From Collapse to Comeback? The Fates of Political Parties in Latin America

Political parties are fundamental for democracy. Yet, we still do not understand why some parties are more apt than others to withstand the ebbs and flows of economic and political development. Why can some parties survive the challenges to representation that developing countries face? How are others able to thrive, despite these challenges? Why do some fail in the face of these challenges? This study identifies and explains the different outcomes of political parties in the wake of a major challenge to the democratic regime: party-system collapse. A political party can collapse with the party-system; it can persist beyond party-system collapse; and it can come back after party-system collapse.;The following pages examine the post-collapse trajectories of the parties that constituted the Peruvian, Venezuelan, and Bolivian political party systems to explain the conditions under which a political party persists and potentially comes back after major systemic crisis. All three party systems entered into collapse. The trajectories of the individual parties afterward, however, were quite different.;The study builds a theory of party persistence and national electoral comeback by bringing together the literatures on party organization, subnational politics, and political psychology. It shows that, in the aftermath of party-system collapse, the constituent political parties incur severe losses at the national level. They have lost their national electoral vote share. Additionally, they no longer have access to state coffers, and they must contend with a leadership vacuum at the national level. Given these obstacles, political parties must rely on other resources to persist after party-system collapse and potentially come back at the national level. These resources are organizational and social in nature. When parties have at least one of these resources, they are able to persist in the aftermath of party-system collapse. When they can retain reserves of both resources, they will be well placed to come back at the national level. When parties do not have access to either resource, they will be unable to persist and will collapse alongside the party system.