Inside the black box: Recent studies of Latin American party organizations

Abstract

L American party organizations have received remarkably little scholarly attention. Although this is hardly a new problem (see Blanksten 1960: 479; Martz 1964: 509; Kaufman 1977: 109), it is particularly surprising in the contemporary period. Not only has the demise of authoritarianism in the region increased the number and importance of parties, but the intellectual trend away from marxism to more political and institutional approaches has created a more favorable scholarly environment as well. Yet while a substantial amount of research has been done on non-party organizations such as neighborhood associations, NGOs, “issue networks,” and identity-based social movements,1 and while the recent “institutionalist” wave has generated important studies of Latin American electoral laws, legislatures, and executive-legislative relations,2 studies of party organizations remain conspicuously absent.3 One possible explanation for this paucity of research is that party organizations are simply less important in Latin America than in the advanced industrialized countries. Indeed, more than a generation ago, Douglas Chalmers (1972) suggested that due to long-established patterns of hierarchy, elitism, bureaucratic-corporatism, and patrimonialism, Latin American parties played a lesser role in shaping policy, aggregating interests, and fomenting participation than the class-based parties of Western Europe. More recently, scholars have pointed