The resilience of localism or party nationalization? Empirical implications of the “pink tide” for party nationalization in Latin America, 1986 – 2014

• In Event: Party Systems and Dynamics

Abstract

Under what conditions does politics become national, thus territorially and socially fragmented voices can be unified under a single party or the coalition of parties with commitment to nationally salient issues? This question seems substantial to understand the change of democratic representation after the so-called “pink tide” in contemporary Latin America. Indeed, despite the strong tradition of federalism in Brazil and Argentina, the level of party system institutionalization has been recognized as distinctive between the two. Nevertheless, both countries have witnessed the rise of leftist candidates in presidential elections around the turn of the twentieth century. Implicit in this difference is that, contrary to the mainstream in the literature of party nationalization, the power of a political party to expand its support across a country should be independent of institutional settings (e.g. decentralization) and the presence of strong candidates to the presidency. By making the comparative study of the “pink tide” with the framework of party nationalization, this project seeks to test the hypothesis by establishing an electoral dataset from twenty Latin American countries with and without the election of leftist candidates to the presidency. The statistical estimation will be made with latent transition analysis in which a dependent variable will be the growth pattern of party nationalization and independent variables will be the degree of decentralization, the type of electoral systems, and the effective number of presidential candidates.

Author

• Kazuma Mizukoshi