Juan Bautista Lucca

Los Break-in parties en América Latina: ¿éxito o fracaso?

This research note outlines the theoretical development and methodological design of the research project “Break-in parties in Latin America: Success or Failure?”. The aim of the project is to analyze the characteristics of parties that manage to break into the party system – to clarify how structural conditions at the moment of genesis affect the “inward” and “outward” development of these parties and to explain how its origin and development are linked to their subsequent success or failure. To expose these objectives, in this research-note we procede as follows: first, we offer a literature review on the emergence of new parties; second, we discuss what is “new” in these kinds of organizations; and third, we explain our theoretical and methodological approach to analyze the break-in parties in Latin America.

'Break-In Parties' and Changing Patterns of Democracy in Latin America

Although Lijpharts typology of consensus and majoritarian democracy can be regarded as the most widely used tool to classify democratic regimes, it has been rarely applied to Latin America so far. We try to fill this gap by adapting Lijpharts typological framework to the Latin American context in the following way. In contrast to previous studies, we treat the type of democracy as an independent variable and include informal factors such as clientelism or informal employment in our assessment of democratic patterns. On this basis, we aim to answer the following questions. First, how did the patterns of democracy evolve in Latin America over the two decades between 1990 and 2010 and what kind of differences can be observed in the region? Second, what are the institutional determinants of the observed changes? We focus on the emergence of new parties because of their strong impact on the first dimension of Lijpharts typology. From our observations we draw the following tentative conclusions: If strong new parties established themselves in the party system but failed to gain the presidency, they pushed the system towards consensualism. Conversely, new parties that gained the presidency produced more majoritarian traits.