The political economy of party building

Abstract

This article theorizes the strategies used by parties to expand their support base, with a particular focus on the allocation of party goods. Here, we theorize that nascent parties with goods to hand out will favour a particular type of societal group, which we name private-gain-seeking groups. We utilize Peru’s party system collapse following Fujimori’s rule as an opportunity to test our hypotheses, which state that political parties will favour electorally volatile groups with restricted access to information or compromised opportunities to process it. Evidence for the hypotheses is found using data on the FONCODES allocation patterns of approximately 750 mayoral districts in Peru. The data suggest that groups expected to be favoured could end up receiving shares 34 percent greater than the least attractive groups.