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Women hold less than 10 percent of chief executive positions worldwide. Understanding how women democratically access these posts requires theorizing how they gain resources from established parties to mount viable electoral campaigns. We argue that in stable regimes marked by representational malaise parties respond to gendered incentives and nominate female candidates. Drawing on Latin American cases, we show how diverse parties nominated women in order to signal change or novelty, to credibly commit to "feminine" leadership and issues, and to mobilize female voters. A negative case depicts how a lack of representational critiques can fail to incentivize parties to back women instead of men. Our focus on gendered incentives provides a new framework that places political parties at the center of questions about women's electoral opportunities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What impact does personalism, or presidential dominance of a weakly organized ruling party, have on the level of democracy? We argue that presidents who dominate their own weakly organized parties are more likely to seek to concentrate power, undermine horizontal accountability, and trample the rule of law than presidents who preside over parties that have an independent leadership and an institutionalized bureaucracy. Independent party leaders, we suggest, will often try to curb the excesses of the president in order to protect their own political prospects. We explore these hypotheses through a quantitative analysis of the determinants of the level of democracy in 18 Latin American countries from 1980–2015. We find that personalism has a consistently negative impact on the level of democracy in Latin America. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Party system institutionalization (PSI) is a critical dimension of modern democracies. However, conventional approaches to institutionalization do not include party systems' ability to adapt and respond to challenges that emanate from society, one of the crucial traits in Huntington's definition of institutionalization. We discuss conventional approaches to the analysis of PSI. Building upon the idea of social orders put forth by North, Wallis, and Weingast, we argue that the analysis of institutionalization at the level of party systems must consider the system's ability to provide open access and to include all sectors: that is, the system's ability to incorporate demands that emanate from society. We propose a new conceptualization and operationalization of PSI, and we present a new data set of PSI indicators for 18 Latin American countries. Finally, we analyze the data to assess the level of PSI and type of party system in each Latin American country. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information on the elections in Latin America in 2018. Topics discussed include presidential elections in the Latin American countries, changed political cycle because of political distrust, political disaffection in those countries, number of Latin Americans who participated in election polls and political campaigns over there. It further discusses democracy in Latin American countries, works of political party Partido Acción Ciudadana (PAC) and antipolitical movements in the region.

This article analyzes how the tension between the district median voter and party policy preferences affects a Members of Congress (MC) disposition to toe the party line versus siding with the district in Latin America. It analyzes MCS in the lower chamber of 16 Latin American countries based on face-to-face MC and voter surveys, i.e. the district median voters' and parties' left-right placement and MCS' responses. The findings suggest that MCS only claim to deviate from the party line by siding with the district as the parties' position moves closer to the districts' median. Robustness checks support this tendency: As the party position moves closer to the district median position, MCS are more likely to display lax attitudes towards party discipline and attach more importance to getting resources for their districts. Overall, the findings contribute to an understanding of the effect of the tension between district and party preferences on party loyalty in Latin America and the sequential steps leading to party unity in legislative votes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Theories of democratic legitimacy argue that people who believe the government is well managed and represents their interests are likely to defend the democratic status quo. Principal-agent theory predicts, however, that these same groups are also more likely to support executive actions that threaten vertical or horizontal accountability. Citizens who feel represented by an ideologically sympathetic and competent executive may be willing to delegate the president additional authority to enact their agenda, even at the expense of democratic principles. Survey data from Latin America are largely consistent with the principal-agent hypothesis; those who voted for the ruling party in the previous election or who perceive that the economy is strong say they not only like democracy and oppose coups but also support limits on critical actors and opposition parties and are willing to let the president bypass the legislature and court. Thus to understand the breakdown of democracy, we must not only examine the conditions that leave the losers of political and economic processes satisfied with the process that culminated in their defeat but also identify conditions when winners tolerate electoral and institutional challenges and are willing to protect space for public criticism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using an original database of legislative and presidential electoral results from the democratic transitions of the 1970s and 1980s to the present day, we provide a new assessment of electoral volatility in Latin America. Following a model established in studies of other regions, we decompose volatility into two subtypes: party replacement and stable party volatility. We demonstrate the relevance of this approach to Latin America and, further, document that volatility has persisted rather than waned in Latin America’s posttransition period largely because of party replacement. We then examine the contested link between economic performance and volatility and document temporal instability in this relationship: our analysis affirms previous conclusions regarding a connection in the 1980s in Latin America but uncovers scant evidence of a relationship between the economy and volatility for the 1990s to present day. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes the professional careers of legislators who conclude their terms and retire from electoral politics. The study uses a mixed-methods approach, drawing on data from interviews, media reports, secondary source material, and an original database of Ecuadorian legislators' political careers between 1979 and 2007. Counterintuitively, the findings suggest that nearly half of Ecuadorian deputies have what Schlesinger (1966) termed discreet legislative careers. In addition, the article argues that weak political party institutionalization, understood as the monopolization of candidate selection mechanisms by party leaders, explains this type of political behavior. Following this theoretical argument, which contradicts the theories of electoral connection and political ambition, discreet political careers appear to constitute a pattern of systematic political behavior in some Latin American legislatures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While many studies of party system nationalization examine the effects of various institutional factors, few take into account the impact of party formation cost. This paper aims to fill the empirical gap by focusing on the interactive effect of electoral systems and party registration rules. I argue that the effect of electoral systems on party system nationalization is conditional on spatial registration rules, a requirement that requires a party to collect signatures or organize local branches in a specified geographical manner to maintain the party’s legal status. Based on data for 97 legislative elections in 18 Latin American countries from 1978 to 2011, the empirical analysis demonstrates that a country with an electoral system that encourages a personal vote tends to have a much lower level of party system nationalization when that country does not have spatial registration requirements. The result is robust across different model specifications and estimation techniques. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many successful political parties depend for their initial popularity and cohesion, and even for their long-term brand strength, on a leader. Nevertheless, literature on successful party building downplays the role of leaders. Thus, the question, what type of leader is good for party building?, remains undertheorized. This article presents and provides initial evidence for a leadership-centered theory of successful party building. It argues that externally appealing, internally dominant leaders facilitate party building by lifting new parties to electoral prominence and helping to prevent debilitating schisms. The article provides evidence for this argument through a most similar cases comparison of three new left parties in Latin America: two that took root (Brazil's Workers' Party, Mexico's Party of the Democratic Revolution), and one that collapsed (Peru's United Left). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Early advocates of decentralization lauded it as a strategy for strengthening democratic institutions, but later scholarship has emphasized decentralization's negative consequences, especially for political parties. This article argues that the impact of political decentralization on established parties is shaped by the context in which the reforms occur, with poor economic performance and limited programmatic differentiation making parties more vulnerable to the challenges posed by decentralization. The article explores how decentralization under such circumstances has contributed to party decay in Latin America, where declining support for established parties has been significant, in some places undermining democratic stability and governability. The article employs cross-national time-series analysis and case studies. The quantitative evidence indicates that political decentralization weakens existing parties in contexts of poor economic conditions and little ideological differentiation in the party system. Case studies elaborate the processes through which decentralizing reforms together with economic conditions and party linkages affect party systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Revista de Sociologia e Política is the property of Revista de Sociologia e Politica and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The study of party system institutionalization in Latin America is complicated by the fact that political development in the region has been indelibly marked by period-specific stages and challenges of capitalist development. These periods are associated with distinct patterns of social mobilization, class conflict and political incorporation or exclusion of labour and popular constituencies. These patterns heavily condition the programmatic structuring of partisan competition and its impact on party system institutionalization. Important theoretical insights can be derived from the study of intra-regional variation in period-specific challenges and effects, but this requires careful attention to the factors that differentiate cases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bolivia, Ecuador, and Venezuela are cases in which, despite of the collapse of party systems, the fragmentation of popular sectors, and the dismantling of corporatism that resulted from neoliberal reforms, a new mode of incorporation nonetheless emerged. This article argues that left government responses to the demands of heterogeneous, mobilized, popular sectors shaped a new incorporation in the political arena. In it governments deal differentially with the proliferation of politically significant popular sectors and subaltern social groups. This segmented popular interest intermediation is explained by the interaction of three broad conditions: the configuration of popular sector forces and their linkages to left parties when they took office after the crisis of neoliberalism, the ideational frames of said parties’ leadership, and the dynamics of opposition and support for the regime’s project. The new incorporation establishes a new normal in the relationship of popular sectors to politics in democratic regimes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the political participation of women in coalition governments of Andean countries, including charts and statistics. Topics discussed include the number of seats occupied by women in legislative bodies; the lack of opportunity for women to enter and participate in cabinets; and a discussion of the role of women presidents in Latin American politics and executive branches. The author concludes with a discussion of the need to remove gender discrepancies from Latin American political institutions, particularly in cabinets, and to seek gender equity in Latin American government.

An explanation of the recent wave of constitutional changes in favor of more permissive reelection rules in Latin America is presented based on a principal-agent model of intraparty relations within the presidential party. The theoretical model suggests causal mechanisms through which institutionalized presidential parties constrain the decision to scrap term limits. The theoretical implications are tested using both quantitative and qualitative evidence. Results from logistic regression suggest that the likelihood of removing term limits in Latin American countries (1990-2013) significantly declines with the level of presidential party institutionalization. Case study evidence illustrates the operation of the theoretically-derived causal mechanisms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Identification with political parties in Latin America is analyzed in two dimensions: volume and composition. In general, the literature focuses on the analysis of volume, as measured by the percentage of citizens identified with parties. However, two countries with identical volume of party identification do not necessarily share identical institutional contexts or party systems. Identification can be reproduced in different environments. It can even be cultivated in systems of unstable and only barely programmatic parties, which leads one to think of the existence of different types of identification. Two of them are proposed here: i.e., identification through conviction and identification through transaction. To show the predominance of each type of identification, the series of results of Latinobarómetro (1995-2003) and LAPOP (2006-2012) were used in designing multi-nominal logistic models for each country. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contrary to the situation in Europe, comparative study of party membership in Latin America is virtually nonexistent. The goal of this essay is to fill this gap in the study of party politics and the internal organization of parties in the region. This essay examines the statutes of the principal political parties in Latin America and analyzes the role given to party members in fiftyone political parties in the region. This information is organized into three categories: entry requirements; members' rights; and members' duties (in formal terms). The essay argues that these aspects are rather homogenous among Latin American countries; unlike the situation in Europe, they cannot explain differences in party membership growth rates. The essay evaluates six alternative hypotheses, concluding that the varying levels of party membership in Latin American countries are the result of a combination of historical factors, candidate selection procedures, and party strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT Many studies suggest that mixed-member electoral systems produce different attitudes and behaviors among representatives. This article assesses how this type of electoral system shapes Bolivian legislators' perceptions of their roles as representatives, their district activities, and their relationships with their political parties. It examines these dimensions using elite survey data and interviews with legislators and their personal assistants. The results show that the electoral system does not produce a uniform impact. It shapes how legislators perceive their role as representatives and the nature of the relationship they build with their political parties, but it does not produce differences in the kinds of activities that both types of legislators carry out in their districts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This review essay critically examines the evolution of scholarly literature on Brazil's Partido dos Trabalhadores since the PT's founding in 1980. We periodise the relevant literature into four phases, examining the foundation of the PT, the party's early experience in subnational government, its transformation and moderation in the late 1990s, and finally its experiences in national government since capturing the presidency in 2002. After detailing strengths and weaknesses of this research, we also examine the trajectory of the PT in light of recent comparative work on the so-called ‘left turn’ in Latin America. We conclude by offering an agenda for future research on the PT. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Over the past fifteen years, Latin America has seen a wave of leftist governments take office with some leaders increasing the state's role in the economy, while others continue and even intensify market-oriented reforms. Building on the concept of mandates in the American politics literature, and supplemented by personal interviews conducted with Latin American policymakers and empirical work, I argue that whether leftist presidents implement policies away from the market depends on their margin of electoral victory combined with whether the president's party holds a majority of seats in the legislature. As much American politics work shows, presidents that win elections by landslides are better able to claim a mandate. However, the capacity of presidents to convert massive victories into policy change also requires control of the legislature by the president's party. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I argue that political parties oriented towards particularistic goods affect coalition government in presidential systems. Particularistic parties hire out their support on some item(s) of the presidential agenda in exchange for locally targeted policies or resources under the control of presidents. They are relatively cheap coalition partners for presidents in policy terms and their representation in the legislature provides presidents with coalitional flexibility. My empirical analysis of cabinets in 10 Latin American countries shows that when particularistic parties hold a larger share of the legislative seats minority presidents are less likely to form majority governments and more likely to change the party composition of their cabinets. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The goal of this article is to contribute to a burgeoning comparative literature about nationalization of party competition (political parties and party systems), clarifying its terminology and evaluating three different indices of measurement of this phenomenon and used recently in Latin America. This paper argues that despite the confusion in the terminology, the term nationalization should be understood as homogeneity of electoral support across the territory and that a proper measure of nationalization should take into account four basic elements: party presence across the country, number of subnational units where it is measured, its magnitude and the size of the party. The revision of the literature dedicated to Latin American countries reveals that more case studies of longterm evolution of party systems and explanation of its changes and party-centred variables are necessary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT Youth politics in contemporary Latin America diverge from those of previous generations. Increasingly decoupled from parties, unions, and the state, young people glide seamlessly across previously assumed boundaries: culture and politics, individual and organization, subjectivity and collectivity, virtual and 'real.' This article presents findings from a systematic review of research on youth politics and demonstrates the new direction through three main categories: repression, incorporation, and exclusion, relationships between state institutions and youth identities; generational, cultural, and digital lenses, the innovative trends for theorizing current patterns of youth politics; and unsettling politics, the fusion and diffusion of youth political dexterity. The article concludes by highlighting current strengths and proposing future steps to build on this new direction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From Hugo Chávez in Venezuela to Geert Wilders in the Netherlands and Sarah Palin in the US, populist leaders claim to offer more power to 'the people'. However, most scholars argue that populism is in fact a democratic pathology, because it seeks to build a political system devoid of the rule of law. While it is true that populism maintains an ambivalent relationship with liberal democracy, little attention has been paid to the legitimacy of the questions raised by populist forces. Drawing on the work of Robert Dahl, I argue that current manifestations of populism are offering specific responses to two dilemmas that do not have a clear democratic solution: the boundary problem (how to define the people?) and the limits of self-government (how to control the controllers?). My article shows that populist forces are posing legitimate questions about the current state of democracy in Europe and the Americas, although their solutions tend to be more controversial than helpful. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT Throughout Latin America, particular business conglomerates have begun to sponsor their own political parties, building those parties on their own corporate assets. These 'corporation-based parties' represent a new wave of highly particularized conservative representation in the region. Indeed, corporation-based parties have become a regular-though largely unrecognized-feature of contemporary Latin American party systems. This article develops a theory of how and why particular business conglomerates sponsor their own parties, provides substantial evidence for the existence of corporation-based parties across much of Latin America, and uses a case study of a party built on a Panamanian supermarket chain to demonstrate how such parties are organized. In closing, it discusses the possible future for these parties in the region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Confluenze. Rivista di Studi Iberoamericani is the property of Universita di Bologna, Dipartimento di Lingue, Letterature e Culture Moderne and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper contrasts empirically two possible explanations for the party decision to use primaries: desire to improve political selection (selection effect), or desire to increase political competition-and incentives-among candidates (incentive effect). Using a simple model of endogenous primaries, I show that each explanation implies a different relation between primary adoption and the strength of partisan support. I estimate this relation using the case of Latin American presidential primaries and find robust evidence that the incentive effect dominates the selection effect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article contributes to the study of party regulation in contemporary Latin America in two main ways. Firstly, it identifies a so far overlooked process by which four countries (Argentina, Colombia, Mexico and Peru) raised party-formation costs in the past decade, an unprecedented process in third-wave Latin American democracies. Secondly, it offers a tentative answer to the question of why this process took place in this specific set of countries. This answer brings to the fore the issues of political parties’ legitimacy and party fragmentation as sources of electoral reform. The article argues that the countries that passed these reforms are those in which the ruling political elites perceived increasing levels of fragmentation as a result of previous reforms that had opened up the political system. These prior reforms were enacted as a response to established parties’ loss of legitimacy. The findings support the more general distinction between reforms initiated due to legitimacy crises and reforms resulting from changing balances of power. In this way the article also contributes to the broader debate on the factors that explain different types of electoral reforms in Latin America. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

ABSTRACT Many existing explanations of electoral volatility have been tested at the country level, but they are largely untested at the individual party level. This study reexamines theories of electoral volatility through the use of multilevel models on party-level data in the lower house elections of 18 Latin American countries from 1978 to 2012. Testing hypotheses at different levels, it finds that irregular institutional alteration increases electoral volatility for all the parties in a country, but the effect is more significant for the presidential party. At the party level, the results show that while a party that is more ideologically distinctive than other parties tends to experience lower electoral volatility, party age is not a statistically significant factor for explaining party volatility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of América Latina Hoy is the property of Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Anti-vote-buying campaigns led by NGOs and political elites denounce the practice as a crass economic transaction detrimental to democracy. Do potential clients stigmatize vote buying to the same degree, or does the mass public have a more conditional view of the acceptability of vote buying? We theorize that normative evaluations of vote buying vary based on individuals' understanding of the transaction itself and abstract societal costs associated with the practice. We assess this perspective using survey experiments conducted in several Latin American countries that present hypothetical vote-buying situations for evaluation by respondents, varying the socioeconomic status of the hypothetical client and the client's political predispositions. We find that the disapproval of vote buying is highly conditional on the attributes of the hypothetical client and that evaluations of vote buying depend on conceptions of the concrete benefits and abstract costs of vote buying as a part of electoral politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Brazilian Journal of Law & International Relations / Relações Internacionais no Mundo is the property of Relacoes Internacionais no Mundo and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

During the third wave of democratization, all Latin American countries except Cuba have had competitive political regimes, but the quality or level of democracy has varied significantly across countries and over time. One of the best predictors of this variance across countries and time is each country's experience with competitive politics before 1978. Even controlling for a wide range of other explanations, countries with more democratic heritages before 1978 have higher levels of democracy in the contemporary period. This finding, in turn, raises another question: what accounts for the effects of past levels of democracy on the post-1978 period? A hybrid fixed-effects model shows that democratic trajectories are institutionalized through political parties and judicial institutions. Countries that had institutionalized parties under democracy and supreme court justices who served under democracy in the pre-1978 period have been more able to build high-level democracy in the contemporary period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since 1978, all countries in Latin America have either replaced or amended their constitutions. What explains the choice between these two substantively different means of constitutional transformation? This article argues that constitutions are replaced when they fail to work as governance structures or when their design prevents competing political interests from accommodating to changing environments. According to this perspective, constitutions are likely to be replaced when constitutional crises are frequent, when political actors lack the capacity to implement changes by means of amendments or judicial interpretation, or when the constitutional regime has a power-concentrating design. It is further argued that the frequency of amendments depends both on the length and detail of the constitution and on the interaction between the rigidity of the amendment procedure and the fragmentation of the party system. The article provides statistical evidence to support these arguments and discusses the normative implications of the analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Copyright of Dados - Revista de Ciências Sociais is the property of DADOS and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

What accounts for the virtual absence of new Catholic parties in Latin America over the past four decades? From the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries, Catholic activists organized a variety of political parties in the region. Yet since the 1970s, despite the dramatic expansion of political opportunities in Catholic-majority countries, Catholicism has played only a marginal role in the formation of new parties. This article develops a novel interpretation of this phenomenon, arguing that changes in the structure of religious communities and church–society relations resulting from the reforms of the Second Vatican Council account for the absence of new Catholic parties. Empirically, it explores this topic through the structured, focused comparison of two periods of social and political upheaval in Venezuela. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Copyright of Estudios Politicos is the property of Facultad de Ciencias Politicas y Sociales and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article sets off from the conviction of the relevance of political parties in representative democracies, and at the same time, from the situation of strong contestation on the side of the citizens and concludes that nonetheless the political parties continue having full validity as for their capacity to develop basic functions such as those of selection, formation, promotion and aperture of spaces for accountability for those who take politics as a profession. To do so, we supply empiric evidence on the contradictory situation experienced by the parties in Latin America of having political relevance at the same time of being challenged. Then, theoretical attention is paid to the figure of those who are devoted to politics as a career and their importance thus far poorly regarded. Finally, we introduce the theoretical aspects related to the quality of the politicians as a corollary of their profession. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article compares the political systems and democratic governments of Latin America. The author discusses the effect of these systems on social conditions, as well as the education system, political corruption, and the economy. An analysis of the role of political parties in the first decade of the 21st century is provided, particularly those in Argentina and Ecuador, and their reaction to the economic crisis of 2001. The influence of political parties on the stability of the Uruguayan government during this time period is also explored.

The objective of this article was to analyze the influence that political contexts and political careers exert on the behavior of legislators, through the use of the Élites Parlamentarias Latinoamericanas (pela) database of the Universidad de Salamanca, which centers on three Central American countries: Costa Rica, El Salvador and Honduras. Relying on a theoretical division between retrospective and prospective loyalties, the results suggest that the behavior of lawmakers is influenced by their future job prospects. This influence becomes clear when the aspect being evaluated is exclusive, namely, when it does not allow legislators to cultivate loyalties that would secure their professional future without damaging their retrospective loyalties. When political parties control the continuity of political careers, the percentage of lawmakers who place the interests of their districts above the interests of their party is greater among those not seeking to continue their political careers than among those who wish to remain in politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]