezuela and Peru), others realigned (Colombia, Chile, and Uruguay), or expanded (Argentina and Mexico), or were able to become consolidated and ensure their stability over time (e.g., Brazil). What factors explain the transformations in party systems during the past three decades, and how can Latin American party systems be classified according to their attributes? In trying to answer these questions, scholars of Latin America have undertaken studies that are both theoretically and empirically rich. Their work has increased our knowledge of the party systems and representative democracies in the region. Different factors have been highlighted in order to explain the changes these systems have undergone since the third wave of democratization. Some works emphasize the importance of institutional reforms introduced by politicians or by constitutional assemblies. The questions they address are the following: What political reforms have been introduced into Latin American political systems, and what effects have they had on the party systems in different countries? The researchers do not limit their attention to reforms of electoral systems. For example, some of them also study decentralization processes and their effects on party systems. From a different perspective, other authors focus on changes in electoral preferences and their effects on the configuration of political power, exploring how regional economic, political, and social changes have affected voter preferences and the political configuration of party systems. Still others consider the crises of democratic representation in these countries, underlining the decline in the programmatic character of parties as an explanatory variable for the crises and noting that the level of institutionalization of a party system declines when parties abandon this distinctive feature and become clientelistic or personalistic instead. On the other hand, in order to describe party systems and to observe the changes they have undergone, academics have proposed a set of concepts and measurements that make it possible to identify their levels of institutionalization (i.e., stability vs. volatility), nationalization, and programmatic structuration, among other aspects. The operationalization of these concepts has provided researchers with useful data for describing, comparing, and analyzing the party systems of the region transversely over time. Understanding the transformation and characteristics of Latin American party systems over time sheds light on both the progress democratic regimes have made and the setbacks they have suffered within specific countries and in the region at large. Keywords: Latin America, party systems, electoral reforms, voter realignment, democratic representation, fragmentation, institutionalization, volatility, nationalization, party system structuration, Latin American politics
'Break-In Parties' and Changing Patterns of Democracy in Latin America
Although Lijphart's typology of consensus and majoritarian democracy can be regarded as the most widely used tool to classify democratic regimes, it has been rarely applied to Latin America so far. We try to fill this gap by adapting Lijphart's typological framework to the Latin American context in the following way. In contrast to previous studies, we treat the type of democracy as an independent variable and include informal factors such as clientelism or informal employment in our assessment of democratic patterns. On this basis, we aim to answer the following questions. First, how did the patterns of democracy evolve in Latin America over the two decades between 1990 and 2010 and what kind of differences can be observed in the region? Second, what are the institutional determinants of the observed changes? We focus on the emergence of new parties because of their strong impact on the first dimension of Lijphart's typology. From our observations we draw the following tentative conclusions: If strong new parties established themselves in the party system but failed to gain the presidency, they pushed the system towards consensualism. Conversely, new parties that gained the presidency produced more majoritarian traits.
Electoral Laws, Parties, and Party Systems in Latin America
Annual Review of Political Science, 2007
■ Abstract With a focus on Latin America, this literature review considers the extent to which electoral systems affect different aspects of parties and party systems. We find that standard electoral system variables fail many empirical tests that try to tie them to any facet of parties or party systems. Still, methodological considerations regarding interactions with party strategies, party organization, and many contextual variables loom large, so we cannot reject the hypothesis that electoral systems are influential. Analyses, therefore, must go far beyond formal electoral rules generally or a simple focus on single aspects of electoral rules (such as the district magnitude) when trying to explain political behaviors.
Party Membership in Latin America. Party Strategies and the Role of Party Members
Contrary to the situation in Europe, comparative study of party membership in Latin America is virtually nonexistent. The goal of this essay is to fill this gap in the study of party politics and the internal organization of parties in the region. This essay examines the statutes of the principal political parties in Latin America and analyzes the role given to party members in fifty-one political parties in the region. This information is organized into three categories: entry requirements; members' rights; and members' duties (in formal terms). The essay argues that these aspects are rather homogenous among Latin American countries; unlike the situation in Europe, they cannot explain differences in party membership growth rates. The essay evaluates six alternative hypotheses, concluding that the varying levels of party membership in Latin American countries are the result of a combination of historical factors, candidate selection procedures, and party strategies.
Society and Political Parties in Latin America. A Salvageable Relationship?
Auslandsinformationen, 2018
For years, Latin Americans’ trust in the established political parties has found itself in a downwards spiral. This brings young movements and political novices to the scene, who have been winning elections all over the continent lately. Nevertheless, doubts are justified as to whether these political outsiders are able to solve the myriad of crises.
Segmented Party–Voter Linkages in Latin America: The Case of the UDI
Journal of Latin American Studies, 2010
By analysing the socially segmented party-voter linkages deployed by the Unión Demócrata Independiente (Independent Democratic Union, UDI), a Chilean conservative party, this article demonstrates the usefulness of combining Kitschelt's party-voter linkage framework with Gibson's conceptual approach to conservative party electoral coalition-making. In Latin America, parties take advantage of social fragmentation and the availability of non-state campaign financing to combine multiple linkage types and thus attract socially diverse constituencies. Although it is an opposition party, UDI's historical trajectory and organisation have enabled it to receive private funds from its traditional and party-identified core constituency (business and conservative sectors), whose programmatic preferences and interests it represents, and then use these resources in a ' charismatic ' mobilisation approach and particularistic exchanges with a non-core constituency (low-income, nontraditional voters of the radical right), in a segmented, but nationally integrated, electoral strategy. four anonymous reviewers for their very insightful comments on earlier versions of this paper. At different stages, Mauricio Morales, Sergio Toro, Rafael Piñeiro and Peter Murphy provided skilful research assistance. FONDECYT Projects 1060760 and 1090605 funded this research. Any remaining errors are mine.
Comparative Political Studies
Political leaders around the world increasingly rely on personalist parties to win elections and govern. While existing scholarship assumes that personalist parties do not build territorial organization, in fact they vary substantially in terms of organizational strength. In this paper, we move beyond existing structural explanations of party-building and focus on the role of party elites’ preferences to explain the source of this variation. Through a mixed-method approach combining process-tracing of the case studies of Venezuela’s MVR/PSUV and Ecuador’s Alianza PAIS and statistical analysis of Latin American parties, we find that party elites’ past political experiences shape whether personalist parties successfully invest in party organization. Party officials who were socialized in radical-left parties are more likely to advocate for party-building and their presence within party cadres is associated with stronger party organization.
Partidos políticos versus presidentes. Un análisis de la congruencia ideológica en América Latina
Revista Latinoamericana de Opinión Pública, 2020
This study aims to understand political congruence in Latin American presidential democracies. It analyzes the levels of ideological congruence between parties and presidential candidates with their voters. The data used come from Americas Barometer at Vanderbilt University and Latin American Elites Project at the University of Salamanca for 11 Latin American countries between 2004 and 2014. The results conclude that the ideological links in Latin America are varied. Voters tend to be more congruent with the political parties they vote for in the legislative than with the candidates they vote for president, reinforcing the idea of dual legitimacy and dual representation in these countries. The radicalism, and the number, of parties and candidates appears as the most significant variables to explain ideological congruence.
Elections and the Muddled Present of the Latin American Democracies
Latin American Research Review, 2019
, permanently dwell in the quagmire of intense social violence and utter disregard of the rule of law. Farther south, Peru's political turmoil has brought down a president, jailed the main opposition leader, and rocked the judiciary. Bright spots are few and far apart: Ecuador's post-Correa democratic change, of course; Colombia's complex and conflictive postconflict still holds promise, in spite of strong resistance, of extricating the country from the longest civilian conflict in the Western Hemisphere; and Uruguay's democratic stability stands out amid the turbulence in neighboring Argentina and Brazil. However, even democratic stalwarts such as Chile and Costa Rica experience unexpected problems stemming from the erosion of their party systems. Yes, we still have elections. This is the longest period in Latin American history in which governments are elected by reasonably free and fair elections. And, yes, heeding the advice made by the books under review, we should not conflate the countries' political problems into one big bundle labeled "Latin American democratic crisis." Yet it is safe to say that the optimistic promise of the Third Wave of democracy for Latin America has faded, and, after a long transition from authoritarianism, most countries in the region remain stuck in the status of hybrid regime, semi-democracy, or low-quality democracy. 2 Some are now authoritarian systems, and the few traditional democracies are not going through the best of times. Latin American has learned to combine competitive electoral democracy, with flawed rule of law institutions, a bent for authoritarianism from powerful executives encroaching on other branches of the state, and protracted social violence, which curtails the exercise of rights and liberties by the citizenry. Against this problematic backdrop, a crop of new books on Latin American politics demonstrates both the promise and the shortcomings of comparative studies in the region. Four of them rely on sophisticated survey analysis for studying citizen behavior in the region as a whole, for a subset of countries, or for one case (Brazil), over a decade. A fifth shares an emphasis on electoral democracy with the previous works but has a definitely less ambitious and more descriptive scope. Two other books use mixed methods that combine in-depth country cases and statistics to test wide-ranging theoretical claims. Finally, I review a book that takes on populism in Venezuela from another discipline and in so doing, provides a valuable discussion on the historical roots of identity politics. Looming large in this set of books is the ambitious Latin American Voter: Pursuing Representation and Accountability in Challenging Contexts, edited by Ryan E. Carlin, Mathew M. Singer, and Elizabeth J. Zechmeister, an exquisitely conceived collective effort by a distinguished group of Latin Americanists. It sheds light on whether, after decades of experience with democracy, citizens in this region resemble their counterparts in advanced democracies when voting in elections. Apart from the impressive array of scholars involved in the project, what makes this book stand apart from the rest is its systematic approach. With one exception (Herbert Kitschelt and Melina Altamirano's piece on clientelism), the authors share a substantive theoretical inquiry: does American political theories on voter behavior travel well to Latin America? Most of them share a methodological design-several essays use a same Left-Right (L-R) variable construction 3and, most importantly, they have a shared source of information: the AmericasBarometer from the Latin American Public Opinion Project (LAPOP) at Vanderbilt University. More than a collection of essays, this is an academic collective project. Authors use sophisticated statistical models such as multilevel regression models and analysis of change in probabilities to test drivers of electoral choice: sociodemographic (age, gender, race, class); political attitudes; retrospective evaluation of societal performance (economy); or the effect from the exposure to crime and corruption. While one may have objections about the loose operationalization of certain conceptsfor example, social class and cleavage, which sometimes end up conflated with any meaningful social 2 Classification of the countries may vary depending on the framework one uses. For an in-depth analysis of Central American countries, see