Atlantic Council FREEDOM AND PROSPERITY CENTER
ISSUE BRIEF N OV E M B E R 2024
No policies, no party: Four cases from Latin America CHRISTINE ZAINO AND SOFIA HERRERA
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cross Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), personality-driven political movements and political outsiders are increasingly prevalent, often at the expense of party-based politics. A theme of recent elections in the region has been a widespread embrace of political figures and movements vowing to upend the status quo. From Ecuador to Argentina to Guatemala, political outsiders have unseated the establishment. Meanwhile, recently formed, ideologically vague political movements in Mexico and El Salvador overtook the traditional parties that they broke away from to win landslide elections. With few exceptions, the region has failed to develop competitive, institutionalized, and programmatic parties. This breakdown in party systems and proliferation of personality-driven movements has not delivered better results. Improving institutionalized competition among programmatic, ideologically distinct, and identifiable parties would bolster Latin American democracy, delivering citizens freedom and prosperity. Within the past decade, several countries with once seemingly institutionalized party systems, such as El Salvador and Mexico, collapsed as parties lost their grip on power to personality-driven figures and movements.1 Others, like Ecuador and Guatemala, have systems that appear to provide a wide variety of options to citizens through a great proliferation of parties. These systems are unpredictable to citizens, and parties are unable to develop the structure, ideology, and institutionality necessary to deliver solutions to citizen’s needs.2
The Freedom and Prosperity Center aims to increase the wellbeing of people everywhere and especially that of the poor and marginalized in developing countries through unbiased, data-based research on the relationship between prosperity and economic, political, and legal freedoms, in support of sound policy choices.
ATLANTIC COUNCIL
This piece examines how political parties across four Latin American countries in two types of systems have failed to serve as effective vehicles for delivering democracy, and what must change for parties in the region to succeed. We examine the breakdown of the formerly institutionalized party systems in Mexico and El Salvador, and the persistently weak parties in Guatemala and Ecuador. Each country’s experience illustrates how a lack of programmatic parties has contributed to poor governance,
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Following Mainwaring and Scully, an institutionalized political party system must meet four conditions: stability in the rules and nature of interparty competition; component parties possess somewhat stable roots in society; major political actors accord legitimacy to the electoral process and to parties; and party organizations exist apart from the interests of ambitious leaders. See Scott Mainwaring and Timothy R. Scully, eds., Building Democratic Institutions: Party Systems in Latin America (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995).
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Systems with these characteristics are commonly referred to as feckless pluralism in the academic literature of political parties, a category of political systems explained by Thomas Carothers. See Thomas Carothers, “The End of the Transition Paradigm,” Journal of Democracy 13, no. 1 (2002), https://www.journalofdemocracy.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/Carothers-13-1.pdf.
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