Programmatic and Non-Programmatic Party System Structuration in Latin America

• In Event: Programmatic and Populist Party Structuration in Comparative Perspective

Abstract

The academic literature on Latin American party systems has emphasized two seemingly disparate realities. Several studies have stressed the personalistic, and clientelist nature of parties as well as the region’s volatile electoral context. Moreover, at the start of this century, widespread dissatisfaction with democracy and the weakening of established political parties opened opportunities for successful populist outsider leaders, reinforcing the sense that party systems in Latin America lacked programmatic structure. Other scholars, however, have argued that ideological and programmatic incoherence have been overblown, demonstrating through analyses of party positions that Latin American party systems have a clearly identifiable ideological structure, especially regarding the economy, and to a lesser extent on socio-cultural issues. In this paper, we argue that both sets of scholars have identified important characteristics of parties in the region. Relying on data regarding party positions across different types of policies and dimensions from the first Chapel Hill Expert Survey on Latin America (CHES-LA) and using confirmatory factor analysis, we show that party competition in Latin America is in fact programmatically structured, but not exclusively so. It is multi-dimensional, with relevant dimensions also of clientelism and populism, with intra-regional variation. In our conclusion we examine the negative implications this has for democratic accountability and meaningful political representation.

Authors

• Nicolás de la Cerda, Tulane University

• Cecilia Martinez-Gallardo, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

• Jonathan Hartlyn, Univ North Carolina, Chapel Hill