Preserving the Party System

The modern world of policy is characterized by existence of the most various political systems. In this regard, it is appropriate to remind of classification of party systems of Dzhiovanio Sartori. In this classification first of all, a multi-party system with a dominant party draws attention. This system attracted our attention due to the fact that it is characteristic to many countries. Sartori distinguishes 3 modification of a multiparty system with a dominant party. He writes about a predominant party system, a dominant party system and an authoritarian dominant system [1, p. 260-261]. It should be noted that, in Dzh. Sartori opinion, these systems significantly different from each other. However, Sartori was able to reveal similarities. A convincing illustration of this fact is the process of formation of multi-party system in the former Soviet space. This will be illustrated below later. Number of researchers believe that the «one-party system derives its strength from the struggle with imperial, conservative and traditional forms of power. In modernizing societies multiparty systems are weak» [2, p. 419]. It should be noted that, regardless the form of domination, all the dominant party systems have similarities. This is because, these party systems decide essence common challenges. One of the such feature is the spread of patronage and orientations of cash bonds. The second feature is that the dominant parties often act as a center party. This creates more opportunities for ideological maneuvering. However, the dominant parties of different systems also have differences. The most important difference is the methods of dealing with political opponents. The predominant and dominant party systems prevail legitimate democratic mechanisms, like competition of authoritarian ideologies of dominant systems, which leads to a very tough fight. The second difference is, being the ruling party, the dominant party determines the structure of the executive branch. In the dominant authoritarian systems, as a rule, parties serve to enhance the influence of a small group. The third difference is that, in predominant party and dominant systems parties are usually used for the modernization political relationships. In authoritarian systems the dominant ruling party often use non-democratic practices and procedures to maintain the dominance of the ruling group. As stated above, we have paid so much attention to the multi-party dominant party because the party system functioning in the post-Soviet space are mostly the dominant party systems of various modifications. This conclusion is strongly supported by concrete analysis of the formation of parties and party systems in some countries of the former Soviet Union.

The article characterizes the heuristic potential of modern typologies of party systems. Usually, when conducting comparative studies of political parties, quantitative typologies of party systems by Maurice Duverger, Jean Blondel and Giovanni Sartori are used. However, even their heuristic potential is only partially used. Therefore, the article draws attention to some features of these typologies. In particular, qualitative differences were noted between the two types of one-party systems described by Blondel – traditional and mobilization. Sartori’s analysis of party systems in shifting policies is also noteworthy. As a result of this analysis, four new types of (quasi-) party systems were formulated: dominant authoritarian, dominant non-authoritarian, non-dominant, and atomized. In addition, recently, political scientists have developed a number of new typologies and introduced new categories. Thus, Russell Dalton deepens the idea of the differences between authoritarian and adversarial party systems distinguishing exclusive and inclusive among authoritarian systems, and consensus, conflict, and consociative among adversarial ones. The evolution of Alan Siaroff’s typology is traced, which leads to a difference in party system and party model, as well as the emergence of new subtypes – one-party super-majority in a two-party system, dominance and dominance in a multi-party one. Grigorii Golosov, using a modified version of the Nagayama triangle, identifies polyvalent and bivalent systems with a dominant party, monovalent and polyvalent two-party systems, monovalent and bivalent multi-party systems. Finally, Immaculada Szmolka and Lucia G. del Moral conduct a comparative analysis of party systems based on four independent dimensions: competition, stability, the number of parties and the balance between them, polarization. Each measurement allows one to select from three to eight types of party systems, which creates a convenient set of characteristics. It is important to note that these typologies can be used to study party systems, both in stable and new volatile political systems.

The party and election system has an impact on the government system with the phenomenon of difficulty in forming opposition groups. So it is important to review the party and election system by comparing it to the system in the United States to find a more efficient format. By using a descriptive-analytical normative juridical method, the results obtained are First, the implementation of the party system in Indonesia and the United States is different, this is driven by the election system, the proportional system encourages Indonesia to adopt a multiparty system, while the district system urges the United States to adopt a two-party system even though there are not only two parties in the country. Second, the reconstruction of the election system can affect the party system as in Duverger's law theory. Many aspects can affect the election process, such as the time of implementation, the number of candidates, and other variables. So by reconstructing the election system, both the system itself and the variables in it can be a solution to the problems of multiparty and presidential in Indonesia. Keywords : Electoral System, Party System, System of Government

One of the prime incentives for this dissertation was the renewed interest in the role of party agency for the emergence and structuring of party systems that came up in the course of the discussions about the third wave of democracy and the concomitant challenges to the theoretical fundamentals of common party system theory. In addition, scholarly discourse on the third wave brought up again the question as to how the party system as an independent variable impacts on processes of democratic consolidation, national integration and socio-economic development.Trying to examine the role of party agency in this regard and to assess the role of the party system as the independent variable, the dissertation deals with two regional and temporal contexts and a political phenomenon pertinent to these contexts that most often have ranked as unique or paradoxical in scholarly assessments. Academic accounts of post-colonial India are interspersed with references to a deviant case of, or an empirical anomaly to, party system and democratic theory, and the conventional vocabulary used to describe post-apartheid South African political development frequently resorts to such terms as political miracle or societal exceptionalism. A similar confusion and vagueness prevails with regard to the specific configuration of a democratic and competitive party system characterised by the towering and prolonged dominance of one party. The study is an attempt to shed light on these contexts and their party systems by departing from the conventional �paths� of party system theory as well as from the relativist assessments of post-independent India (1947-67) and post-apartheid South Africa (1994-). This is done by means of a diachronic comparison of the two countries� party systems with a distinct focus on the role of party agency in the shaping and maintenance of one-party-dominance and on the role of the two party systems as independent variables. Chapter 1 deals with the conceptual, theoretical and methodological problems, incentives and questions inherent in the kind of cross-national and diachronic comparison attempted in this study. Chapter 2 gives a brief outline of the regional settings at the time democratic party competition was beginning to take shape, outlines the institutional boundaries within which the two party systems were/are located, looks at the main characteristics of the electorate in post-independent India and post-apartheid South Africa and �takes stock� of the two party systems in terms of a broad outline of the dominant party and the relevant opposition parties. The next three chapters present the bulk of the empirical analysis and deal with the emergence, working and functions/effects of one-party-dominance in India and South Africa respectively. Each chapter refers to the basic outline of the analytical framework depicted above and combines theoretical arguments with empirical, as well as historical, givens of the two party systems under examination. Whereas chapter 3 examines how the two party systems were �shaped from above�, i.e. how party agency helped to achieve the dominant position of the INC and ANC respectively, chapter 4 examines the mechanisms of control employed to maintain dominance and the mechanisms of party competition prevailing in the two regional contexts. Both chapters deal with the party agentive factors identified in the analytical framework as responsible for the achievement and maintenance of one-party-dominance in the form of short analytical narratives. The last of these three chapters (chapter 5) sums up and discusses the effects and (redefined) functions of party systems in changing societies and gives an account of how both countries� party systems have fared with regard to these effects and in terms of fulfilling these functions. Chapter 6 takes up the differences and similarities of the two regional contexts as they have emerged out of the preceding three chapters, relates the �lessons� of the Indian experience to the prospects of one-party-dominance in South Africa by means of a comparison and reassesses the two key theses of the study, namely that a) party agency and strategy were among the most decisive factors in the formation and development of the two regional contexts� systems of one-party-dominance and are, in general, crucial for party system formation and development (they are especially relevant in the shaping of one-party-dominance in changing societies); and that b) systems of one-party-dominance have a potentially (but not necessarily) benign effect on processes of democratisation, national integration and democratic development in the crucial period of changing societies� transition to democracy and democratic consolidation.

The topic of electoral volatility was not at the center of academic work in Latin America until Scott Mainwaring and Timothy R. Scully’s seminal 1995 work Building Democratic Institutions: Party Systems in Latin America (cited in Electoral Volatility as an Expression of Party System Equilibrium). Preceding analyses primarily focused on explaining the breakdown of democratic politics in the region during the 1960s and 1970s. Conventional wisdom that departed from the classic work of Sartori in Parties and Party Systems (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1976), maintained that stable party systems are crucial for the durability of democracies, focusing his attention on aspects such as party system polarization and fragmentation. Mainwaring and Scully shift the discussion, arguing that previous literature on the region neglected and inadequately conceptualized an equally important property of party systems: their level of their institutionalization. According to Mainwaring and Scully, party system institutionalization (PSI) is formed by four different dimensions. The first is stability in the patterns of party competition. Thus, institutionalized party systems are those in which actors develop expectations, orientations, and behavior based on the premise that practices and organizations will prevail into the foreseeable future. Mainwaring’s 2018 work, Party Systems in Latin America (cited in Electoral Volatility as an Expression of Party System Equilibrium), argues that this is the only relevant dimension in PSI, while considering that the other three are just underpinnings that facilitate it. So according to this work, an institutionalized party system is the one in which a stable set of parties interacts regularly in stable ways. This stability of interparty competition is traditionally measured with the Pedersen volatility index, a comprehensive measure of the net systematic shift in levels of electoral support for parties across elections. As volatility is negatively correlated with this important dimension of party system institutionalization, conventional wisdom holds that political representation deteriorates when there is persistent high volatility. To this debate, the well-cited 2006 article by Mainwaring and Torcal, “Party System Institutionalization and Party System Theory after the Third Wave of Democratization” (cited in Electoral Volatility as an Expression of Party System Equilibrium), adds the idea that this lack of stability in the patterns of competition in party systems, measured by electoral volatility, is a typical characteristic of new and developing democracies. According to that study, the most important defining characteristic of party systems in less developed countries is captured by their lack of institutionalization, in other words, the amount of electoral volatility in their party systems. Since the publication of these three contributions, the debate on party system dynamics in the region has focused on cross-national levels of electoral volatility, their relationship with other indicators of party system stability, and their consequences for democratic quality and performance, while also broadening the analysis to Europe.

In 1949 V.O. Key wrote about the importance of state-level one-party in the southern United States for organizing local authoritarian rule in a nationally competitive party system.1 Key's study documented a phenomenon that continues to pose theoretical puzzles to contemporary scholarship on party systems: the simultaneous existence of competitive party politics and noncompetitive party politics in one national party system. In addition to documenting U.S. party system dynamics at the subnational level that were distinct from those at the national level, Key also uncovered important institutional interac tions between noncompetitive state party systems and the competitive national party system. These findings (and many others that followed about U.S. state party politics) pro vided significant possibilities for theory building about parties and party systems. How ever, this theoretical promise was stifled by two subsequent developments in political science. The first was the impermeability of boundaries between American and com parative politics, which relieved Americanist scholars of the burdens of generalization and comparative theory builders of the burden of paying close attention to U.S evidence. The second was the theoretical development of comparative literatures on party systems, whose most influential scholars overlooked or rejected the incorporation of subnational contexts into their theorizing about party systems. As a result, scholars of American politics developed an extensive empirical literature on state party politics while com parative theorizing about parties and party systems remained oblivious to the theoretical implications of this trend. Today there is new interest in how and why the quality of democracy varies across subnational territorial units of countries.2 Party system dynamics are a crucial piece of the puzzle. However, the comparative literature on parties and party systems offers few theoretical tools to scholars interested in this topic. This is because in that theoretical tradition party systems are conceived of and measured nationally. Their systemic prop erties are assessed at the national level, and the indicators used to measure those proper ties (usually votes for national offices or seats in national legislatures) are national. This practice has created a situation of conceptual and measurement incompleteness that hinders new discoveries in the study of party competition across jurisdictional bound aries of the nation-state. 21

Political parties play a fundamental role in the representative political systems of northern industrialized democracies. They connect civil and political society, advance the perceived interests of individuals, groups, and social strata while aiming consciously to develop these constituencies, and provide a link between society and the state, espousing the claims of the one and enforcing the rules of the other (Sakwa 1995, 169). Political parties provide representation and accountability, electoral pressure for partisan constituencies, and the basis for structuring political choice in the competition of interests in the political arena. In short, they serve as an integral aspect of representative democracies, and thus are perceived as the bedrock for the process of democratization. It is the argument of this article, however, that Russia's transition to democracy actually has been inhibited by the development of a dysfunctional and extremely unstable party system. An important starting point for understanding the woeful state of Russia's contemporary party system is examining the motivations surrounding the choices made by self-interested political elites. The desire of those who already possess power to maintain it and the desire to obtain the goods of political office--most notably power and personal enrichment--by those who seek them, have adversely impacted party system formation. These motivations also have had an impact on the structure of the institutions of government with which the parties interact, creating a political environment that reduces the importance of the role played by parties. In this regard, Russia's transition to democracy played a key role, because it served to enhance the freedom of action of the political elites, allowing them to better mold the political system according to their desires. This analysis emphasizes the profound impact of two factors on the development of Russia's party system: the course of the initial transition and the role of elites during and after the transition process. The sudden collapse of the Soviet system disrupted the development of the nascent party system, severing its connections to society and leaving it to be reconstituted from above by elites in circumstances that limited its connections with the society and the political system. In these circumstances, the parties became led by the elite. The later changes made to the overall political system during the 1993-95 and 1999-2000 election cycles have reinforced the party system's susceptibility to the behavior of the elite but at the expense of developing links between political and civil society. Those changes also shaped the incentives for elite action in ways that have led away from the development of a well-structured party system. Until the party system re-establishes its links with society and the incentives of party elite behavior are shaped by the need to promote societal interests rather than their own, Russia's party system will continue to be dysfunctional in the ongoing process of democratization. The remainder of this article is divided into five sections. Section one discusses how the collapse of the Soviet Union granted elites the leeway to fashion a party system and political institutions according to their own desires. Sections two and three describe the major developments in party system formation during the 1993-1995 and 1999-2000 election cycles, respectively. Section four draws on the historical evidence described in the preceding three sections to outline the principal factors that have contributed to the dysfunctional nature of Russia's political party system and its impact on the consolidation of Russian democracy. Section five offers general conclusions and prescriptions for the future. Impact of the Soviet Union's Collapse on the Emergence of a Nascent Multiparty System Competitive provoke party development, and this is one reason that founding elections are considered to be so important in transitions to democracy (O'Donnell and Schmitter 1986, 57). …

The article characterizes regional party systems as a phenomenon of modern politics. The author proceeds from the concept of a region as an intrastate subnational territorial unit. The formation of the concept of party systems in political science is described, which began with V. O. Key’s book on the dominance of the Democratic Party in the southern states of the United States in the 1920s–1940s. Key’s conclusions on the one-party specifics of the southern states, sharply distinguishing them from the classical two-party system of the federal level, later fit well into R. Dahl’s concept of multi-level polyarchies; however, they were criticized by such well-known experts in the field of comparative study of party systems as G. Sartori and A. Ware. In particular, Sartori called “unit-jump fallacies” any attempts to single out regional party systems, especially one-party ones. However, he recognized that the US party system has a two-tier structure and extended the model of a pre-dominant party system to the southern states. Equally inconsistent was criticism from Ware, who noted differences in party politics at the federal and regional levels, but insisted that they did not matter to the development of national party systems. Only at the beginning of the 21st century L. Bardi and P. Mair substantiated the possibility of forming their own party systems in subfederal regions and showed their differences from national party systems. Also of great importance is the broader concept of “federalized party system”, which was introduced by E. Gibson and J. Suarez-Cao. The federalized party system consists of national and subnational (regional and local) party systems. The author’s analysis of the most common definitions of the regional party system shows the need to adjust them. Taking into account the conclusions of theoretical and empirical studies, the article proposes the author's definition and description of regional party systems.

In Australia, two‐and‐a‐half party systems are common with the Liberal and National parties, usually needing to collaborate to form governments. In Queensland, the 2008 merger of two of these state parties to create the Liberal National Party (LNP) created instead a two‐party system. This review examines the forces for the merger and prospects for the continuation of the LNP, the likelihood of change as a result of the Queensland merger in the remaining two‐and‐a‐half party systems, and how the drivers of this merger compare with those observed in studies of other non‐Australian party and electoral systems. Pressures and conditions for a merger similar to those in other, mostly European systems, were evident in the case of the LNP. The particular structure of the pre‐merger party competition and relationships was, however, a likely factor in the merger in that two collaborating parties could avoid a contested switch in party seniority. This aspect, unlikely to occur in other Australian party systems, combined with the very limited success of the LNP in gaining and holding government since the merger, does not suggest an imperative for further mergers in other Australian systems.

This study examines whether (and how) parties adapt to party system saturation (PSS). A party system is oversaturated when a higher effective number of parties contests elections than predicted. Previous research has shown that parties are more likely to exit when party systems are oversaturated. This article examines whether parties will adapt by increasing the nicheness of their policy platform, by forming electoral alliances or by merging. Based on time-series analyses of 522 parties contesting 357 elections in twenty-one established Western democracies between 1945 and 2011, the study finds that parties are more likely to enter – and less likely to leave – electoral alliances if PSS increases. Additionally, a small share of older parties will merge. The results highlight parties’ limited capacity to adapt to their environments, which has important implications for the literature on party (system) change and models of electoral competition.

Despite myriad explanations for government spending levels, few studies have included considerations of party system institutionalization. This is surprising since the level of party system institutionalization should significantly affect policymak ing. Weakly institutionalized systems, that are characterized by loose ties with societal groups, higher volatility levels, and poorly developed internal organizations, should result in lower public goods but higher parochial goods spending. In contrast, more institutionalized systems should result in more public goods spending as these systems try to appeal to broader swaths of the population. Time-series cross-sectional analyses, with three different spending measures as dependent variables, show that institutional ized party systems significantly influence spending patterns. At the outset of his seminal work, Rethinking Party Systems in the Third Wave, Scott Mainwaring notes that in third wave democracies it is necessary to consider the degree of institutionalization of the party system, since institutionalized party systems function very differently from highly institutionalized systems, with important implica tions for democracy.1 He suggests that institutionalized parties should result in lower electoral volatility levels, entrenched ties between parties and voters, higher levels of legitimacy for parties, and established internal party organizations.2 Although scholars have sought to measure and refine these requisite components of institutionalized party systems, the effects Mainwaring speaks of have yet to be fully explored. The policy im plications of institutionalized systems have only recently been considered.3 Indeed, much work remains in order to adequately understand the myriad effects of stable party systems. One of the most fundamental and essential government policies is the distribution of government expenditures. This is, after all, the essential building block of gover nance, since fiscal policies affect other realms of policymaking. As Hans-Dieter Klingemann and his coauthors succinctly say, Money is not all there is to policy, but there is precious little policy without it.4 Previous studies have provided explana tions that rely on political, institutional, or structural factors to explain government ex penditures. However, at least two limitations emerge from many of these works. First, many studies of government spending refrain from cross-national analysis, often focus ing instead only on developed states. As Mainwaring points out, this is a concern because 229 This content downloaded from 207.46.13.51 on Mon, 20 Jun 2016 06:00:51 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Comparative Politics January 2010 theories derived from or based on such states may not hold the same theoretical weight when applied to developing states. Second, although some studies consider various as pects of party systems, few explore the relationship between government spending and party system institutionalization (PSI). Studies that include party system variables typi cally involve some form of counting the number of parties,5 the number of parties holding seats in the ruling coalition,6 or the parties' relative seat share. For instance, Bumba Mukherjee concludes that the number of effective parties influences levels of subsidies and transfers.7 Refuting Mukherjee's legislative universalism theory, Kathleen Bawn and Frances Rosenbluth suggest that the number of coalition parties better determines spend ing levels.8 Additional research is necessary to understand the effects of party system stability. The connection between party stability and government spending is intriguing, since weakly institutionalized systems should behave differently than more stable ones and, thus, should differently influence how states allocate expenditures. This article offers three contributions to the extant literature. First, it provides an initial attempt to explore the importance of PSI vis-?-vis government spending levels and types. If the relationship between these variables holds, spending levels, as well as spending types, should vary based on the level of PSI. Specifically, institutionalized systems, when controlling for institutional, ideological, and structural factors, should result in higher public goods and overall spending. In contrast, weakly institutionalized systems should rely less on expensive public goods?thereby resulting in lower overall spending levels?and should favor parochial spending that benefits smaller segments of the population?thereby resulting in lower overall spending. Previous studies have seldom considered the effect of PSI on policymaking, though some have explored the concept theoretically and offered refinements in measuring its components.9 Another strand of work has considered what factors catalyze or promote PSI.10 More recently, scholars have assessed the relationship between PSI and democ racy.11 Still, there is a dearth of research on the relationship between PSI and policy making. Charles Hankla considers how party system strength affects trade openness, but this is one of the few exceptions.12 Second, this article addresses the paucity of scholarship on PSI in developing democ racies. Previous studies have considered relatively small samples of states when exploring the causes or effects of PSI.13 In particular, the research has only recently begun to include postcommunist states. As illustrated in Table 1, this is a serious concern since average Table 1 Volatility and Party Replacement Levels by Region Volatility Party Replacement Africa 9.97% 6.45% Asia 13.91% 15.23% Latin America 17.55% 18.22% OECD 11.78% ;.57% Postcommunist 28.61% 39.51%

This article is part of the special cluster titled Parties and Democratic Linkage in Post-Communist Europe, guest edited by Lori Thorlakson, and will be published in the August 2018 issue of EEPS This article introduces a special section on parties and democratic linkage in post-communist Europe. It sets out the main objectives and research questions that guide the four articles in this special section, presenting these in the context of the comparative politics literature on party and party system change and democratic development. It introduces the key arguments of the articles in the section, arguing that the contributions identify regionally distinctive patterns of party and party system behaviour in Central and Eastern Europe. These patterns have fuelled a quest for more suitable conceptual and measurement tools and call for diversity in comparative analysis, combining intra and inter regional comparison.

Latin America’s Parties Jonathan Hartlyn (bio) Building Democratic Institutions: Party Systems in Latin America. Edited by Scott Mainwaring and Timothy R. Scully. Stanford University Press, 1995. 578 pp. This book represents a major step forward in the analysis of parties and party systems in Latin America, enriching the debate enormously. Introductory and concluding chapters by the coeditors make an important general argument, raise issues for further research, and place the country cases in a coherent comparative framework. In between, the 12 country studies provide a wealth of information; written by a mix of senior and junior scholars, the chapters are of uniformly high quality. Mainwaring and Scully argue that “the critical difference among Latin American party systems is whether or not a competitive party system is institutionalized” (p. 1). For them, a strong, institutionalized party system is a necessary (though not sufficient) condition for consolidating democracy and for governing effectively. I agree, although I believe that they have not considered all the relevant issues regarding institutionalization here. Their conclusion briefly reviews the impact on parties and party systems of several contemporary changes in the region. These include the region’s wave of democratization, severe economic crisis, the emergence of antistatist economic policies, the questioning of the traditional Left in the wake of the Soviet collapse, and the impact of the mass media and other technological changes on campaigns and party organizational strength. The editors’ focus on party institutionalization leads them to reject categorizing countries by the traditional criterion of the number of parties. To determine party institutionalization, Mainwaring and Scully combine four criteria: regularity of party competition (low electoral volatility); stability of parties’ roots in society; legitimacy accorded parties and elections; and the existence of solid party organizations independent of individual leaders. On the basis of these criteria, the 12 country cases are divided into “institutionalized party systems,” “inchoate party systems,” and an intermediate and somewhat residual category, “hegemonic party systems in transition.” The “institutionalized party systems” include six countries that differ in terms of the longevity of their parties, the types of parties and party systems that they have, the history and nature of their democratic experiences, and their evolution subsequent to the book’s publication. Chile (chapter by Timothy Scully) and Uruguay (Luis González), both with deeply rooted parties of long standing and a long history of [End Page 174] democracy, but also both victims of military takeovers in the 1970s, are naturally located here. Scully focuses principally on elements of continuity, whereas González stresses the challenges of change. Colombia (Ronald Archer), with traditional parties reaching back into the nineteenth century, is often superficially lumped together with Venezuela (Miriam Kornblith and Daniel Levine) because both experienced transitions to democracy in the late 1950s and did not experience military breakdowns in the 1970s. Not in this book. Instead, the chapters here show that the history and nature of the major parties, their organization, and their links to both state and society have varied greatly across the two countries, with profound implications for the kinds of problems of governance and democracy that each has experienced. The chapter on Venezuela was completed prior to the 1993 presidential elections, which saw the emergence of new political forces and a dramatic fall in the vote for the two parties that symbolized the country’s institutionalized party system. Yet the chapter’s discussion of the challenges of economic scarcity; of the perceived “suffocation” of civil society by the two excessively centralized, pragmatic, and corrupt political parties; and of the military’s discontent make this outcome understandable. Also included is the often overlooked case of Costa Rica (Deborah Yashar), the only unequivocally successful democracy in the region since the early 1950s. James McGuire’s chapter on Argentina analyzes the “movementist tendencies” of the major parties, especially the Peronists, and the weakness of the ties between class actors and the parties, two features that call into question the extent to which Argentina falls into the “institutionalized” category. The two hegemonic party systems in transition are Mexico and Paraguay. Ann Craig and Wayne Cornelius place in their proper context societal dynamics and the myriad electoral-rule changes enacted by Mexico’s hegemonic Institutional Revolutionary...

Since the beginning of the third wave of democratization in the late 1970s, Latin American party systems have confronted several challenges, and they have frequently been transformed. There have been various types of changes. While some systems collapsed in the 1990s (e.g., Venezuela and Peru), others realigned (Colombia, Chile, and Uruguay), or expanded (Argentina and Mexico), or were able to become consolidated and ensure their stability over time (e.g., Brazil). What factors explain the transformations in party systems during the past three decades, and how can Latin American party systems be classified according to their attributes? In trying to answer these questions, scholars of Latin America have undertaken studies that are both theoretically and empirically rich. Their work has increased our knowledge of the party systems and representative democracies in the region. Different factors have been highlighted in order to explain the changes these systems have undergone since the third wave of democratization. Some works emphasize the importance of institutional reforms introduced by politicians or by constitutional assemblies. The questions they address are the following: What political reforms have been introduced into Latin American political systems, and what effects have they had on the party systems in different countries? The researchers do not limit their attention to reforms of electoral systems. For example, some of them also study decentralization processes and their effects on party systems. From a different perspective, other authors focus on changes in electoral preferences and their effects on the configuration of political power, exploring how regional economic, political, and social changes have affected voter preferences and the political configuration of party systems. Still others consider the crises of democratic representation in these countries, underlining the decline in the programmatic character of parties as an explanatory variable for the crises and noting that the level of institutionalization of a party system declines when parties abandon this distinctive feature and become clientelistic or personalistic instead. On the other hand, in order to describe party systems and to observe the changes they have undergone, academics have proposed a set of concepts and measurements that make it possible to identify their levels of institutionalization (i.e., stability vs. volatility), nationalization, and programmatic structuration, among other aspects. The operationalization of these concepts has provided researchers with useful data for describing, comparing, and analyzing the party systems of the region transversely over time. Understanding the transformation and characteristics of Latin American party systems over time sheds light on both the progress democratic regimes have made and the setbacks they have suffered within specific countries and in the region at large.

The KGParl lead joint network: “Parties and Party System after 1990” is investigating the constitution and the transformation of a new German party landscape after the reunification of 1990. The first focus is on the establishment of party political structures in the five new German states after the system transformation in 1989 and the unification in October 1990. It is trying to analyze the different expectations in East and West Germany and the competing influence of the established West German parties, which extended their organizations into the territory of the former GDR, in building what soon was seen as an “East German party system”. Also, the effects and repercussions of these processes in eastern Germany on the all-German party system will be examined: Was there a sort of co-transformation occur in western Germany? Did the reunification perhaps even accelerate the fragmentation of the “old” federal German party system that has been evident since 1983, when a new, young party, the Greens, succeeded in entering the German Bundestag for the first time?