Date:
Location:
"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.