Party-based regimes in Latin America

• In Event: History of Political Institutions and Processes

Abstract

Party-based regimes are more prosperous, peaceful, and stable than regimes where parties wait in the wings while charismatic leaders, personalistic networks, or religious and military organizations predominate over the political stage. Yet, only a few of the world’s regimes are party-based. Why? This paper explores the roots of Latin America’s party-based regimes since independence. Latin America shows the largest variation in the degree to which regimes are party-based, historically and contemporaneously, among all the world’s regions. Existing scholarship tends to emphasize institutional characteristics and labor-incorporation processes as the key to explain variation in party systems in the region. I reject these explanations theoretically and empirically, and advance an alternative theory that emphasizes how early dynamics of coalition formation in Latin America’s new republics shaped the long-term development of political institutions in the region. I also demonstrate how the few countries that managed to change course did so after situations of extraordinary conflict reshaped political coalitions on the ground. With these arguments I integrate three branches of the literature in the comparative politics of Latin America – one that emphasizes the 19th century roots of the continent’s political institutions, one that studies party formation in democracies and autocracies, and the literature that explores the consequences of political violence in Latin America.

Author

• Fernando Augusto B Neto, Harvard University