Social Science Research Council

"Party System Collapse in South America: Voters, Party Organization, and Adaptation"

My current research interests focus on changes in political party systems and electoral behavior over the last twenty years in Latin America. My dissertation project seeks to explain party system collapses in Peru and Venezuela during the 1980s and 1990s by answering two questions. First, why did voters decide to turn from the traditional parties to anti-party system challengers? Second, why did politicians from the traditional parties fail to adjust to voter demands? I will address these questions using cross-national comparisons with other Latin American countries, particularly Argentina, as well as survey evidence and aggregate comparisons of regions within each country. The major hypotheses to be tested include, with respect to voter demands: the hypothesis that persistent high levels of government corruption produced dissatisfaction with the traditional parties; that voters turned away from the traditional parties because of persistent economic mismanagement; and that voters sought new alternatives because the traditional parties began to offer public policy packages that were either too redistributionist or too regressive to accord with majority preferences within the electorate. In terms of the party response, major hypotheses are organizational: leadership recruitment was too constrained, preventing new voices and faces from emerging and adapting to changed circumstances; decision-making procedures gave excessive veto power to organized interests such as labor unions and chambers of commerce; or leadership overvalued the benefits of remaining loyal to the party's activist base. This analysis is intended to contribute to the literatures on political party strategic adaptation and on the development of democracy in poor countries during the 1980s, the 1990s, and the current decade.