The Dynamic Diversity of Latin American Party Systems

The Dynamic Diversity of Latin American Party Systems

Abstract: Most Latin American party systems change so often and in so many respects that the ‘typical'
party system of each country can be described only in imprecise terms, if at all. However, the nature of
party systems as they are defined in individual elections can be described in rich and fairly reliable
detail. This article compares the party systems of 20th-century Latin America election by election
through indicators of fragmentation, volatility, personalism, ideological clarity, mean left-right tendency,
and polarization. The data cover approximately 150 lower or single-house legislative elections in 20th-
century Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Mexico, Peru, Uruguay, and
Venezuela.
KEYWORDS: Latin America, fragmentation, volatility, ideology, polarization

Michael Coppedge
Kellogg Institute, Hesburgh Center
University of Notre Dame
Notre Dame, IN 46556
tel 219/631-7036
fax 219/631-6717
coppedge.1@nd.edu

The Dynamic Diversity of Latin American Party Systems

Recent research on Latin America has gone a long way toward correcting the old stereotype of the
region's parties and party systems as excessively pragmatic, clientelistic, personalistic, volatile,
uncohesive, and therefore weak. A new conventional wisdom has developed that emphasizes the variety
among Latin American countries rather than their common deviation from the norms of the
industrialized north. Our understanding now needs to go a step farther, by recognizing that there is
almost as much difference within each country as there is across the countries of Latin America. This
recognition requires us to be more cautious in generalizing about cross-national differences. Also,
scholars must now pay more systematic attention to the substance of party competition, which has been
neglected in favor of more objectively measured party-system characteristics such as fragmentation and
volatility. This article attempts to improve the new conventional wisdom in both ways, by describing the

file:///E|/mestrado/The%20Dynamic%20Diversity%20of%20Latin%20American%20Party%20Systems.htm (1 of 20)11/5/2006 16:56:55

 The Dynamic Diversity of Latin American Party Systems

ideology, polarization, mean left-right positions, fragmentation, and institutionalization of the party
systems of 20th-century Latin America on an election-by-election basis.

The Development of the Conventional Wisdom

The conventional wisdom about Latin American parties and party systems developed in four stages.
From the turbulence of the 19th century until about 1960, the prevailing stereotype was that Latin
America was a region of caudillismo, or domination by one or more strong personalities, often military
figures, who generally lacked a strong organizational base of support. However, Chile was always
recognized as the exception: the most ‘European' of the Latin American cases, with well-organized,
deeply rooted political parties possessing clear left-right ideologies (Johnson, 1958: 19, 66-93). From
about 1960 to about 1967, Latin American parties were common objects of study in the United States.
This research brought two innovations. First, scholars recognized that the democratic mass politics of
the postwar era had given rise to new sorts of parties. Some were communist or socialist parties, which
were appropriately considered quite ideological. But ‘Aprista' or ‘national-revolutionary' parties were
also emerging, characterized by middle-class leadership, a multi-class social base, and a reformist
ideology (Blanksten, 1960; Martz, 1964; DiTella, 1965; Dix, 1966: 292). Second, this wave of research
produced detailed case studies of parties as institutions, thereby building up a reserve of knowledge
about organizational structure, candidate selection, cohesion, campaigning, factionalism, and elections
(Alexander, 1964; Martz, 1966; Williams, 1967; Payne, 1968; Hilliker, 1971). In the late 1960s,
however, the study of political parties became a marginal pursuit among Latin Americanists, shouldered
aside by military rule and a radicalized environment in which only truly revolutionary change counted
and reformism was considered indistinguishable from personalism, clientelism or outright reaction.
Some research on parties continued, but it was considered less interesting than research on the military,
the church, economic policy, or social classes.

Research on parties continued to be neglected until the mid-1980s, when redemocratization was well
under way and parties once again became important political actors. The wave of democratization
inspired case studies of parties in Argentina (Gibson, 1996), Brazil (Keck, 1986; Kinzo, 1988;
Mainwaring, 1993), Chile (Scully, 1992), Colombia (Hartlyn, 1988), Ecuador (Conaghan, 1988),
Mexico, Peru (Graham, 1992), Uruguay (Gillespie, 1991; González, 1991), and Venezuela
(Coppedge,1994). The integration of Latin American cases into mainstream debates about
presidentialism, legislative behavior, and electoral reform also motivated scholars to collect comparable
cross-national data on Latin American party systems for the first time (Taagepera and Shugart, 1989;
Remmer, 1991; Mainwaring, 1993; Jones, 1994; Mainwaring and Scully, 1995; Coppedge, 1997b).

In the new conventional wisdom that grew from these studies, admirably synthesized in Mainwaring and
Scully's Building Democratic Institutions (1995), Latin American party systems vary principally
according to institutionalization and number. The fundamental distinction divides the institutionalized
party systems from the ‘inchoate' ones. A secondary division is the more traditional classification into
dominant-party, two-party, and multiparty systems. These are the two dimensions that have received the
most attention and on which the greatest quantity of data exists. Roughly speaking, Latin American

file:///E|/mestrado/The%20Dynamic%20Diversity%20of%20Latin%20American%20Party%20Systems.htm (2 of 20)11/5/2006 16:56:55

 The Dynamic Diversity of Latin American Party Systems

party systems are thought to fall into six distinct types defined by their degrees of institutionalization
and fragmentation. The ideal combination is the institutionalized 2-2.5-party system, which is identified
with Costa Rica, Colombia, Venezuela, Uruguay before 1971, and in some respects Argentina. Uruguay
after 1971 and Chile are classified as institutionalized but fragmented party systems, which are also
considered viable, although prone to crises of governance if majority coalitions cannot be built. A third,
marginally democratic is the institutionalized dominant-party system, which is identified with Mexico
and Paraguay, and a fourth is the inchoate 2-2.5-party system, believed typical of Peru. The worst
combination is defined as the inchoate and fragmented party system, which has been diagnosed in
Ecuador, Bolivia, and Brazil during its democratic years. The party system of authoritarian Brazil could
be classified as an inchoate dominant-party system even though many observers consider authoritarian
elections intrinsically incomparable to the democratic systems.

The new conventional wisdom is a vast improvement over the spotty coverage and stereotypes that
prevailed 30 years ago. However, there are two respects in which it can be improved. First, it is
important to revive the systematic analysis of the substance of party politics. A purely institutional focus
limits us to a dissection of party systems that have been drained, gutted, and picked clean of the flesh
and blood of politics--ideology, personalities, interests, ideas, platforms, slogans, images, issues--in
short, the substance of political competition. Crucial aspects of the democratic process such as alliances
and coalitions, policy choices, and polarization, cannot be understood well without considering the
ideas, interests, and images of parties, in addition to their number and sizes. The next two sections will
evaluate how ideological and polarized Latin American party systems are and describe the extent to
which they lean to the left or the right.

Second, improvement of the conventional wisdom requires coming to grips with party-system change.
We are all aware that most Latin American party systems change rapidly, especially in contrast to those
of the industrialized north. However, the conventional wisdom has not yet fully realized how this
variability affects our ability to describe and analyze them. The more volatile a party system is, the less
sense it makes to generalize about any of its characteristics--fragmentation, ideological tendency,
polarization, even volatility itself. A useful typology by country is out of the question: these party
systems defy taxonomy. Averages over a long span of time tend to be poor indicators of the nature of a
party system at any one point along the way, and averages over a short span of elections tend to be
unrepresentative of other periods. Even generalizations about different periods of a country's history are
inadequate because the periods of relative homogeneity are usually frustratingly brief, and because a
periodization that is useful for describing one characteristic is rarely useful for describing any others.
Most Latin American party systems are changing, and changing often, in several dimensions at once, all
on staggered timetables. There is often, therefore, considerable uncertainty about what, if anything, is
‘typical' of the party system in any given country.

Figure 1 illustrates the nature of the problem more precisely using elementary statistics. The two axes
represent the two most familiar characteristics of party systems--fragmentation (the effective number of
electoral parties) and volatility.(1) Each ellipse in the figure corresponds to the entire 20th-century
experience of one country, except for Brazil, which has separate ellipses for its democratic and
authoritarian party systems. Each country's mean fragmentation and volatility lies at the exact center of

file:///E|/mestrado/The%20Dynamic%20Diversity%20of%20Latin%20American%20Party%20Systems.htm (3 of 20)11/5/2006 16:56:55

 The Dynamic Diversity of Latin American Party Systems

its oval. Each oval traces the 95% confidence intervals corresponding to those means, with the vertical
extremes indicating the interval for fragmentation, and the horizontal extremes indicating the interval for
volatility. For example, we are 95% confident that the average of the effective number of parties in
Uruguay lies between 2.25 and 2.67 (the vertical extremes), and that the average volatility rate in
democratic Brazil lies between 29 and 51 (the horizontal extremes).

Figure 1

If one country's mean falls within another country's confidence interval, the two countries' means are not
significantly different. Therefore, contrary to the conventional wisdom, we cannot say with confidence
that 1) Mexico's party system has been less fragmented than Colombia's, 2) Costa Rica's has been more
fragmented than Uruguay's or less fragmented than Bolivia's, 3) Venezuela's has been less fragmented
than Argentina's, or 4) Chile's has been less fragmented than Ecuador's. Neither can we confidently say
that 1) Venezuela's party system is less volatile than those of Peru, Chile, Bolivia, or Ecuador; 2)
democratic Brazil's is more volatile than Ecuador's or Argentina's; or 3) Costa Rica's is more volatile
than that of authoritarian Brazil.

In view of the uncertainty introduced by the variability of Latin American party systems, generalizations
about countries should be avoided, and if unavoidable, should be made with greater caution, for example
by reporting standard deviations or confidence intervals. Ideally, the units of analysis should be
individual elections, not countries. The true values of the parameters of interest are known to a much
higher degree of certainty when elections are the units because the variance for a single election is close
to zero (depending only on the reliability of the indicator itself). Election-by-election data may seem less
meaningful than a sweeping generalization about a larger swath of a country's history, but they are in
reality more meaningful. Political actors probably care far less about averages than they do about the
results of the last election, which defines their political reality for 2 to 5 years at a stretch.

Ideology: Rigidity, Personalism, and Clarity

Some conventional wisdom about ideology in Latin American party systems exists, although it has not
been studied as systematically or rigorously as fragmentation or volatility. The longstanding perception
of Chilean parties as highly ideological persists, as does the perception of parties in Ecuador and Bolivia
as highly personalistic, nonideological, and clientelistic (Scully, 1995: 100; Gamarra and Malloy, 1995:
399; Conaghan, 1995: 436). Brazilian parties are widely believed to have fit this description before the
coup of 1964, but Scott Mainwaring argues that ‘these old adages must be put to rest' for the post-1985
party system (Mainwaring, 1995: 375-6). Most of the other systems are thought to fall somewhere
between these extremes. The Costa Rican party system is considered moderately ideological, as it has a
clearly reformist large party (PLN) opposed by an almost equally large but ideologically heterogeneous
opposition grouping (PUSC) (Yashar, 1995). In the early 1980s the same could have been said of Peru
and Venezuela, but in both countries the traditionally large reformist parties have lost ground to
independent candidates--Fujimori in Peru and Caldera in Venezuela (Graham, 1992; Coppedge, 1996). It

file:///E|/mestrado/The%20Dynamic%20Diversity%20of%20Latin%20American%20Party%20Systems.htm (4 of 20)11/5/2006 16:56:55

 The Dynamic Diversity of Latin American Party Systems

has always been difficult to characterize the ideology of the large parties in Colombia in Uruguay
because they are divided into factions, some of which are ideological and others, merely personalistic
(Hartlyn, 1988; Gillespie, 1991). Finally, parties in Argentina and Mexico are considered ideological,
but only if a cleavage other than left vs. right is recognized as dominant. In Mexico, the left-right
dimension is subordinated to a division between democracy and continued official-party dominance
(Domínguez and McCann, 1996). In Argentina the fundamental political divide separates Peronists from
everyone else, although the nature of the division is controversial (McGuire, 1995; Ostiguy, 1997).

Before we can assess more accurately how ideological Latin American parties and party systems are, it
is necessary to clarify three issues. First, personalism and ideology are not necessarily mutually
exclusive qualities. Some of the most rigidly ideological parties in the world have been closely identified
with, and tightly controlled by, strong personalities, and parties that are known primarily as vehicles for
strong personalities may nevertheless stake out clear ideological positions. Second, clientelism and
ideology are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Many successful parties all over the world trade
personal favors for political support. Even in supposedly highly ideological Chile, party officials of all
tendencies engaged in the same sorts of clientelistic activities (Valenzuela, 1977: 166). Clientelism is
merely a means to build and maintain a power base; ideology, where it exists, is what guides what that
power is used for. Many parties are to some degree clientelistic, to some degree personalistic, and to
some degree ideological: these three qualities vary independently.

Third, for some purposes the ideological sophistication of party leaders is less relevant than the clarity of
a party's image among voters. Sartori's definition of an ‘ideological mentality' as ‘a state of dogmatic
impermeability both to evidence and to argument' (Sartori, 1969: 403) is a good one if we wish to
understand a party's behavior at the elite level--its rigidity or willingness to compromise on policy or
coalition partners. But if we wish to understand relations between parties and voters--the rationality of
voter choice, the quality of representation, the possibility of holding elected officials accountable--then a
different standard applies. Very few voters care about whether a party leader can debate the finer points
of Althusser, Maritain, or Hayek. If they wish to vote ideologically, all they need is a sense of the
approximate relative positions of the available parties on the ideological spectrum.

‘Sufficiently ideological' parties thus are parties that take clear, widely understood positions on a
conventionally interrelated set of issues. Definitions of ‘left' and ‘right' do not always travel or age well:
they can vary greatly from region to region, country to country, decade to decade, and even person to
person if they are made very precise. The more diverse the regions to be analyzed, and the longer the
span of time to be covered, the less specific the criteria for the left-right dimension can be, because
dimensions that are relevant in only a few countries must be dropped from the cross-national criteria for
comparison. Nevertheless, if the comparison is limited to one region and a manageable span of time, the
criteria for the left-right dimension are usually well understood.

My recent classification of Latin American parties is useful for assessing how ideological the parties of
the region are.(2) I began by drafting a classification of all the parties (loosely defined as any label
reported in election returns) that contested lower-chamber elections in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile,

file:///E|/mestrado/The%20Dynamic%20Diversity%20of%20Latin%20American%20Party%20Systems.htm (5 of 20)11/5/2006 16:56:55

 The Dynamic Diversity of Latin American Party Systems

Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Mexico, Peru, Uruguay, and Venezuela. The classification scheme
identified parties with a position on a left-right spectrum (left, center-left, center, center-right, or right)
and a religious-vs.-secular dichotomy; or, if that was not possible, it classified parties as ‘personalist,'
‘other' (e.g., regional, ethnic, environmental), or simply ‘unknown'. ‘Personalist' was therefore defined
very strictly, so that only parties with no identifiable left-right position would qualify. I then sent this
draft and my explicit coding criteria to 80 country specialists, asking for their advice in correcting any
misclassifications. Fifty-three of the experts provided feedback, which I then used to make corrections.
(3) The final version successfully classifies about 800 of the approximately 1,200 parties in the sample,
which won 97 percent of the votes cast. Although a more rigorous classification is possible in principle,
this classification is the most comprehensive and systematic one in existence for Latin American parties
and, as will be shown below, its reliability is fairly high. Although any case study would provide a
firmer basis for rating parties in any one election, there is currently no alternative to this classification
for comparing Latin American party systems historically and across countries.

The classification provides two kinds of evidence about party and party-system ideology. First, it reports
the percentage of the vote won by strictly personalist parties and candidates in each election. By this
criterion, personalist parties are rather small and rare. The personalist vote is greater than 10 percent in
only 23 of the 149 elections in the sample. The only country in which the personalist vote has been
consistently greater than 10 percent is Ecuador. It is also high, as the new conventional wisdom
suggests, in Peru 1990-5 and Bolivia 1989-93. However, it is also greater than 10 percent in the Chilean
elections of 1932 and 1949-57. There were also surges of personalism in conventionally ideological
Costa Rica in 1958, 1962, and 1974, and in Venezuela in 1968 and 1993. This criterion also rates
personalism surprisingly low in Brazil--in fact, lower than in Chile, on average.

Because the criteria for ‘personalism' are so strict, however, it is prudent to consider the reliability of the
classifications. Some parties seem nonideological because they are strictly personalist, but others seem
nonideological because it is not clear where they stand on the ideological spectrum. In these latter cases
the reliability of the classification is low. Some Latin American parties are very hard to classify, and this
is reflected in a lack of consensus among the country specialists. A few are large, important parties--the
Peronists in Argentina, the Mexican PRI in certain elections, and the Liberals and Conservatives of
Colombia during much of their history. But because others are quite small, nearly insignificant parties, it
would be misleading to report reliability statistics on individual parties. Instead, I base the analysis here
on an aggregated measure of reliability for each election. Specifically, reliability is the proportion of the
experts concurring with my final classification of a party, multiplied by the proportion of the vote won
by that party, summed over all parties winning votes in that election.(4) In other words, reliability is a
weighted average of the degree of concurrence with the classification of all the parties in an election, or
the degree of concurrence with the average vote. For example, if three parties contested an election and
all experts concurred with my classification of the largest party (A), 4 of 5 experts agreed on the second
party (B), and 3 of 5 agreed on the smallest party (C), the reliability would be 86 percent, calculated as
follows:

file:///E|/mestrado/The%20Dynamic%20Diversity%20of%20Latin%20American%20Party%20Systems.htm (6 of 20)11/5/2006 16:56:55

 The Dynamic Diversity of Latin American Party Systems

Party Vote Agreement Product

A .50 1.00 .50

B .30 0.80 .24

C .20 0.60 .12

.86

A low reliability score could result from several factors besides an unclear ideological position on the
part of the party.(5) However, it is very unlikely that a classification could have a high reliability score if
it did not have a clear ideological position because any vagueness or inconsistency of position would
create disagreements among the experts.

The mean reliability for this sample is 85.6, with a standard deviation of 12.6 and a median of 88.7.
(These figures exclude Bolivian and Uruguayan elections because too few country specialists provided
comments on these cases to calculate reliability.) If we establish a cutoff for reliability at 85 percent--
equivalent to 17 out of 20 experts concurring on the classification of the average vote--then 63 percent
of the elections were reliably classified and 37 percent were not.

The best standard for identifying sufficiently ideological party systems combines both criteria: reliability
of 85 percent or more and a personalist vote of less than 10 percent. Table 1 sorts all the elections
according to these twin criteria. By these stiff criteria, 55 percent of the Latin American elections in the
sample (52 percent counting Bolivia and Uruguay) were sufficiently ideological; 15-16 percent probably
had significant personalism; and 24-9 percent were not clearly ideological without being clearly
personalist. These figures provide some support for the old conventional wisdom in that elections that
were either personalist or not clearly ideological (or both) have been fairly common in Latin America,
perhaps more common than in Western Europe. However, the new conventional wisdom is also
vindicated because such elections have not been the norm and because some countries have had
sufficiently ideological elections more frequently than others. It is no surprise that Chile ranks highest in
this regard and Ecuador ranks lowest.

Table 1: Personalism and Ideology

(n=149) at least 10% Personalist (n=23) less than 10% Personalist (n=126)

file:///E|/mestrado/The%20Dynamic%20Diversity%20of%20Latin%20American%20Party%20Systems.htm (7 of 20)11/5/2006 16:56:55

 The Dynamic Diversity of Latin American Party Systems

Significantly Personalist Sufficiently Ideological (n=67)

(n=10) Argentina 1912-30, 1958-65
Chile 1932, 1949-57 Brazil 1945, 1966-78, 1990-4
Costa Rica 1958-62 Chile 1915-25, 1937-45, 1961-93
at least 85% Reliable Peru 1990-5 Colombia 1958-78, 1990-4
(n=77) Venezuela 1968 Costa Rica 1953, 1966-70, 1978-
94
Mexico 1961-7, 1991-4
Peru 1978-85
Venezuela 1973-88

Probably Personalist (n=3) Probably Not Very Personalist

Unknown
Bolivia 1966, 1989-93 (n=23)
Reliability
Bolivia 1962, 1979-85
(n=26)
Uruguay 1917-94

Personalist and Not Clearly Not Clearly Ideological (n=36)

Ideological (n=10) Argentina 1946, 1973-95
less than 85% Costa Rica 1974 Brazil 1950-62, 1982-6
Reliable Ecuador 1966-94 Colombia 1931-49, 1982-6
(n=46) Venezuela 1993 Mexico 1970-88
Peru 1963
Venezuela 1958-63

SOURCE: Author's data.

The new conventional wisdom is not fully vindicated, however. Table 1 shows that almost every country
has experienced elections that deviated from its current reputation for being ideological or not. As
already noted, Chile, Costa Rica, and Venezuela have had repeated bouts with personalism. The
Brazilian party system may be volatile and fragmented, but it has not lacked for ideological clarity in the
1990s. The Argentine party system has a justifiable reputation for being sui generis due to controversy
about what the Peronists stand for, but in the pre-Peronist era (1912-30) and during the period of
proscribed Peronism (1958-65), this system was sufficiently ideological. The major Colombian parties
have a reputation for being virtually indistinguishable in left-right terms, but this did not prevent the
experts from concurring with classification of the Liberals in the center and the Conservatives on the
center-right during the National Front years (1958-74) and in the 1990s. The ideological swings of
Mexican presidents from 1970 to 1988 clouded perceptions of the position of the official PRI, but in the
1960s and the 1990s the relative positions of Mexican parties are clear enough. Peru's reputation for
personalism is based on its experience before redemocratization in 1978 and the rise of Fujimori in
1990; but in the 3 intervening elections its parties possessed sufficient ideological coherence. And
although there are no reliability figures for Bolivia, I suspect that it would turn out to be sufficiently

file:///E|/mestrado/The%20Dynamic%20Diversity%20of%20Latin%20American%20Party%20Systems.htm (8 of 20)11/5/2006 16:56:55

 The Dynamic Diversity of Latin American Party Systems

ideological during the 1979-85 period as well, as the party system was very polarized in left-right terms
during those years, as we shall see.

Ideology: Mean Tendency and Polarization

It is also hard to generalize about two other aspects of party ideology in Latin America--how skewed to
the left or the right the party system is, and how polarized it is. Mean Left-Right Position (MLRP)
measures the how far to the left or the right the average party was in each election, based on the left-
right positions of all the parties and their shares of the vote. This indicator assumes that all parties
classified left (whether Christian or secular) are approximately twice as far from the center as parties
classified center-left; and right parties are twice as far to the right as the parties of the center-right. This
assumption permits the calculation of MLRP as

(XR + SR) + .5(XCR + SCR) - .5(XCL + SCL) - (XL + SL),

where ‘XR' represents the percentage of the vote won by all the parties in the Christian right bloc, and so
on for the other bloc abbreviations. This index would equal 100 if all parties were on the right, -100 if all
parties were on the left, 50 or -50 if all parties were center-right or center-left, respectively, or zero if all
parties were centrist, personalist, other, or unknown, or if the parties to the left perfectly counterbalanced
the parties to the right.(6) In this sample, MLRP ranges from -42 (Peru 1985) to +69 (Brazil 1970), with
an overall mean of 5.

Left-right polarization is a different aspect of party-system ideology. Here it is defined as the dispersion
of the vote away from the relative center of the party system. The relative center can be farther to the
right or the left than the absolute center as defined in the classification criteria, and is operationalized
here as MLRP. The index of polarization (IP) makes the same assumptions about the positions of the
blocs in a (-1,+1) range.(7) Its formula is

|1-mlrp|*(XR+SR) + |.5-mlrp|*(XCR+SCR) + |-.5-mlrp|*(XCL+SCL) + |-1-mlrp|*(XL+SL),

where mlrp = MLRP/100. The index can reach its maximum only when half of the vote goes to the right
and half to the left; if all of the vote went to just one extreme, polarization would be zero because the
relative center would be at the extreme as well and there would be no dispersion.(8)

Table 2 categorizes elections by their mean left-right position and degree of polarization. ‘Polarized'
party systems are those tending toward a bimodal distribution of the vote on the left-right spectrum.
‘Unimodal' party systems have a more prominent peak distribution near their relative center, often
indicating a lack of meaningful competition among parties. ‘Flat' party systems have a profile that is
more evenly distributed across the range of left-right options, and are therefore more competitive across
ideological tendencies. Each of these types can also ‘lean' farther to the left or the right, or be ‘centered',

file:///E|/mestrado/The%20Dynamic%20Diversity%20of%20Latin%20American%20Party%20Systems.htm (9 of 20)11/5/2006 16:56:55

 The Dynamic Diversity of Latin American Party Systems

in accordance with its mean tendency. Table 2 shows that no country's party system has consistently
leaned in one direction, and the only party systems that have remained within one range of polarization
are those of Costa Rica after 1953, Uruguay, and Venezuela, which are all flat (and not right of center).
It may be no coincidence that these are three of the most stable democracies in the region.

Table 2: Mean Tendency and Polarization

Center-
Left- Center-Left- Right- Right-
Centered
Leaning Leaning Leaning Leaning
MLRP from
(n=147) MLRP MLRP from MLRP MLRP
-10 to 10
below -20 -20 to -10 from 10 to above 20
(n=57)
(n=11) (n=23) 20 (n=29)
(n=27)

Chile 1969- Argentina Bolivia 1979- Bolivia Bolivia 1985

73 1973 80 1989 Chile 1937
Chile 1941 Brazil 1994 Chile 1949, Ecuador
Peru 1963 Chile 1932, 1957, 1993 1992
Polarized 1945, 1953, Ecuador
IP above 55 1961 1994
(n=24) Costa Rica
1953
Ecuador
1984, 1990
Peru 1980

Argentina Chile 1965 Argentina Brazil 1986 Argentina

1965, 1983 Colombia 1914-20, Chile 1989 1912
Mexico 1970- 1990b 1930, 1946, Brazil 1945-
3 Costa Rica 1985-95 62, 1982
Peru 1978, 1962, 1970- Brazil 1990 Chile 1915-
1985 4, 1982 Colombia 25
Uruguay Ecuador 1991 Mexico 1985-
1917 1988 Costa Rica 8, 1994
Flat
Venezuela Uruguay 1958, 1966,
IP from 25
1958, 1983 1934-42, 1978, 1986-
to 55
1950-4, 94
(n=79)
1966, 1994 Ecuador
Venezuela 1979, 1986
1963-78, Peru 1990

file:///E|/mestrado/The%20Dynamic%20Diversity%20of%20Latin%20American%20Party%20Systems.htm (10 of 20)11/5/2006 16:56:55

 The Dynamic Diversity of Latin American Party Systems

1988-93 Uruguay
1919-31,
1946, 1958-
62, 1971,
1989

Argentina Colombia Bolivia 1993

1922-8, 1958- 1933-90a, Brazil 1966-
63 1994 78
Bolivia 1966 Colombia
Unimodal
Mexico 1976- 1931
IP below 25
9 Ecuador
(n=44)
Peru 1992-5 1966
Mexico 1961-
7, 1982,
1991

SOURCE: Author's data.

Although Table 2 dramatizes the difficulty of generalizing about mean tendencies or polarization by
country, it also identifies selected elections from different countries that are comparable in terms of
mean tendency and polarization. For example, authoritarian Brazilian elections and several elections in
authoritarian Mexico all fit the category of right-leaning unimodal systems, as do a couple of early, less
competitive elections in Colombia and Ecuador. In the centered unimodal cell we find Argentina when it
was dominated by Irigoyen, Bolivia when it was dominated by Barrientos, and contemporary Peru
dominated by Fujimori. Some of the elections in other cells may appear to be strange bedfellows, as they
lump together party systems that are institutionalized and inchoate, fragmented and not; but the apparent
oddity of the combinations only underscores how independent one characteristic of party systems is
from others. It is interesting to note that Chile 1969-73 was not the most polarized or the farthest-left-
leaning system, but it was the most left-leaning of the polarized systems and the most polarized of the
left-leaning systems. The combination of polarization with a leftist tendency may be hazardous to a
regime's health: 3 of the 5 left- or center-left-leaning polarized cases succumbed to military coups before
the next election, a far higher proportion than that in any other cell of the table.

Institutionalization

There is some truth to the old stereotype that Latin American parties and party systems are poorly
institutionalized. Volatility in 20th-century Latin America averages 21.3, compared to 8.6 in Western
Europe.(9) However, this average masks great variation within the region that has been recognized for
quite some time. In his 1976 classic, Parties and Party Systems, Sartori made a distinction between

file:///E|/mestrado/The%20Dynamic%20Diversity%20of%20Latin%20American%20Party%20Systems.htm (11 of 20)11/5/2006 16:56:55

 The Dynamic Diversity of Latin American Party Systems

‘structured' party systems and ‘fluid' ones (Sartori, 1976: 310-1). Twenty years later, Mainwaring and
Scully made a similar distinction between ‘institutionalized' and ‘inchoate' party systems, and produced
a summary index of institutionalization (Mainwaring and Scully, 1995: 19). As Table 3 shows, both
ratings identify clear differences among the Latin American cases, and the two ratings agree almost
perfectly on which systems have been well institutionalized and which have not.(10) Based on their
combined judgments, the conventional wisdom is that Uruguay, Costa Rica, Chile, and Venezuela (and
possibly Colombia and Argentina) have institutionalized party systems, while Bolivia, Ecuador, and
Peru (and probably democratic Brazil) do not. There is no consensus on a few countries--Argentina,
Colombia, and Mexico--largely because they are institutionalized in some respects but not others.
Mainwaring and Scully (1995: 6-21) wisely examined many different aspects of institutionalization:
electoral volatility, the difference between presidential votes and legislative seats won by parties, some
evidence on the strength party identification, the strength of linkages between parties and social
organizations, the percentage of legislative seats held by parties founded by 1950, the popular legitimacy
of parties and elections, and the strength of party organizations. Here, however, I will focus on volatility
alone because comparable historical data on other aspects is incomplete.

Table 3 reports confidence intervals by country to clarify the significance of the average differences.
The conventional wisdom is basically correct about volatility, with three exceptions. First, there is a big
gap within the more institutionalized group, between the extremely low mean volatility in Uruguay,
Colombia, Mexico, and authoritarian Brazil and the significantly higher levels in Costa Rica, Chile, and
Venezuela. Second, Argentina clearly belongs in the most volatile group, with democratic Brazil.(11)
And third, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Peru's volatility rates have been so variable that they are not
statistically distinguishable from any but the three least-volatile systems.

Table 3: Indicators of Party-System Institutionalization

Adjusted
Party-System
Bloc
Volatility
Sartori's Mainwaring- Volatility
Case (95%
Classification Scully Index (95%
confidence
confidence
interval)
interval)

Uruguay structured 11.5 6-12 *

Costa Rica structured 11.5 15-28 2.1-4.1

Chile structured 11.5 22-32 2.8-4.4

Venezuela structured 10.5 18-33 1.4-3.3

file:///E|/mestrado/The%20Dynamic%20Diversity%20of%20Latin%20American%20Party%20Systems.htm (12 of 20)11/5/2006 16:56:55

 The Dynamic Diversity of Latin American Party Systems

Colombia -- 10.5 5-18 *

Argentina -- 9.0 29-41 3.7-9.9

Authoritarian
structured -- 0-29 *
Brazil (1970-8)

Mexico structured 8.5 5-13 *

Paraguay structured 7.5 -- --

Bolivia fluid 5.0 19-78 3.3-10.2

Ecuador fluid 5.0 17-53 4.2-8.4

Democratic
Brazil (1950-62, -- 5.0 29-51 2.0-4.0
1986-94)

Peru fluid 4.5 25-67 1.3-8.6

*Excluded because there are too few ideological blocs to permit a meaningful measurement of bloc
volatility.

SOURCES: Sartori (1976: 310-1), Mainwaring and Scully (1995: 17), and author's data.

Party-system volatility is a good indicator of the outcome of all the things that cause change in a party
system, which are manifold: 1) voter defections, 2) generational turnover in the electorate, 3) extension
of the suffrage, 4) conjunctural variations in turnout, 5) party mergers and alliances, 6) party splits, 7)
election boycotts, and 8) the proscription of certain parties. But it is not the only possible indicator of
volatility: the same index can be calculated using the vote shares won by ideological blocs rather than
parties. Such an index takes us closer to measuring volatility due solely to voter defections from blocs,
which is a narrower but more coherent aspect of institutionalization. To take us closer still, we can
remove the components of volatility due to ideological shifts and adjust for differences in the spacing of
elections. The resulting statistic is adjusted bloc volatility (ABV):

ABV=(1/Ti)[.5*SUM|Bi, t+1 - Bi, t| - lesser (Si, t+1, Si, t)]

where Bi,t is the percentage of the vote won by bloc i in election t, Ti is the number of years elapsed

file:///E|/mestrado/The%20Dynamic%20Diversity%20of%20Latin%20American%20Party%20Systems.htm (13 of 20)11/5/2006 16:56:55

 The Dynamic Diversity of Latin American Party Systems

since the previous election, and Si,t is the vote share of party i that will shift to a different bloc in
election t+1. ABV can be low even when party-system volatility is high if voters have firm loyalties to
ideological blocs that transcend loyalties to specific parties: a looser but still useful sort of
institutionalization.

One of the distinctive features of the Chilean party system is that it is supposedly structured by precisely
the kind of firm identification with left, center, and right blocs that ABV is designed to capture
(Valenzuela, 1978; Scully, 1992). But by this measure (last column of Table 3), Chile is no more
ideologically structured than Costa Rica or Venezuela. Even more striking is the fact that democratic
Brazil clearly belongs in this relatively institutitionalized group. Otherwise, bloc volatility yields the
same groups as party-system volatility except that Ecuador is now more clearly extremely volatile.

Fragmentation

Party systems have long been classified into types defined by the number and relative sizes of the parties
(Duverger, 1954, Almond and Coleman, 1960; Sartori, 1976; McDonald and Ruhl, 1989). This practice
has usually led to the classification of Mexico and Paraguay as dominant-party systems; Colombia and
Uruguay as historically two-party systems; Costa Rica, Venezuela, and perhaps Argentina as two-and-a-
half-party systems; and Bolivia, Chile, and Ecuador as multiparty systems. However, these labels
sometimes have to be amended depending on the period being analyzed: authoritarian Brazil had a two-
party system, Uruguay became more of a three-party system in 1971, Venezuela's two-and-a-half-party
system seems to have been limited to elections between 1973 and 1988, and so on.

The new institutionalism tends to shun simple typologies in favor of continuous measures of
fragmentation. The one reported here is Laakso and Taagepera's Effective Number of Parties, based on
shares of the vote (ENPV). (See note 1 for its definition.) One can also calculate the effective number of
ideological blocs (ENB) using the same formula, but substituting the share of the classified vote won by
each bloc for shares won by parties.(12) ENB provides some indication of how meaningful the
fragmentation of the party system is. Some fragmented party systems are also ideologically fragmented,
but others are not; instead, there is more competition among parties that are very similar in left-right and
Christian-secular terms. In these systems, some of the divisions among parties are programmatically
superfluous, the products of politiquería (superficial pseudo-politicking).

According to means tests, we can safely say that party systems are more fragmented (in terms of ENPV)
in Chile, Ecuador, and democratic Brazil than in the other 8 countries; and that they are less fragmented
in Colombia, Uruguay, Mexico, and authoritarian Brazil than in Chile, Ecuador, Argentina, Venezuela,
and democratic Brazil. In terms of ENB, the party systems of Ecuador and Chile are significantly more
ideologically diverse than those of Bolivia, Peru, Costa Rica, Venezuela, and Argentina. Beyond these
simple generalizations averages can be seriously misleading, so it is preferable to compare elections
rather than countries. Table 4 cross-classifies party systems in each election by the number of blocs and
the number of parties. The dispersion of each of the countries among multiple cells drives home the folly

file:///E|/mestrado/The%20Dynamic%20Diversity%20of%20Latin%20American%20Party%20Systems.htm (14 of 20)11/5/2006 16:56:55

 The Dynamic Diversity of Latin American Party Systems

of trying to classify Latin American countries by the number of parties.

Table 4: Fragmentation of Bloc and Party Systems

Two-Party Moderate Multi-Party Extreme Multi-Party

(n=139) ENPV from 2 to 3 ENPV from 3 to 5 ENPV above 5
(n=46) (n=44) (n=39)

Argentina 1928 Argentina 1916, 1922, Argentina 1926, 1946,

Brazil 1974-8 1958 1960-3
Dominant-
Colombia 1931, 1964, Brazil 1945
Bloc
1970, 1990a Peru 1995
ENB below 2
Costa Rica 1953 Venezuela 1958
(n=43)
Mexico 1985, 1991
Peru 1963

Argentina 1983 Argentina 1918-20, Argentina 1912-4,

Bolivia 1966 1930, 1985-93 1924
Brazil 1982 Bolivia 1993 Brazil 1950, 1958-62
Colombia 1947-9, Colombia 1991-4 Ecuador 1966
Two-Bloc
1974-86 Costa Rica 1958 Venezuela 1963-8,
ENB from 2 to3
Costa Rica 1962-70, Mexico 1988 1993
(n=63)
1978-94 Peru 1985, 1992
Mexico 1994 Venezuela 1973-8,
Uruguay 1919-84 1988
Venezuela 1983

Argentina 1973, 1994- Argentina 1965

5 Brazil 1954, 1994
Moderate Bolivia 1979-89 Chile 1915-21, 1932-
Multi-Bloc Brazil 1986 45, 1953, 1961, 1973-
ENB from 3 to Chile 1925, 1965-9 93
5 Colombia 1990b Ecuador 1979, 1988,
(n=37) Costa Rica 1974 1992-4
Peru 1978-80
Uruguay 1989-94

file:///E|/mestrado/The%20Dynamic%20Diversity%20of%20Latin%20American%20Party%20Systems.htm (15 of 20)11/5/2006 16:56:55

 The Dynamic Diversity of Latin American Party Systems

Extreme Brazil 1990

Multi-Bloc Chile 1949, 1957
ENB above 5 Ecuador 1984-6, 1990
(n=6)

Note: 22 elections are excluded because the number of parties is too small to permit a meaningful
estimate of the number of blocs. These cases are Brazil 1966-70; Colombia 1933-45, 1958-62, and 1966-
8; Mexico 1961-82; and Uruguay 1917. They may be considered dominant-party systems with an
unknown number of blocs.

SOURCE: author's data.

This table also groups together cases that are comparable with respect to the diversity of choices offered
in elections. The dominant-bloc, dominant-party systems listed in the note at the bottom of the table--e.
g., early authoritarian Brazil, Colombia early in the National Front period, and Mexican elections before
1985--presented voters with very limited and relatively meaningless choices, aside from the certainty
about which party would win. The lower-right corner of the table defines the opposite situation: extreme
multi-bloc, multi-party systems that offered voters extremely diverse choices and few clues about which
was likely to emerge as the winner. This was the case in the Brazilian election won by the dark horse
Fernando Collor de Mello, Chile at the beginning and end of the Ibáñez interlude, and several
Ecuadorian elections. Finally, the three cells in the upper-right corner of the table contain the party
systems in which voters had many choices, but not the most meaningful ones. In Argentina 1912-6 and
1922-6, this situation resulted from the fragmentation of the center into a variety of Radical parties; in
Venezuela 1958-68, from the division of center-left among URD, Acción Democrática, and its splinters;
and in Brazil 1945-50 and 1958-82, from the division of the center-right among the PSD, UDN, and a
great many elite-led regional parties and alliances.

Conclusion: Toward Explanations

This article has been an exercise in description, but it conveys an important message about explanation:
party systems as diverse and dynamic as these will not be easily explained. The explanatory factors in
the standard toolkit--level of development, class structure, ethnic cleavages, demographic change, and
electoral laws--change too slowly or gradually to capture much of the variance described here.
Explanations that work in Latin America are more likely to concern factors that are more easily, rapidly,
and completely manipulated by governments, party leaders, and other elites. These factors include party
splits, mergers, and alliances; campaign tactics; programmatic shifts; perhaps short-term economic
performance; and in isolated cases, election boycotts and the proscription of certain parties or
candidates.

file:///E|/mestrado/The%20Dynamic%20Diversity%20of%20Latin%20American%20Party%20Systems.htm (16 of 20)11/5/2006 16:56:55

 The Dynamic Diversity of Latin American Party Systems

The diversity and dynamism also pose severe methodological challenges. In order to identify the causes
of change, we must have some basis for knowing what the party system would have been like in the
absence of any explanatory factor of interest; volatility often makes this extraordinarily difficult.
Elaborating typologies or calculating averages will not take us very far. Our only options are either to
delve into intensive and rich case studies, which avoid generalization altogether, or to undertake
quantitative comparisons of many elections in a large sample over a long period of time, which risk
superficiality. The quantitative strategy has two challenges of its own. First, the diversity across
countries makes it hard to separate the causal impact of the various conditions that remain relatively
constant in each country. And second, the different variance across countries (a type of
heteroscedasticity) makes it imperative for analysts to standardize the data so that, for example, a small
change in Uruguay is equivalent to a big change in Ecuador.

Although sound explanations will be devilishly hard to substantiate, it is important to try, because
whether party systems are weak or strong, left or right, ideological or pragmatic, fragmented or
monolithic, they have important consequences. The nature of party systems affects the meaning of
elections, the quality of representation, the nature of economic policy choices, and the legitimacy and
survival of governments and the democratic regime itself, especially in Latin America.

References

Alexander, Robert J. (1964) The Venezuelan Democratic Revolution. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers
University Press.

Almond, Gabriel and Coleman, James S. (1960) The Politics of the Developing Areas. Princeton:
Princeton University Press.

Bartolini, Stefano and Mair, Peter (1990) Identity, Competition, and Electoral Availability. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.

Blanksten, George I. (1960) ‘The Politics of Latin America', in Gabriel Almond and James Coleman
(eds) The Politics of the Developing Areas, pp. 485-95. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Conaghan, Catherine (1988) Restructuring Domination. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.

----- (1995) ‘Politicians Against Parties: Discord and Disconnection in Ecuador's Party System', in
Mainwaring and Scully (eds) Building Democratic Institutions, 434-458. Stanford: Stanford University
Press.

Coppedge, Michael (1994) Strong Parties and Lame Ducks. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

----- (1996) ‘The Rise and Fall of Partyarchy in Venezuela', in Jorge I. Domínguez and Abraham F.
Lowenthal (eds) Constructing Democratic Governance, pp. 3-19. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University

file:///E|/mestrado/The%20Dynamic%20Diversity%20of%20Latin%20American%20Party%20Systems.htm (17 of 20)11/5/2006 16:56:55

 The Dynamic Diversity of Latin American Party Systems

Press.

----- (1997a) ‘A Classification of Latin American Parties', Kellogg Institute Working Paper Series, No.
244, University of Notre Dame.

----- (1997b) ‘District Magnitude, Economic Performance, and Party-System Fragmentation in Five
Latin American Countries', Comparative Political Studies 30: 156-85.

DiTella, Torcuato (1965) ‘Populism and Reform in Latin America', in Claudio Véliz (ed), Obstacles to
Change in Latin America, pp. 47-74. London: Oxford University Press.

Dix, Robert H. (1966) ‘Latin America: Oppositions and Development', in Robert A. Dahl (ed) Regimes
and Oppositions, pp. 261-303. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

----- (1989) ‘Cleavage Structures and Party Systems in Latin America', Comparative Politics 22: 23-37.

Dominguez, Jorge I. and McCann, James A. (1996) Democratizing Mexico. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1996.

Duverger, Maurice (1954) Political Parties. New York: Methuen and Wiley.

Gamarra, Eduardo and Malloy, James M. (1995) ‘The Patrimonial Dynamics of Party Politics in
Bolivia', in Mainwaring and Scully (eds) Building Democratic Institutions, 399-433. Stanford: Stanford
University Press.

Gibson, Edward (1996) Class and Conservative Parties. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Gillespie, Charles (1991) Negotiating Democracy. Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press.

González, Luis E. (1991) Political Structures and Democracy in Uruguay. Notre Dame, IN: University
of Notre Dame Press.

Graham, Carol (1992) Peru's APRA. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner.

Hartlyn, Jonathan (1988) The Politics of Coalition Rule in Colombia. Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge
University Press.

Hilliker, Grant (1971) The Politics of Reform in Peru. Baltimore, Johns Hopkins Press.

Johnson, John J. (1958) Political Change in Latin America. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Jones, Mark P. (1994) ‘Presidential Election Laws and Multipartism in Latin America', Political
Research Quarterly 47: 41-57.

Keck, Margaret E. (1986) ‘Democratization and Dissension: The Formation of the Workers' Party,'
Politics and Society 15: 67-95.

file:///E|/mestrado/The%20Dynamic%20Diversity%20of%20Latin%20American%20Party%20Systems.htm (18 of 20)11/5/2006 16:56:55

 The Dynamic Diversity of Latin American Party Systems

Kinzo, Maria D'Alva Gil (1988) Legal Opposition Politics Under Authoritarian Rule in Brazil. New
York: St Martin's Press.

Laakso, Murkuu and Taagepera, Rein (1979) ‘Effective Number of Parties: A Measure with Application
to Western Europe', Comparative Political Studies 12: 3-27.

Mainwaring, Scott (1991) ‘Parties, Politicians, and Electoral Systems: Brazil in Comparative
Perspective', Comparative Politics 24: 21-43.

----- (1993) ‘Presidentialism, Multipartism, and Democracy: The Difficult Combination', Comparative
Political Studies 26: 198-228.

----- (1995) ‘Brazil: Weak Parties, Feckless Democracy', in Mainwaring and Scully (eds) Building
Democratic Institutions, 354-98. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Mainwaring, Scott and Scully, Timothy R. (1995) ‘Introduction: Party Systems in Latin America', in
Mainwaring and Scully (eds) Building Democratic Institutions: Party Systems in Latin America, 1-34.
Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Martz, John D. (1964) ‘Dilemmas in the Study of Latin American Parties', Journal of Politics 26: 509-
31.

McDonald, Ronald H. and Ruhl, J. Mark (1989) Party Politics and Elections in Latin America. Boulder:
Westview.

McGuire, James W. (1995) ‘Political Parties and Democracy in Argentina', in Mainwaring and Scully
(eds) Building Democratic Institutions, 200-46. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Ostiguy, Pierre (1997) ‘Peronismo y antiperonismo: Bases socioculturales de la identidad política en la

Argentina,' Revista de Ciencias Sociales (Universidad Nacional de Quilmes, Argentina) 6: 133-214.

Payne, James L. (1968) Patterns of Conflict in Colombia. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Pedersen, Mogens. N. (1979) ‘The Dynamics of European Party Systems: Changing Patterns of
Electoral Volatility', European Journal of Political Research 7: 1-26.

Remmer, Karen L. (1991) ‘The Political Impact of Economic Crisis in Latin America in the 1980s',
American Political Science Review 85: 777-800.

Sartori, Giovanni (1969) ‘Politics, Ideology, and Belief Systems', American Political Science Review 63:
398-411.

----- (1976) Parties and Party Systems. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Scully, Timothy R. (1992) Rethinking the Center. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

file:///E|/mestrado/The%20Dynamic%20Diversity%20of%20Latin%20American%20Party%20Systems.htm (19 of 20)11/5/2006 16:56:55

 The Dynamic Diversity of Latin American Party Systems

----- (1995) ‘Reconstituting Party Politics in Chile', in Mainwaring and Scully (eds) Building
Democratic Institutions, 100-37. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Taagepera, Rein and Shugart, Matthew (1989) Seats and Votes. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Valenzuela, Arturo (1977) Political Brokers in Chile. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

----- (1978) The Breakdown of Democratic Regimes: Chile. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

----- (1994) ‘Party Politics and the Crisis of Presidentialism in Chile', in Juan J. Linz and Arturo
Valenzuela (eds) The Failure of Presidential Democracy, 165-224. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press.

Williams, Edward J. (1967) Latin American Christian Democratic Parties. Knoxville: University of
Tennessee Press.

Yashar, Deborah J. (1995) ‘Civil War and Social Welfare: The Origins of Costa Rica's Competitive
Party System', in Mainwaring and Scully (eds) Building Democratic Institutions, 72-99. Stanford:
Stanford University Press.

file:///E|/mestrado/The%20Dynamic%20Diversity%20of%20Latin%20American%20Party%20Systems.htm (20 of 20)11/5/2006 16:56:55