Cleavage Structures and Party Systems in Latin America

In a seminal article in 1967 Seymour Martin Lipset and Stein Rokkan posed a series of central questions for the comparative study of party systems. The first set of questions concerned the genesis of the system of cleavages within the national community, including the timing of their appearance and their relative salience and durability. A second group of questions focused on the translation of cleavages into stable party systems, including the question of why conflicting interests and ideologies in some cases favored the emergence of broad aggregative coalitions, and in others fragmentation. The final set of questions bore on the behavior of voters within the various party systems. What were the characteristics of those voters mobilized by the several parties, and how did economic and social change translate into changes in the strengths and strategies of the parties? The authors stressed that all these and related questions were to be addressed diachronically, that is, in historical perspective.' While Lipset and Rokkan, as well as most of the many others who have asked similar comparative questions, have focused almost exclusively on the competitive party systems of Europe and the Anglo-Saxon diaspora (the United States, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand), it seems high time that questions like those raised for industrialized countries now also be posed for Latin America, particularly since Latin America constitutes the area of the world that most closely approximates the developed West in culture, levels of economic and social development,2 and experience with competitive party systems. Only by examining such questions outside the regions of the ancestral homes of political parties and party systems can we expand our generalizations about the historical development of political parties beyond the evidence of a particular time and place. It is also at least highly plausible that Latin America's experience with the construction of systems of competitive party politics will prove more relevant to the future trajectory of such politics in other parts of the so-called Third World than will that of the developed West. This article is an attempt to begin the systematic analysis of that experience.3 Among the questions we pose will be the following. Has the development of western party systems proven to be the prototype for the evolution of competitive party systems in Latin America? What are the kinds of parties and the patterns of competition among parties in Latin America, and how have they emerged over time? Have the West's past experiences with the onset of mass politics and the politics of industrialization been more or less replicated in contemporary Latin America? How might one account for any differences? What follows is therefore meant essentially as an exploratory exercise in delineating some broad patterns of similarity and difference between the party systems of Latin America and the developed West.