Comparative Politics Speaker Series

Date: 

Thursday, October 13, 2016, 12:00pm to 2:00pm

Location: 

CGIS Knafel Building, 1737 Cambridge Street, Bowie-Vernon Room (K262)

"Latin American Party Systems: Institutionalization and Erosion”

Speaker:

Scott Mainwearing, Jorge Paulo Lemann Professor for Brazil Studies, Harvard Kennedy School.

Co-sponsored by the Department of Government, Harvard University.

Contacts:

Jessie Bullock 
jbullock@g.harvard.edu

Andrew Leber 
andrewmleber@g.harvard.edu

Shannon Parker 
shannonparker@g.harvard.edu

Faculty Advisors:

Dan Smith, Assistant Professor, Department of Government, Harvard University.

Yuhua Wang, Assistant Professor, Department of Government, Harvard University.

Abstract:

In recent decades, work on party system institutionalization has proliferated in Latin America, Africa, the post-Soviet region, and Asia. This presentation will take on three challenges related to this literature. First, I will reconceptualize party system institutionalization. Second, I will offer some reflections on how party system institutionalization affects democracy. Political scientists and political sociologists have long argued that parties are indispensable to democracy. This raises a question in an era in which most third and fourth wave democracies have weak parties and weakly institutionalized party systems: how does democracy function under these conditions? Third, I will propose some indicators of party system institutionalization and discuss the data for these indicators for 18 Latin American countries in the period since 1990.