Building Democratic Institutions: Party Systems in Latin America

Maxwell, Kenneth; Mainwaring, Scott; Scully, Timothy R.

doi:10.2307/20047256

Cited by 180 publications

(58 citation statements)

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“…Consistent with other scholars (see Mainwaring & Scully, 1995), I argue that party capacity is a product of a path-dependent process and is unlikely to change quickly. Gunther and Diamond (2003, p. 173) write, "The correlation between the degree of organizational thinness/thickness of the party and the temporal dimension is not accidental.…”

Section: The Link Between Party Organization and Party Violencesupporting

confidence: 86%

Political Parties and Violence in Karachi, Pakistan

Siddiqui

2022

Comparative Political Studies

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Political parties in many ethnically polarized contexts around the world engage in electoral violence. Why do some parties engage in violence directly while others do so through intermediaries? Existing literature has produced contradictory results about when democracy turns violent and paid insufficient attention to the form that party violence takes. Using qualitative and survey data of both party elites and voters, this paper focuses on two parties in the violent megacity of Karachi, Pakistan: the Muttahida Qaumi Movement—whose cadres directly orchestrated violence—and the Pakistan People’s Party—which outsourced violence to distinct specialists. It argues that where state capacity is contested by multiple competing sovereigns, the economic and coercive benefits to be gained from violence are high. However, even where parties share similar incentives for violence within a particular electoral arena, whether a party engages in violence directly or not depends on its organizational structure and strength.

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Section: The Link Between Party Organization and Party Violencesupporting

confidence: 86%

Political Parties and Violence in Karachi, Pakistan

Siddiqui

2022

Comparative Political Studies

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“…The uneasy relationship between party system institutionalization, democracy, and liberalism On the one hand, previous research provides grounds to expect a positive association between party system institutionalization and democracy. The former is supposed to reduce the scope of populist leaders, and to promote accountability (Birch, 2003;Schleiter and Voznaya, 2018), governability (Diamond and Linz, 1989;Mainwaring et al, 1992;Innes, 2002;Zielinski et al, 2005;Thames and Robbins, 2007), programmatic representation (Mainwaring and Torcal, 2006), and legitimacy (Mainwaring and Scully, 1995;Diamond, 1997: xxiii). On a more general level, low institutionalization can prevent both parties as well as voters from engaging in strategically driven coordination (Mainwaring and Zoco, 2007), intensifying problems of collective action in relation to preference aggregation.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The sources of continuity and predictability can be diverse, including institutional, cultural, demographic, etc., factors. While the literature tends to emphasize the close relationship between parties and specific social groups as the anchor of this stability (Pridham, 1990;Mainwaring and Scully, 1995;Morlino, 1998;Tavits, 2005;Casal Bértoa, 2017), the degree of closure is also a function of the internal norms of a country's party politics.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In terms of the empirical co-variation of the various measures of democracy and of institutionalized party politics, most studies (e.g. Diamond and Linz, 1989;Mainwaring and Scully, 1995;Morlino, 1998;Kuenzi and Lambright, 2005;Tavits, 2005;Hicken, 2006;Lindberg, 2007;Weghorst and Bernhard, 2014;Casal Bértoa, 2017) point to a positive pattern, finding frequently changing party labels and unpredictable relations among parties in the least democratic systems. But quite a few studies (e.g.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Party system closure and the liberal dimension of democracy: a double-edged sword

Mölder

Enyedi²,

Bértoa³

2022

Riv. ital. sci. polit.

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An institutionalized party system is often regarded as a precondition for a well-functioning democracy. Recent recesses in democracy and, in particular, in the liberal dimension of democracy in relatively established party systems, however, warrant a fresh look into how party system institutionalization shapes liberal democracy. We use a dataset that covers 58 European party systems over more than a century to assess how party system institutionalization in the governmental arena – closure – is related to more robust liberal democracy. Our results show that stable coalition combinations are conducive to higher levels of liberalism, while infrequent government changes and the exclusion of new parties from the governmental arena have a detrimental role.

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“…This conclusion is implicit in much of the growing literature on party institutionalization (PI), which is concerned with the democratic benefits of political parties that are embedded in society (see, for example, Dix, 1992;Mainwaring and Scully, 1995;Martínez, 2020). Although there is debate on how best to conceptualize and operationalize PI, it can broadly be thought of as a property describing the extent to which parties are stable political forces.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Party statutes and party institutionalization

2022

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Studies of party- and party-system stability have often explored the connection between the party-level property of Party Institutionalization (PI) and parties’ electoral performance and organizational longevity, yet scholars still have not agreed on a standard measure for this concept. This article argues that the length of party statutes could provide part of such a measure, specifically for the extent to which parties have become routinized (a key dimension of PI) through the formalization of their rules and practices. We validate the plausibility of this measure using data on 303 parties from 49 countries, demonstrating that party statute length varies systematically and in ways predicted by our knowledge of how party organizations reflect their institutional environments and the complexity of internal coalitions. We also show that statute length varies in expected ways with attributes often associated with higher or lower levels of party institutionalization. We conclude that statute length offers a conceptually congruent and objective indicator of formalization, one that could be used either alone or combined with measures of parties’ informal practices to advance our understanding of the relationship between PI and democratic development.

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Building Democratic Institutions: Party Systems in Latin America

Cited by 180 publications

References 0 publications

Political Parties and Violence in Karachi, Pakistan

Political Parties and Violence in Karachi, Pakistan

Party system closure and the liberal dimension of democracy: a double-edged sword

Party statutes and party institutionalization

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