Cleavage Articulation Failures and Electoral Volatility

• In Event: Movements and Democracy in Contemporary Context

Abstract

Research on electoral volatility typically assumes that volatility is driven by malleable voters. In contrast, this study focuses on party-driven volatility. It considers how political parties’ cleavage articulation failures—when parties fail to discern and represent the relevant dimensions of cleavage-based identities—shape volatility outcomes. Articulation failures may occur for one or more cleavage blocs. When articulation failures are partial, they generate divergence in volatility levels across these blocs. I evaluate the association between articulation failures and volatility outcomes by considering how shifting articulations of Bolivia’s ethnoracial cleavage have affected patterns of bloc and systemic volatility. I find that the country’s former and current party systems reflect partial but opposite articulation failures of the ethnoracial cleavage. Whereas political parties failed to articulate the indigenous identity in the former party system, in the current party system, the non-indigenous bloc remain disarticulated. Bloc volatility levels have shifted accordingly. The findings shed light on the ways in which salient identities can interact with different representation outcomes to facilitate or hinder party system institutionalization.

Author

• Mariana Giusti-Rodriguez, Naval Postgraduate School