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In 2001/2002, after a decade of exile, Peruvian political parties seemed to re-emerge in the political arena. Nevertheless, this comeback was short-lived. The results of the 2006 sub-national elections were disastrous for political parties compared with those in the 2002 elections. This article states that these results are explained by the implementation of several institutional reforms, particularly state decentralization and a law to regulate political parties. Those reforms sought to establish a political regime opposed to the previous Fujimori regime. I suggest that the unforeseen lack of harmony between these reforms led to an unexpected outcome: the weakening of the national parties at the sub-national level. Without denying a structural dimension to the party crisis in Peru, this perspective emphasizes an institutional approach that partly explains the poor electoral results of parties due to the combination of these reforms. The paper concludes by assessing the Peruvian experience in light of the current experience of other Andean countries. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Explanations for voter decision-making during the process of party-system collapse in Peru (during the1980s) and Venezuela (during the 1980s and 1990s) raise two major questions about party organizationaldynamics. Why did traditional parties fail to shift their ideological appeals in such a way as to end apattern of ideological under-representation that drove voters to embrace outsider parties? Why weremany of the traditional parties in Peru and Venezuela unable to prevent corruption perceptions fromeroding party identification?This paper uses evidence from a new survey of local political party leaders in Argentina, Peru,and Venezuela to argue that the answers to these two questions lie in patterns of party organization.Electorally suboptimal ideological positioning can be explained by the relatively high intra-party powerof often ideologically extremist local leaders in the collapsed parties. Differences in the vulnerability ofparties' identifiers to corruption concerns, in turn, are explained by whether the party channels patronageprimarily through the state apparatus or through the party organization. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 2006 Peruvian election was another illustration of the weakness of the country's party system. Nevertheless, the comeback of the traditional parties, which had begun in 2001, continued in 2006. In particular, widespread fear of the anti-system candidate, Ollanta Humala, enabled Alan Garcia to reclaim the presidency despite memories of his disastrous first administration. Garcia did a masterful job of staking out the center ground in the runoff, moving somewhat to the left on domestic issues while using polemical exchanges with Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez to appeal to conservative voters. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]