James Loxton

Populism and competitive authoritarianism in the Andes

Although military rule disappeared in Latin America after 1990, other forms of authoritarianism persisted. Competitive authoritarianism, in which democratic institutions exist but incumbent abuse skews the playing field against opponents, emerged in Peru, Venezuela, Bolivia, and Ecuador during the post-Cold War period. This article seeks to explain the emergence of competitive authoritarianism in the Andes. It argues that populism – the election of a personalistic outsider who mobilizes voters with an anti-establishment appeal – is a major catalyst for the emergence of competitive authoritarianism. Lacking experience with representative democratic institutions, possessing an electoral mandate to destroy the existing elite, and facing institutions of horizontal accountability controlled by that elite, populists have an incentive to launch plebiscitary attacks on institutions of horizontal accountability. Where they succeed, weak democracies almost invariably slide into competitive authoritarianism. The argument is demonstrated through a comparative analysis of all 14 elected presidents in Bolivia, Ecuador, Peru, and Venezuela between 1990 and 2010.

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

Authoritarian Successor Parties

Authoritarian successor parties, or parties that emerge from authoritarian regimes but that operate after a transition to democracy, have become prominent actors in Africa, Asia, Europe, and Latin America since the third wave. What explains their prevalence? What are their effects on democracy? This article argues that such parties often benefit from authoritarian inheritance: they may inherit valuable resources from former dictatorships that, paradoxically, help them to thrive under democracy. Despite their undemocratic origins, the article argues that their effects on democracy are not entirely negative, but double-edged.

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