Party-System Collapse: The Roots of Crisis in Peru and Venezuela - Hardcover

Seawright, Jason

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0804782369 ISBN 13: 9780804782364

Verlag: Stanford University Press, 2012

Inhaltsangabe

Most party systems are relatively stable over time. Yet in the 1980s and 1990s, established party systems in Peru and Venezuela broke down, leading to the elections of outsider Alberto Fujimori and anti-party populist Hugo Chavez. Focusing on these two cases, this book explores the causes of systemic collapse.

To date, scholars have pointed to economic crises, the rise of the informal economy, and the charisma and political brilliance of Fujimori and Chavez to explain the changes in Peru and Venezuela. This book uses economic data, surveys, and experiments to show that these explanations are incomplete. Political scientist Jason Seawright argues that party-system collapse is motivated fundamentally by voter anger at the traditional political parties, which is produced by corruption scandals and failures of representation. Integrating economic, organizational, and individual considerations, Seawright provides a new explanation and compelling new evidence to present a fuller picture of voters' decisions and actions in bringing about party-system collapse, and the rise of important outsider political leaders in South America.

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Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Jason Seawright is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Northwestern University.

Jason Seawright is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Northwestern University.

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PARTY-SYSTEM COLLAPSE

The Roots of Crisis in Peru and VenezuelaBy Jason Seawright

Stanford University Press

Copyright © 2012 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-8236-4

Contents

List of Figures and Tables...................................................viiAcknowledgments..............................................................ix1. Party-System Collapse in South America....................................12. Characterizing Party-System Changes.......................................323. Economics, Societal Crisis, and Anxiety...................................634. Corruption and the Collapse of Party Identification.......................885. Ideological Underrepresentation and Voter Defection.......................1136. Voter Affect and the Demise of Party Systems..............................1447. Explaining Parties' Degree of Ideological Flexibility.....................1658. Collapse and the Experience of Politics...................................201Notes........................................................................245Bibliography.................................................................259Index........................................................................275

Chapter One

PARTY-SYSTEM COLLAPSE IN SOUTH AMERICA

Before the 1990s, Venezuela's two-party system was among the most stable and well-institutionalized party systems in the developing world (Coppedge 1994: 174–77). One of the two traditional parties won every fully democratic presidential election in the country's history. From the early 1970s through 1988, these traditional parties, in effect, faced no challengers, winning a combined share of at least 85 percent of the presidential vote in 1973, 1978, 1983, and 1988. Over this period, the traditional parties also dominated the legislature.

In 1993, however, these established electoral patterns began to change rapidly. Both traditional parties lost roughly half of the support they had enjoyed in the previous presidential elections, and—for the first time in Venezuelan democratic history—the winner of the election was not endorsed by either of the established parties.

What began as traditional-party decline in 1993 culminated, in the 1998 presidential elections, in a party-system collapse (Dietz and Myers 2007; Morgan 2007). Neither of the two traditional parties was able to get any traction for its selected candidate. One party endorsed a candidate from outside the party system early in the campaign cycle; the other waited until days before the election to throw its support to that same outsider candidate. Thus the election became a contest between two candidates from outside the established party system. Both traditional parties have been electorally marginalized since that election.

The same election that saw the collapse of the Venezuelan traditional parties also elevated Hugo Chávez to the presidency. Subsequently, Chávez has departed dramatically from the moderate, pro-U.S. politics that were previously traditional in Venezuela, striking out instead in the direction of a bold, confrontational populist leftism (Hawkins 2011)—an approach that regularly reaches provocative symbolic heights, memorably including the moment when Chávez used a United Nations speech (on September 20, 2006) to characterize U.S. President George W. Bush as the devil (Lapper 2007: 19–20); more substantive moments of provocation include Chávez's repeated statements that he intended to construct "21st-century Socialism" and remake his country as a "Socialist Republic of Venezuela." In a country that had once been a leading U.S. ally in Latin America and a model of moderate democracy, the degree of political change represented by these events is breathtaking.

In Peru during the 1980s, a less established party system also collapsed (Cameron 1994; Tanaka 1998; Dietz and Myers 2007). Three political parties had dominated the Peruvian electoral landscape starting roughly with the 1980 presidential elections. These three parties provided all of the major presidential candidates for the elections of the 1980s. They also controlled most of the seats in the legislature and won most local elections.

However, between 1985 and 1990, this three-way party system largely collapsed. From a combined 1985 presidential vote share of 85 percent, the traditional parties fell to a combined 1990 presidential vote share of only 31 percent. Indeed, neither of the two candidates who advanced to the second round of the 1990 Peruvian presidential elections came from a traditional party. In the wake of this 1990 collapse, the Peruvian traditional parties received single-digit vote shares in local and national elections for the rest of the 1990s.

During that decade, outsider president Alberto Fujimori instituted a free-market economic policy, featuring extensive privatizations and a sharp reduction in trade barriers, that substantially departed from the patterns of recent Peruvian economic history. In tandem with these economic reforms, Fujimori launched a military coup that overthrew Peru's democratic regime and dissolved the sitting Congress. He then held a constitutional convention that refounded Peruvian democracy on Fujimori's terms. At the conclusion of a turbulent decade of personalist, anti-party electoral authoritarianism, Fujimori finally lost power in the wake of a fraudulent reelection in 2000 and a series of corruption scandals involving an ally of his: intelligence operative and dirty-tricks specialist Vladimiro Montesinos.

The rise of Hugo Chávez and of Alberto Fujimori involves many convergent series of events. The personal biography of each leader is relevant, as are the stories of their tactical, ideological, and organizational preparations for electoral victory. Yet, the crucial role of these factors notwithstanding, it is difficult to imagine that either man would have won power if the Peruvian or Venezuelan party systems had not been in the process of collapse. If Fujimori or Chávez had faced credible, competitive candidates from established, valued traditional political parties, then they would have faced perhaps insurmountable challenges from voters' strategic voting calculations, citizens' loyalty to the existing parties, and the resource and visibility asymmetries associated with major-party status. Party-system collapse significantly reduced those obstacles to outsider victory. Hence, understanding the process of party-system collapse is a vital part of thinking about the political origins of Chávez or Fujimori.

Latin America is a notoriously turbulent region for political parties. Among countries where no party-system collapse occurred, net electoral volatility scores—the percentage of the overall vote that changes between two specified elections—for the period from 1982 through 1995 range from a low of 17.7 percent in Uruguay to a high of 64.3 percent in Brazil (Coppedge 2001: 175). Change in a party's electoral strength is not at all unusual in the region. Furthermore, the experience of debt crises, economic restructuring, and neoliberal reform during the 1980s and 1990s was far from politically placid. Perhaps the Peruvian and Venezuelan party-system collapses were merely typical instances of political instability during Latin America's neoliberal era?

In fact, while party-system change of some kind has indeed been common in the region, party-system collapse has been rare. In some countries, collapse was not an issue because no...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Stanford University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2012
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0804782369
• ISBN 13: 9780804782364
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 312
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Mare Nostrum Group B.V.; gpsr@mare-nostrum.co.uk; ; Doelen 72; Breda; 4831 GR; Niederlande