Partidos políticos, elecciones y lealtades partidarias en Costa Rica: Erosión y cambio

Abstract

Though parties are key organizations of any democracy, they typically get short shrift even in academic research about the political systems of developing countries. In Costa Rica, historians rarely study them; Héctor Pérez-Brignoli was the last one to publish a short book on one of them (the now basically moribund Social Christian party) in 1998. Costa Rican political scientists infrequently attend party meetings, interview the leaders or rank and file (much less conduct a systematic survey of party members), or see how parties reach out to society and how they produce legislation.Fernando F. Sánchez’s fine monograph, the first ever on the country’s party system, begins to fill this void. His book is a lightly revised version of his Oxford DPhil thesis at St. Antony’s College, Oxford University (under the direction of Alan Angell). Its most important virtue is comprehensiveness: Sánchez presents a mass of aggregate electoral returns and public opinion polls to chart the rise and fall of the two-party system, which came into existence in the mid-1980s and collapsed by 2006. Sánchez turns out to be prescient: soon after he defended this thesis, the jailing of two former Social Christian presidents, Rafael Angel Calderón Fournier (1990 – 94) and Miguel Angel Rodríguez Echeverría (1998 – 2002), on corruption charges left the United Social Christian Party (Partido Unidad Social Cristiana or PUSC) bereft of supporters. His book usefully mines studies of the Costa Rican political system for data and insights that make this an indispensable book on the country’s political parties and on its political system as a whole.The first two parts of the book contain a theoretical overview of the subject and background history on the now-defunct party system. Parts 3, 4, and 5 form the core of Sánchez’s study of the Party of National Liberation (Partido Liberación Nacional, PLN) and the virtually extinct PUSC. Sánchez shows that the signs of weakening partisan attachment to parties gradually became evident during the 1990s, when the percentage of independent voters began to rise, in large part because the long influential PLN lost adherents faster than the PUSC could create new ones. All too many of us were oblivious to these changes, largely because studies of Costa Rican electoral behavior are uncommon. Sánchez, in fact, is only one of two political scientists that I am aware of (Jorge Vargas Cullel being the other) that have even bothered to collect polling data (generously provided by CID-Gallup) on party identification, for which he must be thanked.Sánchez also writes several informative chapters on how parties became isolated from the Costa Rican public. He suggests that economic decline and the combative style of PLN president José María Figueres (1994 – 98), along with intense factional struggle, weakened this party. He also hypothesizes that an increasingly educated society also grew disenchanted with a two-party system that, I would add, offered voters little in the way of choice. Between 1950 and 2000, for example, the share of Costa Ricans with postsecondary education went from 1.2 to 11.7 percent of all individuals.This book would have been stronger with more analysis of electoral behavior. This topic receives scant attention, despite the fact that Sánchez argues that sociological change contributed to declining rates of party identification. Running statistical models on individual-level data would have permitted the author to determine whether dealignment is more of a function of education and related factors or whether it is a function of disenchantment with the two-party system or party platforms, as more political explanations would hypothesize. Other future directions for research should be to study the internal party conventions that end with nominations for elected office. Studying how parties organize themselves to listen to citizen demands and how they produce the bills they debate in the Legislative Assembly would shed additional light on what remain crucial organizational links between state and society.Partidos políticos, elecciones y lealtades partidarias en Costa Rica is ideal for the reader who is unfamiliar with this country’s party system. It provides a wealth of detail and sets the stage for future research on the party system of one of the world’s oldest democracies.