Parties, partisanship, and democracy: conclusions

Abstract

Partisanship is linked to several aspects of political stability … Partisan identity, with its incorporation of party history and character, however small, is a touchstone and a check on short-term, arrant, political considerations. – Rosenblum (2008: 355) The classic problem of any opposition under democracy is how much to oppose and by what means. If the opposition does not oppose – does not present alternatives and struggle energetically for them – then the representative power of political institutions – their capacity to mobilize and incorporate – is weak. Democracy is anemic. But if the opposition does oppose vigorously, democracy may be threatened. – Przeworski (1991: 89) Since the mid-1990s, a quarter of the established political parties in Latin America have broken down. From one election to the next, they became irrelevant. In their wake, these dramatic and sudden breakdowns left a gaping hole in democratic representation. Party systems fragmented, making it difficult to forge lasting coalitions. New parties emerged as instant electoral vehicles for prominent personalities. Party breakdowns paved the way for unknown outsiders and anti-democratic candidates to attract votes and capture executive office. The conventional wisdom among observers of Latin American politics has attributed party breakdowns to bad incumbent performance. But this explanation overpredicts breakdown. Other explanations focus on institutional or social changes. Although these changes posed new challenges for established parties, they cannot explain why some parties within a system broke down whereas others survive. Prior studies focused either on specific cases of party breakdown in Latin America or on whole party systems that collapsed. Instead, this book is the first to explain why individual parties collapsed across a range of contexts. In Latin America in the 1980s and 1990s, political and economic crises divided the interests of party leaders and subleaders. In normal times, their interests are unlikely to clash. But in times of crisis, party leaders found they could gain short-term electoral benefit from charting a course that reversed party traditions and blurred their differences with their competitors. These reversals diluted their parties’ brands. When party brands blur and when the differences between party alternatives become meaningless, even those party identities that once seemed unbending will wither. When diluted party brands are combined with poor performance, incumbent established parties break down.