Brandon Van Dyck

Challenges of Party-Building in Latin America

Political parties are the basic building blocks of representative democracy. Political scientists have long argued that democracy is “unworkable” (Aldrich 1995: 3) or even “unthinkable” (Schattschneider 1942: 1) without them. Yet four decades into the third wave of democratization, parties remain weak in much of Latin America. Since 1990, major parties have weakened dramatically or collapsed altogether in Argentina, Bolivia, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Guatemala, Peru, and Venezuela.1 At the same time, most efforts to build new parties have failed. The regional landscape is littered with the corpses of new parties that either failed to take off or experienced brief electoral success but then fizzled out or collapsed.2 Consequently, most Latin American party systems are more fluid today than they were two decades ago. Of the six party systems scored as “institutionalized” in Mainwaring and Scully’s (1995) seminal work, one (Venezuela) has collapsed fully, three (Argentina, Colombia, Costa Rica) have collapsed partially, and a fifth (Chile) has arguably been “uprooted” (Luna and Altman 2011).3 Of the four party systems that Mainwaring and Scully (1995) classified as “inchoate,” only Brazil’s has strengthened

Eroding the Clientelist Monopoly: The Subnational Left Turn and Conservative Rule in Northeastern Brazil

Well-financed opposition parties can exert their organizational strength to undercut the territorial advantages of political machines and clientele networks. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, leftist parties in Brazil’s Northeast region brought conservative dominance to an end. The Workers’ Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores, PT) led this shift, not only garnering regional majorities in presidential elections but also winning multiple governorships and increasing its share of federal and state legislative seats in the region. In contrast to arguments attributing recent electoral shifts in the Northeast to civil society, aggregate growth, and conditional cash transfers, we argue that the territorial expansion of the PT organization played a central role. A spike in party finances between 2001 and 2003 enabled the PT, for the first time, to establish party offices in northeastern municipalities from the top down. Drawing from underutilized data and sources, we show that the PT leadership eroded conservatives’ monopoly on rural territory in the Northeast by strategically targeting hundreds of conservative-dominated municipalities and investing resources to stimulate the formation of local offices. The study demonstrates that this top-down territorial targeting produced considerable electoral gains for PT candidates across federal and state races.

The Paradox of Adversity: New Left Party Survival and Collapse in Brazil, Mexico, and Argentina

The “neoliberal turn” of the 1980s and 1990s created profound, longterm challenges for the Latin American left. With the collapse of import substitution industrialization (ISI) and the emergence of an elite neoliberal consensus, the left’s traditional economic platform (e.g., industrial protectionism, price controls, nationalization of key industries) became politically infeasible in much of the region; and with the decline of labor unions and rise of the informal sector (a product of trade liberalization and deindustrialization), the left’s capacity to mobilize the popular classes weakened (Roberts 1998; Levitsky and Roberts 2011). Despite these challenges, five new leftwing parties have taken root in Latin America since the onset of the third wave of democratization in the region in 1978. Six others, after initially rising to prominence, promptly collapsed and disintegrated.1 Interestingly, most of the new left parties that took root were born in adversity. Brazil’s Workers’ Party (PT) and Mexico’s Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) formed in electoral opposition to authoritarian regimes, while El Salvador’s Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) and Nicaragua’s Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) emerged from armed conflict. In contrast, most of the new left parties that collapsed after liftoff were born in democracy, under less adverse circumstances (e.g., Argentina’s Front for a Country in