A New Critical Juncture? Party System Transformation in South American Politics

• In Event: Critical Junctures: Juxtaposing Methods, Triangulating among Divergent Findings

Abstract

This paper reflects on some important choices in critical juncture analysis, from the perspective of a writer who wrote a comparative historical analysis of recent party system transformations in Latin America but opted not to use the critical juncture framework. The paper begins with an overview of my argument for explaining variation in regional party system change during the post-Cold War period, which stresses the occurrence of state crises and the inherited strength of left-wing political infrastructure. I then reflect on two key analytic decisions and how they differed from those made by Kenneth Roberts, who examined much the same cases and events, but decided to explore them through a critical juncture analysis. The first regards how to understand the causal impact of antecedent conditions. Drawing on examples from my argument and that of Roberts, I develop a typology clarifying different ways in which antecedent conditions exert causal impact within hypothesized critical junctures. The second regards how to determine whether a legacy has lasted long enough to be considered enduring. While there is no simple answer to this question, a useful exercise involves explicitly comparing the average length of legacies, as they can be perceived at the time of writing, to the average length of critical junctures. Performing this exercise lends support for my decision not to utilize the critical juncture framework.

Author

• Samuel Handlin, Swarthmore College