Democratization, Informal Institutions, and the Emergence of

Responsive Party Systems in Latin America

Simon Bornschier

University of St. Gallen and University of Zurich

siborn@ipz.uzh.ch

Paper prepared for the workshop “Rule of Law, Informal Institutions and Democracy in

Latin America and Eastern Europe in Comparative Perspective”

ECPR General Conference

Reykjavik, August 25-27, 2011

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Abstract

This paper’s point of departure is the assumption that the emergence a party system that is

responsive to the citizenry is an important determinant for successful democratization and

the establishment of the rule of law. Because many parties in Latin America and elsewhere

use clientelistic appeals to mobilize voters, they fail to adequately represent the policy

preferences of their electorate. In this paper, argue that programmatic party competition is

rooted in a specific historical interaction between the nature of the pre-democratic party

system at the end of the 19th century and political mobilization by progressive parties

between the 1930s and 1960s. I study this route in a comparative historical analysis of

democratization and party system formation in eleven countries. In order to make sense of

the failure of party systems to institutionalize in many Latin American countries, this

approach pays special attention to the deliberate attempts of political elites in restricting

competition and in deploying clientelistic appeals to prevent ideological conflicts from

materializing. The impact of historical party system formation on contemporary party

systems will then be assessed by drawing on data on party system institutionalization and

responsiveness after re-democratization in the 1980s.

3

Introduction

The first euphoria over the unprecedented diffusion of democratic rule around the world in

the “Third Wave” of democratization has given way to more gloomy assessments of the

prospects for the consolidation of democracy in many of these countries. Starting with

O’Donnell’s (1994) famous article on “delegative democracy”, the democratic quality of

many of the new regimes was questioned. This has resulted in a proliferation “democracies

with adjectives” or “defects” of democratic regimes that are used to characterize regimes

lying in the “grey zone” between democracy and authoritarianism (e.g., Collier and

Levitsky 1997, Diamond 2002, Merkel et al. 2003, 2006, Merkel 2004). In particular, this

literature testifies large problems regarding the rule of law, “horizontal” or inter-

institutional accountability, and in the responsiveness of party systems to voter

preferences.

This paper takes as its starting point the assumption that an important determinant for

the successful democratization is the emergence of a party system that is responsive to the

citizenry. Because many parties in Latin America and elsewhere use clientelistic appeals to

mobilize voters, they fail to represent the programmatic preferences of their electorate,

which would be one of democracy’s most central goals according to democratic theory. In

this paper, I present first results from a larger study that focuses on the conditions under

which conditions programmatic linkages come about. While recent developments in

countries such as Brazil and Mexico suggest that new parties that actively seek to

overcome clientelistic patterns of mobilization may actually be successful in the long run,

this paper focuses on a historical route of party system development that is capable of

explaining the prevalence of programmatic party competition after the most recent

transition to democracy in the region in the 1980s. I adopt a “Rokkanian” perspective that

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analyzes critical junctures and historical legacies that set countries apart (Lipset and

Rokkan 1967, Rokkan 1999, Collier and Collier 2002 [1991]). By stressing the merits of

polarization for political representation and, consequently, the quality of democracy, my

approach differs from that of scholars which have pointed to political moderation as a key

for democratic survival (e.g., Collier and Collier 2002).

This paper posits two critical junctures that set party systems based on ideological

divisions and those based on clientelistic mobilization apart. The first is the type of elite

party system that emerged around the turn of the 19th to the 20th centuries, which has

important consequences for the representation of elite interests when the suffrage was

expanded later on. Only where conservative forces joined together in nationwide parties

were they able to defend their interests effectively in the electoral arena was open party

competition viable. This had important consequences for what I call the polarization phase,

when left-wing or progressive parties challenged the political establishment between the

early and the mid-20th century. In this phase, politics came to evolve around clearly

contrasting visions of state responsibility or market liberalism, as well as around the issue

of further democratization. Where conservative parties met the challenge of competing

openly with progressive forces, clientelism, if not ousted, was at least constricted or

complemented by programmatic bases of vote choice. In those contexts where elite

interests in the early democratization process were not safeguarded by political parties,

polarization was aborted by different means, such as bans on challenging parties, military

interventions, and the use of clientelistic resources to de-mobilize newly emerging social

groups. Consequently, these party systems are characterized by heavy reliance on

particularistic benefits and low levels of programmatic structuring.

5

Overview and a guide to the reader

The paper is structured as follows. The first section briefly discusses the role of parties in

democratization and reviews recent theorizing on party systems in new democracies.

Second, I sketch the theory involving the two critical junctures outlined above. The bulk of

the paper is then dedicated to the comparative historical analysis of eleven Latin American

countries. Due to the historical evidence necessary to substantiate the theoretical argument

presented, this is a very long paper. This is a guide on how to access the material

presented: I suggest first to read the two theoretical sections, as well as the introductions to

the analysis of the first and the second critical junctures on pages 18 and 26 to 29,

respectively. Figure 2 on page 29 presents a synthesis of the historical trajectories of the

eleven countries. Those not interested in the details of the specific cases, but rather in the

main thrust of the argument may read only the discussion of those countries they are

particularly interested in or of classifications that appear implausible to them. Section 5

then tests whether the predictions derived from the historical analysis explain party system

institutionalization and responsiveness in the 1980s and 1990s. While the focus of the

paper is thus on the early post-authoritarian party systems, I discuss some more recent

evolutions that may lead to a modification of the historically shaped patterns in the

conclusion. The conclusion also provides a summary of theoretical argument and of the

empirical results.

6

Party systems and democratization

As the actors linking citizens and the political system, parties play a central role in

guaranteeing democratic governance. In a path-breaking approach, Mainwaring and Scully

(1995) have argued that democratization entails not only the building of formal democratic

institutions, but also of party systems that represent the interests of voters in the political

process. Most importantly, these authors have reveal vast differences in party system

institutionalization, or, put differently, in the degree to which they constitute veritable

systems, in Sartori’s (1976) terms. Only when the basic patterns of opposition or conflict

are stable do party systems structure the expectations of political actors and introduce

predictability in politics. This, on the other hand, is considered a central prerequisite of

democratic accountability and of the congruence between citizens and their representatives

(Mainwaring and Scully 1995, Mair 1997, 2001, Tóka 1998, Mainwaring and Torcal

2006).

While the representative function of party systems as such makes them a key element of

democracy (Pitkin 1967, Dahl 1971, Powell 2000), a party system firmly rooted in society

may also be a remedy for other defects of new democracies. Early on, O’Donnell (1994)

deplored that institutions in many of the new Latin American democracies do not function

in the way conceived in their constitutions. In particular, he highlighted that whether

parliaments can fulfill their role of effectively checking the executive depends on the

strength and cohesion of political parties. More recently, Chavez (2003) has shown that the

prevalence of the rule of law depends on the historical fragmentation of economic power

and on the resulting “balanced dispersal of political power” (p. 423). A pluralistic party

system, in which governing parties face the threat of finding themselves in the opposition,

therefore favors the establishment of judicial autonomy. Likewise, Ríos-Figueroa and

7

Pozas-Loyo (2010) show that independent judicial institutions are less likely to be created

by constituent bodies dominated by a single political group than what they call multilateral

constitution-making processes.

Party systems, once institutionalized, seem to remain remarkably stable, and the path-

dependent nature of their evolution partially accounts for the continuing differences in the

quality of democracy across Latin America. In Europe, the conjuncture of large-scale

processes of social change and extensions of the suffrage resulted in the early emergence

of cross-local functional conflicts that displaced the clientelistic and local politics prevalent

before (Caramani 2004). Latin American trajectories have proven much more varied.

While some party systems, such as the Brazilian one, have emerged more or less from

scratch after every disruption of democratic rule, the party systems in Colombia, Uruguay

and Chile still carry the imprint of the conflicts prevalent in the early decades of the 20th

century, when democracy was first established (Dix 1989, González 1995, Scully 1995,

Coppedge 1998, Mainwaring 1999). In these cases, strong linkages between parties and

voters seem to have “frozen” party systems into place much like their European

counterparts. Mainwaring and Zoco (2007) have recently shown that lasting differences

between party systems result from specific historical sequences, highlighting that there is

nothing automatic in the stabilization of interparty competition over time. The degree to

which party systems have stable roots in society and become institutionalized thus seems

to be a crucial aspect of the more general path dependency of democratic trajectories.

A major shortcoming of the party system institutionalization approach is that the

indicators commonly used to measure the concept say little about whether parties build

voter loyalties by offering distinctive policy programs, or whether the stability of party-

voter linkages is due to the distribution of particularistic benefits. Here, the distinction

between programmatic, clientelistic, and charismatic linkages introduced by Kitschelt

8

(2000, Kitschelt and Wilkinson 2007) is useful. The party system institutionalization

literature assumes that stable party system result from parties “standing for something”

(Mainwaring and Scully 1995) in terms of differing policy options, and hence a

programmatic linkage, where goods are distributed according to universalistic criteria and

irrespective of whether an individual supported the party that distributes the benefit. To the

degree that parties control the clientelistic networks characteristic of Latin America’s non-

ideological party systems (Chalmers 1977), however, party system stability can also mean

that parties deliver in terms of the particularistic resources they promise to voters. While

the clientelistic linkage between parties and voters means that parties are accountable to

voters, they fail to be responsive to their policy preferences.

At an aggregate level, Kitschelt, Luna, and Zechmeister (2010: 294) show an

impressive relationship between the degree to which party systems are rooted in

programmatic lines of conflict, and various indicators measuring the rule of law, and levels

of corruption in Latin America. The recent re-invigoration of the linkage approach by

Kitschelt and his colleagues has thus provided valuable theoretical tools and some results

that testify the importance of programmatic linkages for the quality of democracy. Where

the observed differences between Latin American countries come from, and under which

conditions programmatic linkages are capable of ousting clientelism, remain open

questions, however. It is to this question that this paper seeks to make a contribution.

Because the parties of notables characteristic of pre-democratic elite party systems

usually employ clientelistic means to stay in power once the suffrage is extended, I take a

party system based on clientelistic, rather than programmatic linkages as a starting point

(c.f., Gunther & Diamond 2003: 175-7). To the degree that the established parties are able

to prevent new competitors from entering the system, clientelistic practices are likely to

remain unaltered. As Shefter (1977, 1993) and Geddes (1994) have argued and empirically

9

shown, in the absence of a universalistic state bureaucracy that precludes such practices – a

condition that generally does not apply in Latin America – established parties are able to

secure their position by distributing particularistic benefits. Hagopian’s (1996) case study

of Brazil reveals that clientelism is an instrument of long-established political elites to hold

on to their positions of power and privilege. Only “externally mobilized parties”, in

Shefter’s terminology, which do not have access to the ruling circles of power, push for

programmatic competition – because programs are all they have to offer. By the same

token, it can be hypothesized that once ideological party competition has been established

and parties appeal to voters by offering distinctive policy options, clientelistic promises

will no longer prove very successful. For voters that are sufficiently informed and are

offered clear programmatic options, selling their vote for a particularistic benefit is

unlikely to be an attractive option. Consequently, the initial emergence of a party system

that is responsive to the preferences of the citizenry emerges as a decisive moment in the

evolution of party systems.

Historical party system formation and polarization: Two critical junctures and

implications for linkage practices

The role of conflict in responsive party system formation

Two requisites are necessary for voters to develop firm attachments to parties that

represent their interests. First, in line with classical approaches to party system formation

(Sartori 1968, 1976) and the more recent study of party system institutionalization in Latin

America (Mainwaring and Scully 1995), the options represented by parties need to be

10

fairly stable in order to socialize voters into a given structure of conflict and to

subsequently give them guidance in their political decision-making processes. Individuals

with high levels of political interest may do without parties and can vote based on the

issues of the day. An institutionalized party system, on the other hand, gives those broad

segments of the electorate the possibility to take meaningful decisions for whom politics is

not their prime interest. From a cleavage perspective (Lipset and Rokkan 1967, Bartolini

and Mair 1990, Bornschier 2009), and building on social psychological theories of

collective identity formation (e.g., Coser 1956, Stryker 1980, 2000), the development of

the lasting political identities that underlie stable party systems requires political conflict,

as Sartori (1968) has suggested long ago. Consequently, a stable, responsive party system

will only emerge if parties present contrasting policy propositions. Put differently, a

responsive party system requires ideological polarization for its formation.

Once such a party system is in place, and given periodic re-emergence of policy-based

conflict in order for parties to retain voter loyalties based on these historical antagonisms,

party systems are likely to perpetuate themselves over long periods of time (Bornschier

2010: 53-63). At least the European experience testifies that ideological party systems tend

to remain stable over long historical periods, as new generations of voters are socialized

into the prevailing structure of conflicts; that is, they come to interpret politics in terms of

the basic dividing lines represented by the party system (Lipset and Rokkan 1967,

Bartolini and Mair 1990, Bornschier 2010: Ch. 3). In the Latin American context, the

durability of party systems in Chile and Uruguay suggests that party systems, once firmly

entrenched, can survive even protracted periods of military rule. On the other hand,

countries such as Brazil, Peru, Ecuador, and Bolivia did not see the institutionalization of a

cleavage-based party system in the first decades of the 20th century, and politics in these

contexts continued to be heavily stamped by clientelistic forms of mobilization after re-

democratization in the Third Wave of democracy.

11

Of course it may appear questionable to champion political polarization in contexts in

which the interests of the landed upper classes, and the availability of the military to act on

their behalf, makes the avoidance of polarization appear far more auspicious for the

survival of democracy. And indeed, in a view defended most articulately by Collier and

Collier (2002), the political moderation of the left, and a labor movement tied to the

political center has been key in making a more inclusive political regime acceptable for the

upper classes in the first decades of the 20th century in Latin America. In this view, it is the

avoidance of polarizing conflict that makes democracy viable. If we shift the focus from

democratic survival to the quality of democracy in the long term, however, a quite

different picture emerges. With hindsight, we know that the collusion of the major parties

in Colombia and Venezuela, and the emergence of a dominant party system in Mexico,

cases that represent success stories from Collier and Collier’s point of view, were not

propitious for the democracy in the long run. While these countries avoided a breakdown

of democracy in the 1960s and 1970s, the survival of popular rule came at the price of a

democracy of low intensity resulting from de-facto restricted competition, as I will argue

in more detail later on.

If we assume for a minute the importance of a responsive party system for the quality of

democracy, and if political polarization indeed helps to create tight links between voters

and parties that re-emerge even after authoritarian periods, then the central question

becomes under which conditions polarization contributes to making party systems

responsive. In this paper, I propose a model with two critical junctures, the combination of

which either results in a party system representative of the preferences of the citizenry, or

to a system in which particularistic clientelistic benefits are the dominant currency in

engendering political support. I suggest that the propitious path to a responsive party

system entails a parties that offered clearly contrasting policy propositions early in the 20th

century, but nonetheless survived long enough to build strong and enduring political

12

identities. Consequently, programmatic parties have re-emerged in most recent wave of

democratization in these contexts, while other countries had to begin more or less from

scratch, increasing the chances that competition is of a primarily clientelistic character.

Two critical junctures

Put simply, the model posits that the emergence of a responsive party system by the mid-

20th century required a strong parliamentary representation of the right in a first step, and

then a polarization of political space by left-wing or other progressive forces in a second

step. The basic theoretical model outlining the two critical junctures is presented in Figure

1. The starting point, inspired by Coppedge’s (1998) account, is the kind of party system

that emerged from the conflict between Conservative and Liberals after independence

(McDonald and Ruhl 1989, Di Tella 2004). This conflict results from a similar critical

juncture as occurred in Europe, which Lipset and Rokkan (1967, Rokkan 1999) refer to as

the “national revolution”. With conflicts centering on the prerogatives of the Church and

over political centralization, the antagonisms that emerged in much of Latin America after

independence were similar to those created by nation-building in the European context.

The second critical juncture, the polarization resulting from the rise of left-wing or

progressive forces, is similar to the “industrial revolution” in Europe in terms of the issues

it put on the agenda. The Latin American experience differs from the European one,

however, in that these conflicts became firmly institutionalized only in few cases. In some

countries, party systems proved unable to channel conflict, and consequently, politics was

dominated by military interventions. Still in others, political elites proved capable of

deploying informal institutions to avoid the crystallization of these conflicts. This

argument is now spelled out in more detail.

13

Figure 1: Two critical junctures and the resulting linkage types

Whether or not a competitive elite party system existed prior to mass politics represents the

first parting of the ways in Figure 1. In line with classical accounts of democratization

(Moore 1969, Dahl 1971), Coppedge (1998) emphasizes the effect of party competition on

elite political culture, as the acceptance of a liberal political regime entailing the right to

opposition becomes engrained in a pluralistic political culture. Consequently, elites are

more likely to accept new actors’ right to opposition when the suffrage is expanded. While

not denying the impact of political culture, I suggest that the central mechanism linking

early pluralism to later political outcomes is of a different kind. Drawing on Gibson (1996)

and Rueschemeyer et al. (1992), pluralistic elite party systems predating democratization

enhance the chances that conservative forces in society – above all, the upper classes – will

build national party organizations to defend their interests as the suffrage is expanded to

the middle classes. I follow Gibson (1996: 7) and others in defining conservative parties as

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14

“...parties whose core constituencies are upper social and economic strata but that mobilize

multi-class electoral support in a common political project” (Middlebrook 2000: 3).

Occasionally, I refer to conservative parties’ core constituency as the pre-democratic elite

or the “oligarchy”, the latter term drawing on Collier and Collier (2002: 786-7), who use it

to denote primarily the landed elite and the elites in the mining or the extractive sector.1

As Remmer (1984: 222) concurs in pointing out that “If a single lesson is to be drawn

from the complex evidence concerning the introduction of competitive party politics in

[Argentina and Chile], it is that the consolidation of liberal democratic institutions depends

not upon their effectiveness in equalizing the distribution of political power, but upon their

acceptability to the propertied and the powerful”. As we shall see, the structural

interpretation is better than the cultural account in explaining why conservative forces that

were regionally divided frequently did not accept open competition despite a pluralistic

pre-democratic order. This first bifurcation in the model thus separates to types of cases.

The first type saw an early emergence of institutionalized elite party systems that in a later

phase helped to provide protection for the interests of pre-democratic elites. In the second

type, the party system preceding mass democracy failed to offer the protection of elite

interests due to a variety of reasons: either no pluralistic pre-democratic order had existed,

or elites were regionally divided due to divergent economic bases, or they were simply too

weak to withstand progressive forces, and a revolution did away with the elite party

system.

The second critical juncture occurs when externally mobilized parties (new political

actors, that is) claim to represent the hitherto marginalized interests of new social groups

such as the middle classes and the popular sector. Left-wing or progressive parties

appeared throughout Latin America in the first decades of the 20th century, but the impact 1 In some countries at least, these groups eventually become decoupled from their initial economic base and came to form an elite that sought to maintain its privileged political position, rather than defending specific economic interests (Hagopian 1996).

15

on party systems has depended as much on the reaction of the elite to their challenge, as on

their own strength. In order for a responsive party system to become institutionalized, a

rough balance in the vote share between old and new parties is necessary. Only one

particular trajectory results in the emergence of a responsive party system and an early

programmatic structuring of the party system. This is route 1 in Figure 1, where

polarization occurs and persists over a longer time-span due to the traditional elites’

capacity to defend their interests in the electoral arena. The resulting ideological conflicts

create strong political identities in which the party system is rooted. Ideology at least

partially crowds out clientelism since large segments of the electorate come to base their

vote choice on parties’ programmatic offerings, rather than direct material rewards. The

crowing-out effect is only partial because conservative parties, whose core constituency is

numerically smaller than that of middle class parties, frequently resort not only to religious

and conservative values in mobilizing beyond the rather narrow strata constituted by upper

classes, but also to clientelism in order to gain weight in electoral assemblies. In particular,

conservative parties tend to be entrenched in the countryside and frequently use clientelism

to get out the vote from dependent peasants and rural laborers.

Contrary to the slender route leading to a responsive party system, a variety of

trajectories results in settings in which clientelism is pervasive and where voters have

difficulties in identifying contrasting policy platforms. What they have in common is that

no polarization of the party system occurred between the 1930s and the 1960s. I call this

aborted polarization, because it represents the conscious effort of parties to restrict

competition. There are two basic ways to restrict competition and thereby to impede

polarization: The first is an outright ban on opposition parties to prevent them from

running in elections. The second, more subtle form sees elite parties retain their hold on

politics due to their monopoly on clientelistic resources, despite not being responsive to the

policy preferences of their electorate. Where the established parties succeed fully in

16

excluding challenging parties using either of these two strategies, I propose to call the

resulting system a dominant party system, even if more than one party competes in

elections and the system appears pluralistic at first sight. However, these contexts lack

what Levitsky and Way (2010) have termed a “level playing field”, making it next to

impossible for opposition parties to gain power. The key difference between a responsive

party system and a dominant party system in terms of citizen-politician linkages is that

voters are offered contrasting policy proposals in the first case, while they collude and thus

fail to do so in the second. As we shall see, dominant party systems can be the result either

of a restriction of competition on the part of older elite parties, or of a revolutionary

movement that succeeds in simply sweeping the old elite away. A responsive party system

thus necessitates the presence both of conservative, and of progressive parties.

With these theoretical premises in mind, it is now possible to sketch three paths

deviating from the successful trajectory to a responsive party system. First of all, elites

may choose to restrict competition despite having a mass basis that would help them

safeguard their interests in a more competitive regime (route 2 in Figure 2). Ultimately,

whether elites allow for competition or restrict it is not so much a question of political

culture, but depends on whether elites believe their position in a more open system to be

secure, or if they fear becoming marginalized. Where parties capable of protecting elite

interests did not institutionalize, two basic scenarios are possible: Either polarization is

aborted or ends (route 4), or progressive parties continue to challenge the status quo. In the

latter case, where traditional elites are unable to protect their interests the electoral arena,

they are likely to turn to the military to protect their interests in the wake of polarization

(route 3).

17

Although the expansion of the franchise plays an important role in triggering political

mobilization, whether or not ideological polarization occurs is largely independent of the

inclusiveness of the regime. Thus, conflicts may become heated in the context of a very

restricted franchise, as was the case in Chile throughout the first half of the 20th century.

On the other hand, parties may restrict competition long before universal suffrage is in

place. Thus, what I seek to explain is not the establishment of inclusive elections, as in

Rueschemeyer et al.’s (1992) work, but the responsiveness of party systems to those

effectively enfranchised around the 1960s. The hypothesis is that a system that is

responsive and open to the entry of new political actors will be able to adapt to an

extension of the franchise.2

In terms of case selection, my objective is to include as many Latin American countries

as possible in order to maximize variation in terms of the two key independent variables,

i.e. the capacity of elites to defend their interests in the electoral arena, and the degree of

polarization occurring in the later phase. On the other hand, the number of countries to be

considered faces constraints in terms of the manageability of the historical analysis. I

therefore focus on eleven Latin American countries, omitting the Central American and

Caribbean countries, which are generally analyzed on their own. However, to ensure

comparability with other major studies, I follow the common practice to include Mexico,

while Costa Rica, one of the oldest democracies in the region, will be included in a later

stage of the project. As we will see, these eleven cases provide some important variation in

terms of the two critical junctures postulated in the theoretical model.

2 The same is not true of party systems that had been weakly institutionalized and unresponsive the 1960s: Here, the expansion of the franchise in the process of re-democratization in the 1980s amplified the discontinuity with pre-coup party systems, as highlighted by Remmer (1985).

18

The pre-democratic order and the defense of elite interests

The common starting point of party system development in post-colonial Latin America is

the conflict between Liberals and Conservatives, and how it became channeled into party

conflict towards the end of the 19th century (McDonald and Ruhl 1989, Di Tella 2004,

Coppedge 1998). With the partial exception of Uruguay, religious issues – such as

religious or state control over education and the prerogatives of the state over those of the

Catholic church more generally – played an important role in this conflict. To varying

degrees, this antagonism also reflected divisions between geographical regions and elites

favoring the centralization of political authority as opposed to those who advocated

decentralized, federal government (Middlebrook 2000: 7-8, Hawkins et al. 2010: 242-50).

As such, this first critical juncture is comparable to what Rokkan (1999) has referred to as

the national revolution in the European context. Contrary to the European experience (see

Caramani 2004), this conflict did not result in the institutionalization of national party

systems throughout the continent. Consequently, it had strongly differing consequences for

the capacity of elites to safeguard their interests once middle class movements started to

assert themselves. Among the eleven cases covered in this analysis, party systems offered

elites a protection of their vital interests only Chile, Uruguay, Colombia, and Paraguay. I

begin the discussion with these countries. The following analysis of cases exhibiting a

failure of elites to protect their interests in the electoral arena is divided into two parts. I

start with Argentina, Brazil, and Ecuador, where the regional division of elites resulted in

their failure to establish a nation-wide conservative party. Peru, Bolivia, Venezuela, and

Mexico, on the other hand, represent different variants of an illiberal political order, which

left elites with no party organizations that would have allowed them to rival progressive

forces when elections became more open.

19

Party systems with favorable conditions for the protection of elite interests: Chile,

Uruguay, Colombia, and Paraguay

Although the religious and political disputes of the 19th century were also fought out in the

battlefields, they were ultimately expressed in a relatively pluralistic order in Chile,

Uruguay, Paraguay, and Colombia. In Chile, the “Parliamentary Republic” of 1891 saw the

emergence of a competitive party system and the formation of a nationwide religious

cleavage (Scully 1992, Collier and Collier 2002). Although this conflict was also one about

the control of government and patronage resources (Valenzuela 1977), the religious

cleavage survived the later advent of a class cleavage, making the country’s party system

closely resemble those found in Western Europe. The early emergence of three parties

forced them to work together when in opposition, and the Conservatives believed that they

would profit from an extension of the suffrage due to their nationwide organization and

their strong links to local notables that controlled clientelistic networks (Scully 1992).

Although politics became more thoroughly clientelistic and the Conservatives and the

Liberals started to collude towards in the second decade of the 20th century (Valenzuela

1977), the early setting had resulted in the establishment of a conservative party with an

extensive party organization of national scope. This provided favorable conditions for the

re-emergence of ideological conflicts and the formation of an urban class cleavage in the

1920s as a result of the emergence of left-wing parties in the context of an extensive labor

movement.

The party systems of Uruguay, Colombia, and Paraguay exhibit some striking

similarities in terms of their origins and early features, being composed of two parties,

each of which displayed substantial internal factionalization. Since their party systems

could hardly look more different today, these countries illustrate the interaction between

the two critical junctures very nicely. In Uruguay and Colombia, strong party loyalties

20

resulted from the protracted civil wars in the 19th century (and beyond that in the case of

Colombia) and the fact that the entire population had taken sides in one of the camps that

later formed the Colorados and Blancos (or Nationals) in Uruguay, and the Liberals and

the Conservatives in Colombia. In a commonly shared view, a “long history of violence”

meant that “Personal physical security became intertwined with attachment to one or the

other party, giving party loyalty an unusual intensity” (Collier and Collier 2002: 124-5).3

The rigidity resulting from these close ties between citizens and parties, which were

galvanized by extensive patron-client networks and extensive party organizations spanning

the territory, led to the factionalization of parties along ideological lines (Di Tella 2004:

116; McDonald and Ruhl 1989, Collier and Collier 2002: 125-6). Furthermore, at the elite

level, a pluralistic order was facilitated, first, by the fact that the two camps were of similar

strength, and thus unable to defeat one another in the days of civil war. Secondly, the

oligarchy was divided and represented in both of the traditional parties (Collier and Collier

2002: 125, 748). In this context, the Colorado party in Uruguay and the Liberal Party in

Colombia each took the lead in the polarization phase, making advances to mobilize the

newly emerging middle and working class sectors.

Paraguay shares some of these countries’ features, as the Colorado and Liberal parties

founded around 1874 have dominated politics until very recently. While not resulting from

civil war as in Uruguay and Colombia, the factions within the Colorado and Liberal parties

also exhibited clear programmatic profiles, while the parties as such were heterogeneous

and engaged heavily in clientelistic mobilization (Abente 1995, McDonald and Ruhl 1989:

67). How pluralistic this system was is open to question and difficult to answer with the

historical accounts that are available. According to Rueschemeyer et al. (1992: 174),

export-based groups in society failed to impose constitutional oligarchic rule. At the same

time, civil and political liberties were respected, although the clientelistic nature of the

3 See also González (1991, 1995) on Uruguay and Wilde (1978) on Colombia.

21

system seems to have restricted competition (Abente 1995: 299). Furthermore, Dix (1989:

30) concurs with my assessment that Paraguayan parties resemble those in Uruguay and

Colombia in having built a multi-class alliance based on strong party loyalties and

clientelistic networks. Although the party system did not endure beyond the “Chaco War”

in the 1930s, the similarities with the Uruguayan and Colombian cases in the antecedent

period leads me to classify Paraguay in the group of countries displaying favorable

conditions for the protection of elite interests by national political parties.

Apart from the case of Paraguay, which is neglected in most comparative work focusing

in this period, my analysis conforms to Rueschemeyer et al’s (1992: 170) and Gibson’s

(1996: 26) assessment of the capacity of elites to defend their interests in the electoral

arena in Chile, Uruguay, and Colombia. It also concurs with Coppedge’s (1998)

characterization of the pre-democratic order as pluralistic or semi-pluralistic in these same

countries.

Regional division and the precarious protection of elite interests: Argentina, Brazil, and

Ecuador

Among the remaining countries, Argentina certainly comes closest to the cases previously

discussed. Despite the early formation of parties that became firmly entrenched in society,

the crucial problem for the protection of elite interests in a more inclusive political regime

was the division of conservative forces along regional lines (Gibson 1996: 41ff.).

Furthermore, because agriculture was not labor intensive, there was only a small peasant

base the Conservatives could use to mobilize support (McGuire 1995: 206, Collier and

Collier 2002: 104-5). Finally, the pre-democratic party system did not contribute to the

formation of a pluralistic political culture since one of the movements always tended to be

hegemonic. From 1880 to 1916, the Conservatives dominated. Since the working class was

22

of immigrant origin and thus not eligible to vote, they felt safe to give in to the demands

for universal suffrage in order to gain support from new social groups in 1912. However,

the 1916 elections proved them wrong, and they rapidly lost control over the political

system (Smith 1978). Except when they relied on extensive fraud, they never again gained

a majority in a free election, a feature clearly setting Argentina apart from Chile despite a

similar party spectrum (Di Tella 2004: 45). As Gibson’s (1996: 49-59) detailed analysis

shows, this was due to their failure to unite in a national conservative party. The rise of the

Radicals, which emerged in the 1890s and established extensive party networks in the

urban middle class, resulted in the early polarization of the party system along ideological

lines (Alonso 2000).4 What mitigated the emergence of a pluralistic political culture is that

the Radicals grew hegemonic from 1916 on. In part, there are structural reasons to this, as

the country’s early development resulted in a stronger middle class than elsewhere. But the

Radicals also actively strived for dominance in not making much effort to accommodate

the Conservatives, as President Yrigoyen circumvented the parliament by ruling by decree.

More importantly still, the Radicals tried to oust the Conservatives from the provincial

governments which they had dominated, and “(...) sought to eliminate the key source of

conservative electoral strength: the machinery of state patronage and electoral

manipulation provided by control of provincial governments” (Gibson 1996: 56). The

result was a phase of instability and a stronger involvement of the military in politics,

which ultimately lead to the emergence of Juan Perón as the leader of a new political

movement.

Brazil represents an even more extreme case of disunity of conservative forces, as the

political order was extremely de-centralized in the first republic from 1889 to 1930, with

each of the states having its own party system. Consequently, national politics became 4 The Radicals’ revolutionary posture was lost later on, which results in the dominant view that the Radicals and Conservatives did not have strongly contrasting ideological views (e.g., Gibson 1996: Ch.2, Madsen and Snow 1991: 40). Collier and Collier (2002: 134) and Remmer (1984: 87-103) present evidence of ideological polarization after the Radicals took power in 1916.

23

known as the “Politics of Governors”, and conflict resolution was characterized by

gentlemen’s agreements, rather than being processed in a nationalized elite party system.

Subsequently, in Vargas’ “Estado Novo”, inspired by European Fascism, parties were

abolished altogether in 1937 (Skidmore 1967: 12-41, Lamounier 1990, Bornschier 2008: 9-

12).

Ecuador started out with a fairly institutionalized system of elite parties serving as

electoral vehicles for contending segments of the oligarchy. The Conservatives and the

Liberals represented a regional divide between the conservative highlands around Quito

and the more liberal coastal region around Guayaquil (Conaghan 1995: 439). The Liberals

began to dominate from 1895 on due to the economic boom of the coastal region, but they

did not establish control over the territory and simply left the landowners in the highlands

in control (Rueschemeyer et al. 1992: 174). In other words, the party system lost its

capacity to represent important interests long before any significant extensions of the

franchise occurred and the two traditional parties were challenged by new ideological

movements. The resulting political instability made military rule become the norm

(McDonald and Ruhl 1989: 305).

Variants of an illiberal political order and the failure of traditional elites to secure their

power: Peru, Bolivia, Venezuela, and Mexico

In Peru, the political order prior to the extension of the franchise to the middle classes did

not prompt different segments of society to invest in party building to pursue their

interests. After independence, politics became a matter between military strongmen

(McDonald and Ruhl 1989: 210). There was no strong religious conflict due to the potent

position of the Catholic church, and the landowning oligarchy was hostile to open political

competition (Middlebrook 2000: 24-6). The upper classes, which had been fractionalized

24

and regionally divided, did partly unite behind the aristocratic Civilista Party that was

founded in 1872 and governed between 1899 and 1912 (Di Tella 2004: 8).5 In a context of

emerging labor protest and first reforms to improve the conditions of workers, there was

intense conflict between more progressive and more liberal factions within the Civilista

Party, resulting in repeated regime crises. In 1912, the oppositional Democratic Party’s

candidate became president, only to be overthrown by the military shortly after, shifting

power back to the Civilistas. But internal tension within the party and between various

presidential candidates continued, prompting the military to intervene yet again, this time

backing Leguía’s progressive Civilista government, which led the country in an

increasingly authoritarian direction (Collier and Collier 2002: 132-40). Thus, elite

contestation was never firmly institutionalized (Rueschemeyer et al. 1992: 176).

Subsequently, the dictatorship that was in place from 1919 to 1930 destroyed the

embryonic party system, and when democratic elections were re-instituted, there was no

conservative party to defend elite interests (Gibson 1996: 35-6).

According to Whitehead (2001: 22-5), two conflicting tendencies are discernible in

Bolivian political history: An old liberal-constitutionalist tradition that saw the introduction

of a directly elected president as early as 1839, and a tendency to by-pass political

institutions in a grassroots mobilization against the prevailing political order. In the late

19th century, the party system did seemed capable of channeling the conflicts of the day.

The Liberal and Conservative parties represented diverging interests between the tin

mining and declining silver mining industries, respectively (Gamarra and Malloy 1995:

400). Klein (1969: 25) presents impressive evidence that the number of political revolts

declined sharply from 1840 onwards, reaching extraordinarily low levels in the 1880s.

Although occasional instances of civil war occurred, and despite the dominance of the 5 According to Gibson (1996: 35-6), on the other hand, the Civilista Party failed to reach out beyond its base in the prosperous coastal elite, and Collier and Collier (2002: 131) note that the other parties were characterized “…more by their regional orientation than by any consistent ideological differences with the Cilivistas…”. Peru thus displays important similarities to Argentina, Brazil, and Ecuador.

25

Liberals between 1899 and 1920, the order remained to some degree pluralistic, since the

reign of the Liberals prompted the emergence of the Republican party, which took power

in 1920. Rueschemeyer et al. (1992: 160-1) classify Bolivia as constitutionally oligarchic

until 1930 and as authoritarian between 1930 and 1952.

Contrary to Coppedge (1998: 196), who blames the Chaco War (1932-35) for the

destruction of the elite party system, a liberal political regime with universal suffrage for

literate male citizens actually re-emerged in 1938 (Whitehead 2001: 25). In the 1942

elections, however, characterized by Klein (1969: 354) as “uniquely free” in Bolivian

history, the oligarchy lost the chamber of deputies to the left, and although they proved

creative in forming anti-leftist alliances, their inferiority with respect to the growing

Nationalist Revolutionary Movement (MNR) and the Party of the Revolutionary Left (PIR)

was annihilating (see Klein 1969: Ch. 11). The instability of subsequent left-wing and

right-wing governments amidst violently repressed worker protest paved the way for

military intervention in politics and, ultimately, for the revolution of 1952.

Mexico. The advent of the Mexican revolution is a more well-known variant of the

Bolivian story, where left-wing or progressive mobilization swept away the old political

order. In Mexico, however, the pre-revolutionary order had been far less pluralistic, and

the preconditions for the emergence of an institutionalized party system were inexistent.

Elite competition was not institutionalized due to the Liberals’ victory in the civil wars that

followed independence and the hegemonic regime they subsequent put in place;

consequently, the antagonism between Liberals and Conservatives vanished, and the

religious cleavage was more or less resolved (Coppedge 1998: 190-1). A single leader,

Díaz, governed from 1876 to 1911, inaugurating a tradition of intolerance for the

opposition. According to Rueschemeyer et al. (1992: 200-4), the failure to consolidate state

26

power and elite heterogeneity prevented the emergence of a constitutional oligarchic

regime. Consequently, no mass political parties formed prior to the revolution.

In many ways, the pre-revolutionary order in Mexico was similar to that in Venezuela,

which embarked on the revolutionary path directly from a long and stable military

dictatorship that lasted from 1899 to 1945. Long before, the religious conflict of the 19th

century had been resolved within a closed political system, and the direct assault on the

prerogatives of the Church in the context of a secular consensus therefore did not lead to a

conservative counter-mobilization (Middlebrook 2000: 15-7). Due to the oil bonanza, the

military dictatorship survived the crisis of the 1930s, but an opening in the regime

nonetheless occurred with the death of Gómez in 1935 (Collier and Collier 2002: 196).

Ideology challenges clientelism: Differing trajectories in the

polarization phase

The elite political order prior to the extension of the suffrage to wider parts of the middle

class had profound implications for the capacity of party systems to channel political

conflict when the rise of left-wing or other progressive forces occurred throughout Latin

America at the beginning of the 20th century and beyond. Some countries lacked a pluralist

party system that helped to provide a basis for the party political organization of the upper

classes and other conservative segments in the new, more competitive regime. The

formation of a responsive mass party system under such circumstances proved difficult due

to two interrelated reasons. For one thing, elites relied more heavily on the military when

they found their vital interests threatened, and the resulting frequent interruption of

27

democratic party competition meant that even the formation of stable political options –

either of a clientelistic or programmatic kind – was made difficult. In other words, these

party systems failed even to institutionalize, which made it all the more unlikely that

ideological polarization would gradually transform a clientelistic party system into a

system responsive to the policy preferences of voters. Secondly, the absence of a clearly

identifiable antagonist to progressive parties, and the resulting lack of conflict along

ideological lines, inhibited the formation of collective political identities and party

attachments, a precondition for cleavage formation.

What kind of linkages prevailed in the mass party system also depended on the strength

of progressive parties and on the strategic choices they made. Thus, where the party system

had been institutionalized, and the right was firmly entrenched, the progressive challenge

during the polarization phase had the capacity to push the system towards programmatic

structuring only under three conditions. First, similarly to what we have seen for the

institutionalization of a pluralistic elite party system, a balance of power between

progressive and conservative elements, or even a preponderance of the latter, was

necessary. In the cases in which progressive movements were hegemonic, no responsive

party system formed. The Argentine case, where Peronism became hegemonic after the

1940s, provides an interesting variation of this pattern, however. Second, in order to

perpetuate responsiveness, the polarizing party must maintain its ideological character and

avoid moving to the center – contrary to what may be the most promising strategy to

ensure elite acceptance of democracy. The downside of the latter strategy is that ideology

gets lost, as progressive parties entangle themselves in contradictions. The progressive

party will be forced to keep its ideological stance, on the other hand, if the entry of a more

extreme competitor remains possible. This represents the third condition.

Institu

tion

alized

party

syste

ms

secu

ringd

efe

nse

of e

lite in

tere

stsElite parties w

eakly institutionalized or regionally divided

Elite party system resulting from

conflict between Liberals and C

onservatives

Re

spo

nsive

party

sy

stem

, early

p

rog

ram

matic

structu

ring

Mo

bilizatio

n o

f th

e le

ft resu

lts in

ide

olo

gical p

ola

rization

Established parties nonetheless exclude

the left: ab

orte

d

po

larizatio

n

Dom

inant party system,

clientelism pervasive

Internally m

obilized parties and corporatist institutions: ab

orte

d

po

larizatio

n

Party system not

responsive, clientelism

pervasive

Revolutionary parties take

power:

po

larizatio

n

en

de

d

Frequent military coups

to protect elite interests as result of

polarization

Political space open, but party system

institutionalization

impeded, clientelism

pervasive

Phase before mass politics

(turn of 19./20. C.), elite

representation

Polarization phase (~

1930-1960)

Resulting party system

and predominant linkage

type

CountriesC

hileU

ruguay C

olombia

ParaguayM

exico Venezuela

BrazilEcuador

Peru

Reform

ist party moves

to the center: p

ola

rization

e

nd

ed

Reform

ist party does not m

ove to the center: id

eo

logical

po

larizatio

n

main

tain

ed

, but lim

ited phases of dem

ocracy

Political space closed, stro

ng p

olitical

ide

ntitie

s in

mo

de

rately

stab

le

party

syste

m

Argentina

Revolutionary party fails to achieve

hegemony, but party

system not

responsive, clientelism

pervasive

Bolivia

Figure 2: Summ

ary of country trajectories resulting from the tw

o critical junctures

29

To put the findings in their simplest form, then, the emergence of a responsive party

system requires a challenging party that exhibits a clear ideological profile, yet does not

electorally override its conservative competitors. Figure 2 presents the trajectory of our

eleven cases from the elite party system in place roughly at the turn of the 19th to the 20th

century through the polarization phase. While corresponding to the theoretically outlined

routes in Figure 1, this figure provides more detailed information on how polarization

ended or was aborted in those cases that lacked a strongly institutionalized, national

conservative party. Finally, the party system that resulted in the 1960s or 1970s as a result

of the combination of the two critical junctures is indicated.

Ideological polarization and the emergence of a programmatically structured mass party

system in Chile and Uruguay, and aborted polarization in Colombia and Paraguay

The analysis of the route to the early emergence of a responsive party system starts with a

more extended discussion of the Chilean trajectory, which constitutes the classical case to

illustrate the logic of the argument. The analysis then moves to the contrasting

development of in Uruguayan and Colombian cases. These two countries share many

features in terms of their pre-democratic order and the make-up of their party systems until

the 1960s, while they diverge in terms of the key variable constituting the second critical

juncture in my model. Finally, the case of Paraguay does not require much elaboration, as

it represents a more conventional variant of a dominant party system.

The fact that political polarization occurred in two steps in Chile, separated by several

decades, had the propitious consequence of providing the country with an experience of

party competition long enough for the party system to develop firm roots in society before

the Pinochet regime put an end to democracy in 1973. Although Chile’s party system is

often considered to have followed the European route to cleavage formation, Scully (1992)

30

convincingly argues that not one, but two decisive moments have shaped the party system

after the formation of the religious cleavage in the 19th century. In the first instance,

polarization resulted from the mobilization of the Socialist Workers’ Party in 1912, which

later became the Communist Party of Chile and remained closely tied to the labor

movement. The Socialist party that still exists today, on the other hand, was originally an

internally mobilized party formed in 1933 (Collier and Collier 2002: 355). The emergence

of the left resulted in a party system that lasted from 1932 to 1952 and was composed of

the Communist and Socialist parties, the Radicals, and the Conservatives. The oligarchy

remained in a strong electoral position during this period due to its clientelistic control of

the vote of the rural population (Collier and Collier 2002: 104, 107).6 The resulting de

facto exclusion of rural workers from political decision-making – which involved the left’s

tacit disposition to refrain from mobilizing the rural proletariat – formed a central element

of the new political compromise of this era (Scully 1992: 62-105).

This pattern was altered by the spread of the class cleavage into the countryside in the

late 1950s, the second decisive moment in 20th century Chilean political history according

to Scully (1992). In conjuncture with a gradual extension of the suffrage, the introduction

of the secret ballot in 1958, and the mobilization of rural workers by the Christian

Democrats, ideological party competition grew more intense outside the urban industrial

sector. The Radicals, which had engaged in clientelistic mobilization and occupied a

brokerage position at the center of the political spectrum, were gradually replaced by the

Christian Democrats as the third force in the party system. The Conservatives and the

Liberals fused to form the National Party for the defense of conservative interests, while

the Communists and the Socialists joined together in the Popular Unity Front. Due to the

over-representation of rural areas as the stronghold of conservative forces, these three

6 Due to the strongly restricted suffrage, large parts of the rural sector were not formally eligible to vote. However, is was common practice in many countries in this era for rural landowners or patrons to register loyal workers as voters, although they did not meet the literacy requirement.

31

formations eventually came to capture roughly similar shares of the vote. This gave the

National Party a veto in parliament, and the conservative forces thus agreed to continue

playing the democratic game.

Increasingly, however, ideological polarization and the waning of the religious cleavage

destroyed the vertical patron-client relationship that had secured the National Party’s

strong showing not only in the cities, but also in the countryside, as Scully’s (1992: 106-

170) detailed analysis shows.7 The Chilean political system had been characterized by the

dualism between an interest-based central arena and a clientelistic local arena, with the

clientelistic logic prevalent in municipal politics feeding back into national politics. Under

the presidencies of Frei and Allende, ideology triumphed in the 1960s and 1970s, slowly

ousting clientelism from the central political arena (Valenzuela 1977). In this context, the

right abandoned its support for the democratic regime, and in 1973, a military coup ended

Chile’s impressive record of uninterrupted elections that had began in 1932. However, the

party system had become entrenched firmly enough to survive the Pinochet’s military

dictatorship, and re-surfaced in surprisingly similar form in the 1980s.

Both in Uruguay and in Colombia, polarization first occurred as one of the two traditional

parties turned to the left. Both the Colorados in Uruguay, as well as the Liberals in

Colombia enacted legislation in favor of the working class. By making concessions to

labor at a very early stage in the development of the labor movement, they reinforced their

standing vis-à-vis their conservative competitor and considerably retarded the emergence

of challenging parties of the left. This leads Collier and Collier (2002) to characterize the

two countries as instances of working class incorporation by a traditional party. Indeed, the

7 For a concurring view, see Coppedge (1998: 183). Likewise, Rueschemeyer et al. (1992: 180) highlight that the state’s involvement in import substituting industrialization provided the resources for state patronage that ensured a continued strong electoral base for right-wing parties.

32

strategy proved successful in that Uruguay and Colombia stand out for their enduring two-

party systems. Aided by the pluralistic pre-democratic order that secured conservative

forces adequate protection of their interests in the political arena,8 as well as by the fact

that neither the Colorados in Uruguay, nor the Liberals in Colombia made major efforts to

mobilize in the rural sector, and did not enact radical land reforms (Collier and Collier

2002: 271), the traditional parties succeeded in dominating politics for decades to come.

The project of social and political reform launched by José Batlle y Ordóñez in Uruguay

in 1903 was ambitious and far-reaching, especially given its early enactment. In particular,

Battle introduced welfare legislation that was generous and progressive even by European

standards at the time (see Collier and Collier 2002: 273-84). Also, he introduced the secret

ballot in 1915 and universal suffrage in 1919, attempting to win the support of the working

class, the “greatest untapped electoral resource in Uruguay” (Collier and Collier 2002:

279). Colombia, on the other hand, made a transition to a political regime with universal

suffrage, but maintained restricted contestation between 1936 to 1949 (Rueschemeyer et al.

1992: 160). While the legislation enacted by the Liberals in Colombia likewise succeeded

in rolling back the emerging mobilization of the left, the crucial difference between the two

cases in terms of my theoretical argument is that the two major parties in Colombia ended

polarization by consent later on, and banned all other parties. In Uruguay, conversely, the

party system remained competitive and became polarized anew by the gradual emergence

of the Communist party, which later came to form part of the Frente Amplio. These

differences resulted in an increasing role of programmatic party competition in Uruguay,

while a deeply clientelistic system was perpetuated in Colombia. While the cases of

Colombia and Uruguay are indeed similar in important respects, then, as emphasized by

Collier and Collier (2002), my own argument focuses on two crucial differences that

explain the linkage type that became prevalent in the 1960s and continues to be so today.

8 As noted before, elite sectors were represented in both of the traditional parties.

33

First of all, when the progressive turn in Uruguay provoked a conservative counter-

reaction,9 as it did after the incorporation of the working class not only in Colombia, but

also in Venezuela, Peru, and Mexico, according to Collier and Collier’s (2002) analysis,

the Colorado Party did not move back to the center. In fact, while progressive elements

were expulsed from the parties that had incorporated the working class in all the other

cases, the Colorados chose not to do so because they feared that they would join the left-

wing opposition (Collier and Collier 2002: 454). This points to the second factor setting

Uruguay and Colombia apart, namely, that the established parties in Uruguay never

restricted competition. In particular, they did not outlaw the Communists, and there was

never a pact or an agreement to limit the choice of policy options, as Collier and Collier

(2002: 453) highlight. Given the strong entrenchment of the established parties in

Uruguay, and the successful integration of the working class into the Colorado’s electoral

base, it was not until the mid-1960s that the Communist Party could be considered a

relevant party and had grown strong enough to polarize the party system anew (González

1991: 128, Collier and Collier 2002: 643-648). In 1971, the left-wing Frente Amplio,

which united the Communists, the Christian Democrats, progressive lists from within the

traditional parties, as well as a few minor parties, reached 18% of the vote (González 1995:

150). In conjuncture with economic difficulties, a radicalization of the labor movement, an

increasingly stalemated party system, and the growing role of the military after the defeat

of the Tupamaro urban guerrilla movement, a military coup ended democracy in 1973.

In Colombia, the progressive turn of the Liberals eventually ushered not only in a

conservative counter-reaction, but into the civil war known as “La Violencia”, lasting from

1948 to the 1958. According to Collier and Collier (2002: 312-3), the civil war was at least

partly a result of class conflict and ideological polarization. More importantly, however, as

9 A military coup occurred in Uruguay in 1933, resulting in a suspension of democracy until 1942. This interruption of democratic elections proved to be of minor importance, however, since it did not significantly transform the party system.

34

stressed by Wilde (1978), it reflected the end of the traditional arrangement of politics as

“conversation among gentlemen”. This involved the sharing of patronage resources by the

two traditional parties, and as the Conservatives wanted to exclude the Liberals from these

resources, rural Liberal guerrilla organizations were formed (Collier and Collier 2002:

458). To end the civil war after ten years of violence, the National Front was formed in

1958, a constitutional provision in which the Liberals and the Conservatives agreed to

refrain from polarization, to alternate in the presidency, to distribute bureaucratic posts

outside the civil service equitably, and to exclude all other parties from competing. The

agreement was approved in a popular vote and was to remain in vigor until 1974, but was

later prolonged until 1978 (Martz 1997: 35, Di Tella 2004: 94-6). In the resulting façade

democracy, local political bosses obtained a vital role in distributing patronage and in

securing the loyal vote for the regime. The Communists, which were strongest in the

countryside, were violently repressed, leading to the emergence of guerilla groups (Collier

and Collier 2002: 439, 461-8, 671-2, 685-6). At the same time, the civil war, fought along

partisan lines, also served to reinforce the strong partisan loyalties to the traditional parties,

as had been the case in the 19th century both in Uruguay and in Colombia. In the 1974

elections, which Collier and Collier (2002: 667-691) judge to have been competitive, the

traditional parties obtained 90% of the vote.

There is broad agreement on the overwhelming reliance of parties on clientelism in

Colombia (Wilde 1978, Martz 1997, Collier and Collier 2002: 671-3, Pizarro Leongómez

2006), even if its organization has changed and is less strictly controlled by parties today

(Archer 1990, 1995). Consequently, we may label Colombia as an instance of two-party

dominance, where the established parties jointly exclude challengers either by an outright

ban, as was the case until 1978, or by their privileged access to state resources, a strategy

they also pursued thereafter. Consequently, it was only in the most recent years that the

established parties in Colombia saw a gradual erosion of their dominant position.

35

In Uruguay, on the other hand, clientelism has traditionally also played a major role,

and the early pluralist order was facilitated by the fact that the Colorados and Blancos

agreed to share pork-barrel resources at various points (Hagopian 1996: 264). There were

even if there were phases of power-sharing (Altman 2008: 488-498), but the traditional

parties never agreed on a common political program that defined the policy options

acceptable to both of them. This contrasts the Uruguayan trajectory not only from the

Colombian, but also from the Venezuelan, as we will see. While we cannot be sure in

which phases ideology was more important than clientelism in generating votes in

Uruguay, González (1991: 25-8) convincingly argues that politics in Uruguay was never

only a matter of clientelism, although both the Colorados and the Blancos, being internally

mobilized parties, were of course able to pursue a mixed mobilization strategy. It was thus

the Frente Amplio that launched the most severe assault on clientelism from the 1960s on,

as contended by Luna (n.d.) and González (1991: 125). Since the party system re-emerged

in strikingly similar shape after the bureaucratic-authoritarian regime in place between

1973 and 1985 (González 1991, 1995), Uruguay stands out as having a uniquely

programmatic party system, as we will see. What is more, there is recent comparative

expert data to show that Uruguay today clearly stands out for clientelism playing a

negligible role in party mobilization (Kitschelt et al.’s 2009: 769).

Paraguay represents a more conventional case of a dominant party system than Colombia.

The Liberals held power from 1904 to 1936, and the 1928 elections are judged to have

been competitive and inclusive for the time, with 20 percent of the population registered to

vote (Abente 1995: 299). While the Communist left was weak, a progressive liberal

splinter movement calling for land reform and far-reaching social reforms appeared after

the Chaco war (McDonald and Ruhl 1989: 67). The movement was overthrown in 1937 by

36

the military, and a phase of instability and military dictatorships followed, at the end of

which General Stroessner established a de-facto one-party dominant system. Opposition

was tolerated to a certain degree in order to give the regime a democratic façade, although

the Communists remained outlawed. However, the electoral rules guaranteed the strongest

party two-thirds of the seats in parliament, and the Colorados, which supported Stroessner,

always won the elections (McDonald and Ruhl 1989: 68-9, Di Tella 2004). The

dictatorship was both repressive and co-optive, and clientelism played a dominant role in

the official party’s mobilization (Abente 1995: 306-9).

Taken together, the Colombian and the Paraguayan cases show that the nature of the

pre-democratic order is not deterministic. Countries set on a route that provides them with

favorable circumstances for defending elite interests and thus channeling conflict in the

party system may nonetheless see competition restrained. Thus, there is considerable room

for political agency beyond the balance of forces in society as they are reflected politically

in the party system. The following sections deal with cases in which the circumstances

were far less favorable than in those just discussed. In Mexico, Venezuela, and Bolivia,

progressive forces easily won the upper hand against conservative interests, while the

inability of conservative parties to defend their interests in the electoral arena in Brazil,

Ecuador, Peru, and Argentina resulted in a mismatch between the political and social

balance of power.

Revolution: Progressive parties take power in Mexico, Venezuela, and Bolivia

Mexico. The statement will be rather uncontroversial that the Mexican Revolution of 1917,

supported by a broad cross-class alliance, and the formation of a pro-regime Party of the

Institutionalized Revolution (PRI) that was to become dominant, eclipsed any real party

competition in Mexico. The strength of the progressive impetus was due to the inclusion of

37

the peasantry alongside the working class in the incorporation project, and in the corollary

that the movement called for land reform (Collier and Collier 2002: 196-250).

Nonetheless, Collier and Collier (2002: 197) state that “(…) one must understand radical

populism as an elite project to establish the political dominance of elements of the

emerging urban middle sectors” – although the process then took on a dynamic of its own.

As far as the dominant classes were concerned, they had not only failed to institutionalize

open elite contestation among them due to the heterogeneity of their interests

(Rueschemeyer et al. 1992: 200), the landed elite also lacked control of the peasantry as a

basis of support (Collier and Collier 2002: 114).

The PRI constituted a lose coalition of local political machines, and the dominant party

system institutionalized thanks to patronage and political favors (McDonald and Ruhl

1989: 48-9, 51-2). In 1939, the catholic and anti-socialist National Action Party (PAN) was

formed to oppose the PRI, but lacking the resources to challenge its rival, it would take

another sixty years for the PAN to seize power (Greene 2007). The result was that Mexico

never had any experience with democracy until recently – at the same time, however, the

Mexican regime relied much more on co-optation than on repression (Rueschemeyer et al.

1992: 199). Thus, despite its dominant status, the PRI actively campaigned for elections

that were almost impossible to lose, distributing selective incentives (Langston and

Morgenstern 2009). Furthermore, state-sponsored unions effectively de-mobilized the

working class (Rueschemeyer et al. 1992: 203), similarly to what was the case in Brazil, as

we will see. The result, then, was not only that the PRI was able to maintain its dominant

status despite some degree of open contestation. Due to its entrenchment in clientelistic

networks, it even retains a strong position within the increasingly pluralist pattern of party

competition emerging since the 2000s.

38

Venezuela shares a number of important features with Mexico. When repression during the

long phase of military dictatorships was loosened in the mid-1930s, Acción Democrática

(AD) managed to crowd out the Communists and became the dominant opposition

movement against the dictatorship. Similarly to what occurred in Mexico, AD rallied the

working and peasant classes behind what was essentially a middle-class project,

demanding radical political and social change, such as calling for universal suffrage and

extensive land reform (Collier and Collier 2002: 196-201). Although AD was an externally

mobilized party with a rather radical program, it profited from the democratic Zeitgeist and

the opening of the military dictatorship: According to Karl (1986), it was actually invited

to govern together with the military in order to prevent an internal succession crisis. The

Revolutionary Junta enacted universal suffrage without property or literacy requirements,

and AD quickly came close to achieving hegemony during its three-year rule between

1945 and 1948, known as the “Trienio”. In the elections for the constituent assembly and

the subsequent elections, it received between 70 and 80% of the votes (Coppedge 1998:

192-3, Collier and Collier 2002: 263). AD built a strong party organization reaching down

to the local level, established links to unions, and by the end of the Trienio achieved

dominance in the labor movement, where it had been rivaled by the Communists. AD was

ousted from power in 1948 in a new military coup due to the broad opposition and the

“extreme polarization” its short period of rule had generated, and democracy was

suspended (Collier and Collier 2002: 267-70).

The Venezuelan success story began only with the “pacted democracy” established in

1958, from where on the country is commonly considered a model for the viability of

democracy in unstable 1960s and 1970s (e.g., Karl 1986, Collier and Collier 2002). Indeed,

Venezuela holds an almost unrivalled record of regular democratic elections between 1958

39

and the late 1990s.10 At the face of it, the new regime was pluralistic, as AD’s dominance

during the Trienio had provoked the strengthening of an opposition party that was to play

an important role after the return to democracy in 1958. COPEI was formed in the 1940s,

and came to adopt a catholic profile during AD’s rule due to the latter’s attack on catholic

educational institutions (Middlebrook 2000: 15-7). COPEI also rallied landowners who

were hostile to the agrarian reform promoted by AD (Collier and Collier 2002: 269), as

well as those who were preoccupied with the newly established dominance of AD

(Coppedge 1994, 1998: 193).

In the Pact of Punto Fijo, which re-established democracy in 1958, three parties,

including AD and COPEI, agreed on a number of policy principles, as well as to share both

power and patronage resources such as the “(...) access to state jobs and contracts, a

partitioning of ministries, and a complicated spoils system which would ensure the

political survival of all signatories” (Karl 1986: 213). The result was an effective de-

politicization of economic policy issues, aided by the wealth created by oil. Although the

Communists had been part of the coalition demanding the return to democracy, they were

excluded from the Punto Fijo agreement. According to Martz (1964: 515), the ban on the

Communists and the Revolutionary Left Movement (MIR) in the 1963 elections meant that

parties representing around 10% of the electorate were outlawed. Over the 1960s, AD

purged three factions that did not agree on the party’s centrist course, and maintained iron

party discipline. Subsequently, AD and COPEI came to dominate not only the electoral

arena, but also civil society, co-opting all independent organization (Coppedge 1994: 18-

46, 148-52, Roberts 2003). In this “Partyarchy”, clientelism became pervasive: Coppedge

demonstrates that the factional struggles between “ins” and “outs” within AD had no

ideological content whatsoever, and instead constituted rival clientelistic networks

10 Venezuela is one of the few countries in Latin America that is classified as “free” by Freedom House for this entire period (see www.freedomhouse.org). See also Coppedge (2005).

40

penetrating the entire territory (Coppedge 1994: 136-52). Due to the constriction of the

ideological spectrum and the clientelistic nature of mobilization pursued by the major

parties, the Venezuelan party system lost its responsiveness to popular preferences. With

the neo-liberal policy turn of the 1980s and the drying up of the resources to fuel their

clientelistic networks, the reign of AD and COPEI came crashing down (see also Roberts

2003). First, this lead to the emergence of new parties such as Causa R and MAS, and

finally to the victory of Hugo Chávez as an anti-party candidate in 1998.

Bolivia to a certain degree followed the Mexican and Venezuelan path in that a broad

alliance of progressive forces together with the military took power in the “Revolution of

1952”. Given the relative weakness of the parties representing conservative forces, the

candidate of the Nationalist Revolutionary Movement (MNR) won the 1951 presidential

elections, but the military prevented the party from taking power. After a popular uprising

in its favor and two days of fighting, the MNR took power in 1952, and between 1952 and

1964 Bolivia could be considered a full democracy according to Rueschemeyer et al.’s

(1992: 160) classification. As in Mexico and Venezuela, the revolutionary alliance was led

by the middle class, but had included the peasantry, although the MNR subsequently made

little effort to act on behalf of the Campesino peasants, which were mainly of Indian

decent (McDonald and Ruhl 1989: 227, 231, Di Tella 2004: 188). Nonetheless, the MNR

enacted radical reforms such as the expropriation of latifundia and the nationalization of

large parts of the tin industry (Di Tella 2004, Klein 1969). The revolutionary party also

sought to establish a single-party regime by employing clientelist resources to mobilize

workers and peasants while at the same controlling their autonomous political articulation

(Gamarra and Malloy 1995: 402-5). Although the MNR failed to achieve dominance

because its clientelistic character resulted in internal factionalization and a large number of

41

spin-offs (McDonald and Ruhl 1989: 228, 232), the revolution swept right-wing parties off

the political landscape, and the MNR had no clearly identifiable antagonist. According to

Klein (1969: Ch. 12), the bourgeoisie was decimated by sky-rocketing inflation, while the

land reform eliminated the landed upper class as a relevant political actor. Consequently,

when the military took power in 1964, it did not do so on behalf of the upper classes, as the

land reform and the model of state capitalism were not reversed during the dictatorship.

The MNR, however, lost its revolutionary impetus long before, as it was forced to

follow the policy dictates of the USA in exchange for financial support in the severe

economic crisis (Klein 1969: 403-9, Di Tella 2004: 81-4). It de-militarized the Campesinos

and pressured them into corporatist structures to isolate them from the more radical unions

(Whitehead 2001: 28, 34, Van Cott 2000). In conjuncture with the narrowing of the range

of societal interests and of the party spectrum, the MNR’s move to the center and its

reliance on clientelism to generate support inhibited the institutionalization of a party

system along ideological lines. The military governments that were in power until 1978

kept party competition in place, although tightly constricted, and continued to use

clientelistic networks to generate support, according to Gamarra and Malloy (1995: 405-9).

With these networks staying in place, it is not surprising that the patterns of political

mobilization in the 1980s continued to evolve around clientelistic resources. Furthermore,

pragmatic alliances with ideological enemies blurred the party’s programmatic image

(Gamarra and Malloy 1995: 413, Whitehead 2001: 36, Di Tella 2004: 159-62), and the

Bolivian party system of the 1980s is one of the least institutionalized in Latin America, as

we will see. The feature that the dominant party systems of Mexico and Venezuela share

with the fluid Bolivian party system, however, is the pervasiveness of clientelism and the

lack of responsiveness of parties to voter preferences.

42

Clientelistic de-mobilization: Ecuador and Brazil

In Ecuador, the failure of elites to establish a nationwide conservative party to defend their

interests was attenuated by the fact that their position was not challenged by strong

progressive movements or parties (Rueschemeyer et al. 1992: 171). In the 1930s, José

María Velasco Ibarra established “Velascismo” as a lasting political tendency in the

country, but his movement was largely devoid of ideology (Conaghan 1995: 446,

McDonald and Ruhl 1989: 310). Velasco owed his early successes to his close ties to the

traditional elites, and although he resembled Argentina’s Peron in rhetoric, he “…never

produced real material and political advances for lower-class supporters” (Conaghan 1995:

446). Although creating various parties, his movement was “quintessentially antiparty”

(McDonald and Ruhl 1989: 310). Velasco became president five times (four times by

election, once by insurrection), and was deposed four times by military coup (McDonald

and Ruhl 1989: 310).

From the 1940s on, a plethora of parties developed. Apart from the numerous, but weak

parties of the left, they resulted from splits from the traditional Liberal and Conservative

parties. As a result, the party system became increasingly fragmented, with around 80

parties competing for voters in the mid-1960s (McDonald and Ruhl 1989: 308-). Conaghan

(1995: 441-) is very explicit in her analysis of the raison d’être of this fragmentation: not

differing policy platforms, but selective incentives and the clientelistic distribution of

resources through extensive neighborhood networks shape party behavior in Ecuador.

Even miniscule parties can negotiate with larger parties to trade resources against votes,

and because politicians often cannot deliver the promised goods to their voters, preferences

are unstable. Consequently, the elite party system de-institutionalized, and only in 1970 did

Izquierda Democrática appear as Ecuador’s the first ideologically united mass party

(McDonald and Ruhl 1989: 312). However, its support has been volatile, and although it

43

won the presidency in 1988, its rise does not seem to have resulted to a polarization of

political space along ideological lines. Consequently, political change came from without

the party system: Neither the indigenous uprising of 1990, nor Rafael Correa’s ascendency

to the presidency and his promise of a “Socialism for the 21st Century” in 2007 were

backed by political parties (Conaghan 2008).

In Brazil, the deeply clientelistic nature of the party system during Brazil’s “Experiment in

Democracy” from 1945 to 1964 (Skidmore 1967) represented a more deliberate attempt to

pre-empt bottom-up mobilization than was the case in Ecuador. From 1937 on, parties had

been banned, and before Vargas was forced to step down by the military, he created two

internally mobilized parties to rally support in the newly established democratic regime.

The Social Democratic Party (PSD) was formed as the party of the regional elites and was

to mobilize votes using the traditional clientelistic networks. The Brazilian Labor Party

(PTB), on the other hand, was created by Vargas’ allies in the labor movement and

conceived as a mass party to bring out the vote of the urban working class, aided by state-

sponsored unions that distributed benefits based on particularistic criteria (Skidmore 1967:

54-62, Hagopian 1996: 61-2, Weyland 1996). In ideological terms, the two parties differed

little, and often formed alliances in elections. As no nationalized party system had existed

since 1889, these parties were created from scratch. The Communist Party, the only

surviving party from the years prior to Vargas’ dictatorship, was banned in 1947.11 The

major third party in the post-1945 regime, the National Democratic Union (UDN)

represented the opponents of the Vargas dictatorship, and had advocated a return to

democracy. In the countryside, the UDN and the PSD represented dissenting factions of

the landed elites, which achieved a dominant role in both parties in the new democratic

11 According to Collier and Collier (2002: 370), the Brazilian Communist Party was the strongest in Latin America in 1945.

44

regime. At the local level, no differing ideologies of these parties were discernible

(Hagopian 1996: 61-72).

For Collier and Collier (2002), the political polarization that occurred both in Brazil and

Chile in the 1960s represents a major commonality, and explains the breakdown of

democracy in 1964 and 1973, respectively. From my analytical point of view, the two

cases differ starkly. In Chile, intensified conflict was the result of the polarization of a

party system representative of voter preferences. Although some factions within the

Brazilian PTB radicalized, the crisis of the democratic regime in Brazil was not

concomitant to party political polarization, even if the PTB grew in strength at the expense

of the right-wing PSB.12 Rather, what lead to the breakdown of democracy was the clash

between the clientelistic logic prevalent in parliamentary elections, which successfully de-

mobilized the left, and president Goulart’s increasingly left-wing populist discourse in the

presidential arena (Bornschier 2008, von Mettenheim 1995). When Goulart, an exponent

of the PTB, started talking about land reform, the extension of the suffrage to illiterates,

and the legalization of the Communist Party, the rival traditional elites represented in the

PSD and the UDN joined forces with the military to put an end to Brazil’s democratic

experiment (Stepan 1978: 123-8, von Mettenheim 1995: 90-1, Hagopian 1996).

The unique feature of Brazil’s ensuing bureaucratic-authoritarian regime was that it

maintained party competition, albeit once again circumscribed and with the help of

officialist organizations. Growing discontent with the military regime resulted in

increasing vote shares for the official anti-regime Brazilian Democratic Movement (MDB)

at the expense of the clientelistic, pro-regime ARENA. The transition to a democratic

regime thus occurred in the late 1970s as an “opening through elections” (Lamounier

1989). Put differently, ideology came to challenge clientelism, as voters were ready to

12 The fact that the two parties stopped entering coalitions may, on the other hand, be seen as an indicator of polarization (Stepan 1978).

45

chose a party on ideological grounds that was unable to provide them material rewards for

their vote. In the process of democratic transition in the 1980s, when politicians shifted

back and forth between the parties in order to remain on the winning sides, these

ideological differences were blurred, however. As the political elites maintained their

position, clientelism once more emerged as the dominant force shaping politics (Hagopian

1996, Mainwaing 1999, Power 2000, Ames 1994, 2001: Ch. 7). Opposition against the

military regime also sparked the emergence of the Workers’ Party (PT), however, Brazil’s

first externally mobilized party (see Keck 1992), which is slowly coming to transform the

party system.

Given Brazil’s record of little experience with open political competition until the

1980s, the crystallization of programmatic political alternatives is likely to be a lengthy

process. With this in mind, it is not surprising that Brazil represents an outlier in Kitschelt,

Hawkins, et al.’s (2010) analysis, exhibiting much lower levels of programmatic

structuring than would be expected based on the duration of electoral contestation since

1945 and other long-term factors. The crucial point is that competition was never really

open until the 1980s, where the PT was still forced to fight an uphill battle against its

clientelistic rivals.

Until the early 1960s, pervasive clientelism de-mobilized the citizenry in Brazil,

safeguarding the position of political and economic elites. While the match between the

political and the social balance of power was thus maintained, the exclusive reliance on

clientelism meant that the protection of elite interests was precarious, as Goulart’s populist

mobilization of the early 1960s showed. In the last two countries to be analyzed, the

mismatch between the balance of power in the political arena and in society presented a

problem from the very start, as conservative interests were unable to curtail the

mobilization of progressive forces by democratic means.

46

Mismatch between political and social balances of power: Unstable regimes in Peru and

Argentina

Peru and Argentina share with Mexico, Venezuela, and Bolivia the presence of a

progressive movement that was potentially hegemonic.13 Contrary to the latter countries,

however, they failed to bring about a revolution in Peru and Argentina. Instead, the

strength of these movements and the weakness of conservative forces in the electoral arena

launched a tradition of military involvement in politics, which in Argentina defended

mainly the interests of the upper classes, while the Peruvian military came to pursue a

project of its own later on.

When progressive parties representing the middle and lower classes were formed in

Peru in the 1920s, the traditional elites had no conservative party to defend their interests

in the electoral arena. Instead, they relied on the military, which played a predominant role

in the Peruvian history of the 20th century. Formed in 1924, the Popular Revolutionary

American Alliance (APRA) was to become the dominating force on the left, forging close

ties to the union movement and outflanking the Communist party, with which it competed.

When Haya de la Torre, APRA’s overpowering founding figure, did not accept the 1931

election, and instead organized a military insurrection, he “…launched the party’s tragic

tradition of violence” (Collier and Collier 2002: 151; see also Coppedge 1998: 195). The

story of following decades is adventuresome. In the absence of a conservative party, the

military intervened continuously whenever it saw the vital interests of the oligarchy as

threatened.

While APRA was allowed to run in parliamentary elections, its candidates were

prevented from assuming the presidency. The only way for APRA to have a chance in

13 In Argentina and Peru, this was party due to the fact that earlier attempts to incorporate the working class had been aborted, in Collier and Collier’s terms. Thus, when the working class was finally mobilized, this occurred in a context in which the labor movement was already much stronger than in most other countries (Collier and Collier 2002: 314).

47

governing was to moderate its programmatic stance,14 and to form alliances with right-

wing parties in order to ensure civilian rule (Collier and Collier 2002: 476-7).15 Ultimately,

however, this resulted in the adoption of rather conservative positions and in the watering

down of the party’s ideological profile. In any event, while APRA continued to play a

dominant role in the party system and was actually able to retain the loyalties of the

working class in the formal sector, it failed to move beyond its original constituencies and

to adapt to the transformations of social structure and the growth of the informal sector

(Collier and Collier 2002: 478-83). According to evidence presented by Stokes (1995: 16-

31), neither APRA, nor the Communists succeeded in supplanting the clientelistic

networks dominant in the poor urban neighborhoods, and the aggregate electoral results in

these areas did not differ from those in middle or upper-class neighborhoods. Rather,

APRA seems to have engaged in extensive patronage and clientelistic change itself

(Collier and Collier 2002: 481, Hilliker 1971: 74-113). In the context of substantial

extensions of the suffrage, new parties emerged in the 1960s, and APRA forged alliances

with strange bedfellows.

The military came to see the party system as stalemated and parties as incapable of

pursuing urgently needed reform, and decided in 1968 to pursue its own project to

modernize the country and to weaken APRA. The regime united a broad class alliance and

initially enacted progressive social reforms, including land reform, but it ultimately failed

to restructure the political system (Di Tella 2004: 100-1, Stokes 1995: 32-47, Collier and

Collier 2002: 764-5). In the constituent assembly and in the 1980 elections, the ban on

APRA was abolished. As one of Latin America’s best organized mass parties that also

14 This is remarkable, since APRA’s positions appear to have been far less radical than those of progressive movements in Mexico, Venezuela, and Bolivia early on. Hence, the party had concentrated its efforts on Peru’s “modern” sector, refrained from mobilizing the peasantry outside the export enclaves, and calling neither for land reform, nor for an extension of the tightly restricted suffrage (Collier and Collier 2002: 327-8). 15 Collier and Collier (2002: 477) note than in an alternative, less benevolent reading, the APRA-elite had become co-opted by the political establishment, and began to see the pursuit of power as an end in itself.

48

provides its faithful with particularistic benefits (McDonald and Ruhl 1989: 214-5, Stokes

2005: 318), APRA party continued to play an important role in politics, and won the

presidency in 1985. Peru still lacks a firmly institutionalized counter-player to APRA,

however, and consequently, the party system is weakly institutionalized. In the absence of

clear ideological divisions, clientelism is likely to play a pervasive role.

Argentina. The inability of conservative forces to defend their interests in the electoral

arena, together with the strength of the progressive challenge, have rendered democracy

extraordinarily fragile in Argentina since the 1940s. Similarly to what has been the case in

Peru, Argentina has spent roughly the same number of years under (restricted) democracy

as under authoritarian rule since the advent of mass politics until the 1990s (Gibson 1996:

25-6). Apart from this commonality, two crucial features set Argentina and Peru apart, as

the following analysis will highlight. First, faced with the threat that democracy may be

overturned, the Peronist party never moderated its programmatic position, and it did not

form alliances with political opponents. Due to Peronism’s penetration of the militant labor

movement, polarization was also maintained during phases in which the Peronist party was

banned, and it thus kept its distinctive programmatic profile in the Argentine party

landscape. Secondly, despite the early defeat of conservatism, Argentina started the era of

mass politics with a strongly institutionalized middle-class party that came to unite the

anti-Peronist opposition: the Radicals. Thus, while the mismatch between political and

social balance of power made democracy fragile, the presence of the Radical party as an

opponent to the Peronists contributed to institutionalizing the party system and to creating

lasting political identities.

With the victory of the Peronist coalition in the 1946 election, which followed the 1943

military coup in which Perón had taken part as a military officer, Conservatism was almost

49

completely marginalized. Not only did the Radical UCR come to lead the alliance that

opposed Perón, the Peronist movement actually seized part of the Conservatives’ mass

base: “Throughout the country, Perón succeeded in recruiting local conservative leaders

into his electoral alliance, both from the top leadership as well as from the cadres of local

party hacks who controlled electoral machinery in rural areas and small towns” (Gibson

1996: 62). Under the banner of “nacionalismo” and economic protectionism, Perón thus

pulled protectionist rural elites into an alliance with the urban working class and other

social groups (ibid, p. 62-6). While some small-town segments of his coalition supported

Perón due to his charisma, the movement’s redistributive economic policies and the

attainment of full employment made it attract urban working class voters exhibiting a clear

ideological profile (Madsen and Snow 1991: 102-33).16 Thus, Peronism was strongly

rooted in a class cleavage, and in the 1983 elections after re-democratization, a clear-cut

class-based profile of party support re-emerged (Madsen and Snow 1991: 134-50,

McGuire 1995: 233-6). Until after the bureaucratic-authoritarian regime that lasted until

1983, the Peronists won every election, partly due to the disunity of the opposition, but the

military intervened repeatedly to prevent them from taking power.

Although Perón himself, despite his strong anti-oligarchic rhetoric, had never proposed

land reform (Madsen & Snow 1991: 54), the reforms he initiated in favor of labor were far-

reaching, and the Peronist movement was diverse, harboring more radical and more

conservative elements. Overall, the Peronists had a clear ideological profile, and what

distinguishes the party’s strategy from that of APRA in Peru is that it never moved to the

center.17 Thus, when Perón was ousted from power and the party banned, the more

16 According to Collier and Collier (2002: 314-5), the project to incorporate the working class was one of the most extensive in terms of the scope of labor legislation, the coverage of social benefits, and the “…dramatic shift away from earlier patterns of state-labor relations to one in which, in symbolic and ideological terms, the government dramatically sided with the working class”. 17 Although Collier and Collier highlight this difference and present abundant evidence to substantiate it, it plays no role in what they seek to explain, i.e., the survival or demise of democracy in the 1960s and 1970s. Democracy constituted an “impossible game” in both cases. From the point of view of my analysis, which

50

progressive wings of the party were not expelled, as was the case in Venezuela and

Mexico. Rather, intense conflict developed between the military government and the union

movement, which remained dominated by the Peronist movement, resulting in strikes,

bombings, and sabotage (Collier and Collier 2002: 358-9, 484-97, 721-42).

Consequently, strong political identities persisted despite the narrow record of open

democratic elections, and when the military regime was toppled in the early 1980s, the pre-

coup party system re-emerged. At the same time, a more pluralist pattern emerged, as the

Peronists actually lost the 1983 presidential election to their Radicals, which once again

had come to rally all anti-Peronist voters (Di Tella 2004: 164-70). Consequently, the

political alternatives in Argentina have remained fairly stable since the 1940s, even if

clientelism plays a major role in political mobilization. While the Radicals are described

by Rueschemeyer et al. (1992: 209) as traditionally relying on clientelistic mobilization,

the Peronists’ alliance with rural elites suggests that the same applies for them as well.

With the existing evidence, it is difficult to discern precisely how large a role clientelism

played in rallying the Peronist electorate in the pre-coup period. More recent analyses

underline the increasing reliance on clientelism on the part of the Peronists in the new

democratic regime, however, which compensates for discontent in the working class

resulting from the adoption of neo-liberal reforms (Brusco et al. 2004, Stokes 2005,

Levitsky 2007).

focuses on the long-term effects of political conflict for the institutionalization and programmatic structuring of party systems, this different behavior of APRA and of the Peronist party is crucial.

51

Historical trajectories and patterns of party system institutionalization and

responsiveness since the 1980s

The preceding analysis has traced party system development until the breakdown of

democracy in the 1960s or 1970s, and further in those cases where democracy survived

despite the proliferation of military rule in Latin America. How well do the two critical

junctures that have guided the analysis explain how institutionalized and how responsive

of the preferences of voters party systems are after re-democratization in the 1980?

Whereas the first critical juncture potentially results in an institutionalized party system,

my theory posits that it is only the second that makes the system responsive to citizen

preferences. To measure party system institutionalization, I use Mainwaring and Scully’s

(1995: 17) overall measure for the period between the early 1980s and the early 1990s. The

measurement of responsiveness is hampered by a lack of data from the 1980s to measure

party positions and voter preferences. Luna and Zechmeister (2005, 2010) have conducted

an analysis of party system responsiveness in the late 1990s, however. Their study

combines data from political elites and mass surveys and covers nine countries. If

historical trajectories indeed have long-term effects, we should still be able to observe the

basic contrasts between countries at this point. More specifically, Luna and Zechmeister

(2005, 2010) measure how well parties represent voters in various systems across a

number of issue bundles including economic and religious issues, preferences for a

democratic regime, law and order, and good governance. Figure 3 thus plots Luna and

Zechmeister’s (2010: 135) “conservative score” and Mainwaring and Scully’s (1995) data

of party system institutionalization in a two-dimensional space together with a linear fit

line.

52

Figure 3: Party system institutionalization and responsiveness in the 1980s/1990s

In line with expectations, Chile and Uruguay have not only the most firmly

institutionalized, but also the most responsive party systems among the countries covered.

Both countries are situated close to the theoretical maximum on both scales. At the other

extreme, Ecuador, Bolivia, and Brazil are characterized by a similarly low performance

both in terms of institutionalization and in terms of responsiveness. This is indeed what the

historical analysis predicts. In between, we find the cases of Colombia and Argentina. If

the relationship between party system institutionalization and responsiveness were linear,

we would expect much higher responsiveness in the case of Colombia. From the point of

view of the analysis presented in this paper, Colombia’s location makes sense: While the

conflict between Liberals and Conservatives resulted in the early institutionalization of the

party system, the subsequent curtailing of party competition resulted in a dominant two-

party system, whose actors rely heavily on clientelism, rather than distinctive programs, to

gain votes. Argentina, on the other hand, takes an intermediate position with respect to

Argentina

BoliviaBrazil

Chile

Colombia

Ecuador

Mexico

Uruguay

46

810

12

0 2 4 6 8Responsiveness of the party system to voter preferences, late 1990s

(Luna and Zechmeister 2010 “conservative score”)

Insti

tutio

naliz

ation

of t

he p

arty

syste

m in

the

1980

s an

d ea

rly 1

990s

(Main

warin

g an

d Sc

ully 1

995)

53

both measures. The strong political identities resulting from the long-term conflict between

Peronists and non-Peronists and parties’ distinct programmatic profiles clearly distinguish

the Argentine party system from those in Ecuador, Bolivia, and Brazil. At the same time,

the limited experience with democratic elections, as well as the clientelist mobilization

pursued by the Radicals and the Peronists make Argentina display a more fluid cleavage

structure than that found in Uruguay and Chile. Finally, Mexico stands out for having a

rather institutionalized party system with low levels of responsiveness to voter preferences.

This location results from the combination of the PRI’s dominant position and in the

weakness of programmatic structuring.

Venezuela, Peru, and Paraguay are not covered by Luna and Zechmeister’s analysis due

to the dramatic transformation of the party system in the first two cases. According to

Mainwaring and Scully (1995: 17), Peru has the least institutionalized party system of all

cases considered, with a value slightly below that of Brazil, Ecuador, and Bolivia. Indeed,

this is what the analysis up to the late 1960s predicts. In Venezuela, the party system was

once highly institutionalized but collapsed in the 1990s. Coppedge (2005) attributes its

collapse exactly to the factors also identified in the my historical analysis: the lack of

responsiveness of AD and COPEI and the ebbing of the patronage resources that had

stabilized the dominant party system since 1958. Finally, Paraguay still has a very limited

record of open democratic elections, but the capacity of left-wing parties to challenge the

once dominant Colorados suggests that chances for the emergence of a responsive party

system exist at least in the long run.

54

Conclusion

There are vast differences between Latin American party systems in terms of their

responsiveness to voter preferences. The critical junctures postulated and analyzed in this

paper help to explain these differences rather well. Contemporary linkage practices are

thus rooted in long-term historical processes. The first critical juncture postulated in this

paper is situated at the turn to the 20th century, and sets countries with pluralistic elite party

systems guaranteeing the protection of elite interests apart from those in which parties are

either weakly institutionalized, or where conservative forces are regionally divided.

Competitive conservative parties existed in Chile, Uruguay, Colombia, and Paraguay, but

only the first two of these countries maintained open political competition when

progressive political actors emerged. Subsequently, only Chile and Uruguay developed

responsive mass party systems. Thus, a pluralistic pre-democratic order and the early

establishment of the rule of law, which is emphasized in various theories of

democratization from Moore (1969) to Dahl (1971), as well as in Coppedge’s (1998)

account of party system institutionalization, is not a sufficient condition for the later

formation of responsive party systems.

The second critical juncture is constituted by what I have termed the “polarization

phase”, where ideological conflict results in lasting political identities and strong loyalties

to political parties. These alignments are then perpetuated by ongoing conflict in the party

system, socializing new voters into the established structure of conflict. Ideological

polarization and the formation of strong political identities to a certain degree crowd out

clientelistic forms of mobilization. While clientelistic and programmatic appeals may be

compatible to a certain degree, it is obvious that the pervasive use of clientelism inhibits

citizens from making their voting choices depend on parties’ differing policy platforms.

55

While ideological conflicts were certainly present before the polarization phase, religious

cleavages tended to have become pacified by the beginning of the 20th century. What is

more, they were more or less off the political agenda when larger segments of the

electorate were enfranchised, and thus mass loyalties based on religion only developed in

few countries, Chile being the prime example. The polarization phase was thus shaped by

the emergence of new parties that sought to change the political status quo. I have termed

these parties “progressive”, rather than left-wing because they sometimes meshed Fascist

and Socialist ideas, such as Bolivia’s MNR, and because one of the traditional parties first

introduced the first move to the left in Uruguay and Colombia.

The progressive challenge occurred at different points in time, partially influenced by

the timing of development and the subsequent formation of the urban middle and working

classes. As a result, the first instance of polarization occurred early in some cases, and later

in others. The forerunner was Uruguay in the first decade of the 20th century, while the

progressive challenge materialized much later in Colombia, despite the striking similarity

of party systems in the two contexts. From the point of view of the political analysis that I

have presented, these differences in timing and the differing social bases that progressive

forces mobilized are largely irrelevant.

However, in those cases where progressive parties or movements actually won the

upper hand against conservative forces or the old elites – an incidence I have referred to as

revolution – this was clearly due to the broader social class alliance that movements in

Mexico, Venezuela, and Bolivia rested upon. In political terms, the outcome was that

pluralism – which depends on some sort of balance of power between conservative and

progressive forces – could not be maintained. The logic of party systems that subsequently

developed was deeply rooted in the distribution of particularistic benefits, failing to be

responsive of the preferences of citizens. While the Bolivian party system never

56

institutionalized, those in Mexico and Venezuela were first dominant, but de-

institutionalized in the long run. This indicates that only responsive party systems, which

have the capacity to adapt to changing social and political contexts, are likely to remain

stable over long periods of time.

Where polarization was aborted, clientelism was often part and parcel of a strategy of

de-mobilization, and thus remained pervasive. The most obvious case here is Brazil,

because the challenge by progressive movements was potentially strong in that country,

while it was much weaker in Ecuador. Finally, the contrast between Peru and Argentina

once again highlights the importance of political polarization for the formation of

responsive party systems. In Peru, APRA itself ended polarization by moving into

conservative terrain in order to avoid the military taking over power. Not only did this

prove illusive, it also resulted in the failure of a responsive party system to develop. In

Argentina, on the other hand, polarization remained strong throughout the 1940 to the

1970s, but parties played a less important role because their electoral weakness made

conservative forces rely on the military to defend their interests, while the Peronists were

often banned from participating in elections. Nonetheless, the antagonism between the

Radicals and the Peronists is rooted both in history and in the class structure. The

Argentine party system thus came closest to those of Uruguay and Chile in offering

distinctive policy platforms and ensuring responsiveness to voter preferences when

democracy was restored in the early 1980s.

This paper has sought to explain the predominant linkage type on which party systems

rested in the 1980s, when Latin America experienced a wave of re-democratization. In

fact, the military dictatorships had largely failed in superseding the dynamics of party

competition that were at least partially responsible for the coups of the 1960s and 1970s.

Where the party system had been responsive before, it quickly regained responsiveness

57

after re-democratization, even if political divides over democracy appeared in Chile and

partially also in Uruguay. The other countries likewise showed great continuity – not so

much in terms of the parties making up the party system, but in that clientelistic forms of

voter mobilization predominated. The data presented in the final section to validate the

historical analysis shows that party systems in Ecuador, Bolivia, Brazil, and Mexico

continued to lack responsiveness in the late 1990s.

Nonetheless, several new dynamics are visible in more recent years, which will be

studied in a later stage of the project of which this paper is part (Bornschier 2011). Thus,

Latin America’s recent “left turn” may have profound impacts on party systems. New

movements combining leftist and indigenous components have emerged in Bolivia and

Ecuador. In Venezuela, the polarization created by Chávez’ ascendency to power may lead

opposition forces to unite, possibly resulting in a new, economic line of conflict emerging.

Most important in terms of the formation of programmatic linkages is the evolution in

Brazil and Mexico, however. Indeed, the Brazilian Workers’ Party (PT) seems to explicitly

aim at changing the dominant ways of voter mobilization by refusing to make clientelistic

appeals (c.f. Samuels 2006). Despite a continuing practice of corruption under the new

government, the PT appears to exert pressure on the established parties to develop more

clear-cut ideological profiles as well. Recent research indicates that parties are becoming

more cohesive in Brazil (Hunter 2007, Hagopian et al. 2009). Similarly, opposition parties

are pushing the Mexican party system in a more programmatic direction (Greene 2007,

2008). Thus, apart from the propitious path that leads through the two critical junctures

that were analyzed in this paper, there appears to be a second, alternative route to

programmatic party competition – a route that is open even to those countries that lack the

favourable historical circumstances of the forerunners in terms of democratic

responsiveness.

58

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