Subnational Determinants of National Multipartism in Latin America

Abstract

Recent research points to the importance of subnational elections as variables shaping the national party system in federal states (Jones 1997b; Mainwaring and Shugart 1997; Samuels 2000). I propose that the effects of subnational elections are not limited to federal states but instead can be seen throughout the region. This paper examines the impacts of gubernatorial elections across eighteen Latin American countries during the most recent democratic period. The analysis suggests that intermediate subnational elections do exert an influence on national party systems, whether the state is federal or not, and particularly influence how many parties are elected to a legislature's lower house.

Bottoms up: How subnational elections predict parties’ decisions to run in presidential elections in Europe and Latin America

“…First, our project is a first step toward demonstrating the national political consequences of parties' subnational decisions and performance. Though extant research has shown that subnational elections influence national legislative party systems (Moreno, 2003;Samuels, 2003), we demonstrate that subnational elections also help shape presidential elections by predicting when subnationally-competitive and successful parties enter the presidential race. Using an original cross-national dataset, we show that when parties gain experience at the subnational level, they are also more likely to participate in the presidential race, which also corresponds with an increased size of the national party system.…”

“…Investigating how geographic subunits structure national political competition has captured the attention of scholars at least since Schattschneider (1960) recognized the lure of local politics for members of the US Congress. Although there is a growing body of literature on party system nationalization, few investigations have focused on how nationalization occurs specifically in presidential systems (Amorim Neto and Cox, 1997;Golder, 2006;Hicken and Stoll, 2008;Morgenstern et al, 2009), and even fewer have focused on the influence of subnational elections in the nationalization process (Harbers, 2010;Jones, 1995;Moreno, 2003;Samuels, 2003). Furthermore, the studies that do investigate the influence of subnational races examine how they affect national legislative politics rather than presidential contests.…”

Unusual Bedfellows? PRI-PVEM Electoral Alliances in Mexican Legislative Elections

“…Furthermore, parties often use subnational elections as a testing ground for national elections. More specifically, subnational elections can give parties the experience and resources required to run nationally (Jones 1997;Moreno 2003;Van Cott 2005). For example, Spoon and West (2015b) find that parties' electoral performances and presence in subnational elections influence their likelihood of entering the presidential race.…”

Small versus Statewide Parties: How Subnational Contestation and Decentralisation Influence Presidential Elections in Europe and Latin America

“…Despite Shugart and Carey’s (1992) rich theoretical discussion of the relationship between subnational contestation and the presidential race, recent research does not provide a clear answer to the question of how local elections affect presidential elections (Hicken and Stoll, 2008; Spoon and West, 2015b; West and Spoon, 2013). The question remains – do subnational elections give parties the experience and resources necessary to compete in national races (Jones, 1997; Moreno, 2003), leading local parties to run for the presidency as Shugart and Carey suggest? Or are local parties less likely to expend resources in national elections, as other research (Chhibber and Kollman, 1998, 2004; Harbers, 2010; Samuels, 2003) has argued?…”