This book generates a wealth of new empirical information about Latin American party systems and contributes richly to major theoretical debates about party systems and democracy.

This book provides an in-depth look into key political dynamics that obtain in a democracy without parties, offering a window into political undercurrents increasingly in evidence throughout the Latin American region, where political parties are withering. For the past three decades, Peru has showcased a political universe populated by amateur politicians and the dominance of personalism as the main party–voter linkage form. The study peruses the post-2000 evolution of some of the key Peruvian electoral vehicles and classifies the partisan universe as a party non-system. There are several elements endogenous to personalist electoral vehicles that perpetuate partylessness, contributing to the absence of party building. The book also examines electoral dynamics in partyless settings, centrally shaped by effective electoral supply, personal brands, contingency, and iterated rounds of strategic voting calculi. Given the scarcity of information electoral vehicles provide, as well as the enormously complex political environment Peruvian citizens inhabit, personal brands provide readymade informational shortcuts that simplify the political world. The concept of “negative legitimacy environments” is furnished to capture political settings comprised of supermajorities of floating voters, pervasive negative political identities, and a generic citizen preference for newcomers and political outsiders. Such environments, increasingly present throughout Latin America, produce several deleterious effects, including high political uncertainty, incumbency disadvantage, and political time compression. Peru’s “democracy without parties” fails to deliver essential democratic functions including governability, responsiveness, horizontal and vertical accountability, or democratic representation, among others.

When Peru's APRA - one of the oldest and most controversial political parties in Latin America - came to power in 1985, expectations were high for the new government, and in part because a decade of economic decline and social crisis had discredited both the military and the right as alternatives. APRA did manage an unprecedented consensus for two years. But a sudden shift in strategy to confrontational rhetoric and authoritarian tactics led to policy stagnation, economic collapse, and a surge of reaction and political violence from extremes of the left and right. Rather than playing the role of the strong centre, APRA acted as a catalyst for the polarisation process. The party's sectarian and authoritarian strains, coupled with the increasingly erratic behaviour of its once-popular young leader, Alan Garcia, created damaging and perhaps irreparable divisions between the party and the rest of society, and between society and polity more generally.

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.

This book presents a new and conflict-centered theory of successful party-building, drawing on diverse cases from across Latin America.

Latin American opinion surveys consistently point to Peruvian citizens' deep distrust of their elected rulers and democratic institutions. The 2011 presidential and legislative elections in Peru, along with the regional and municipal polls of the previous year, showed once again the degree of political fragmentation in contemporary Peru and the weakness of its party system. Fractured Politics examines the history of political exclusion in Peru, the weakness of representative institutions, and the persistence of localized violent protest. It also evaluates the contribution of institutional reforms in bridging the gap between state and society, including Peru's Law on Political Parties, administrative decentralization, and the experience of the Defensoría, or ombudsman's office. The chapters, by leading scholars of Peruvian politics, emerge from a conference, held in 2009 in Saint Antony's College Oxford. Julio Cotler, from the Instituto de Estudios Peruanos (IEP), was the keynote speaker.

This book provides an in-depth look into key political dynamics that obtain in a democracy without parties, offering a window into political undercurrents increasingly in evidence throughout the Latin American region, where political parties are withering. For the past three decades, Peru has showcased a political universe populated by amateur politicians and the dominance of personalism as the main party-voter linkage form. The study peruses the post-2000 evolution of some of the key Peruvian electoral vehicles and classifies the partisan universe as a party non-system. There are several elements endogenous to personalist electoral vehicles that perpetuate partylessness, contributing to the absence of party building. The book also examines electoral dynamics in partyless settings, centrally shaped by effective electoral supply, personal brands, contingency, and iterated rounds of strategic voting calculi. Given the scarcity of information electoral vehicles provide, as well as the enormously complex political environment Peruvian citizens inhabit, personal brands provide readymade informational shortcuts that simplify the political world. The concept of "negative legitimacy environments" is furnished to capture political settings comprised of supermajorities of floating voters, pervasive negative political identities, and a generic citizen preference for newcomers and political outsiders. Such environments, increasingly present throughout Latin America, produce several deleterious effects, including high political uncertainty, incumbency disadvantage, and political time compression. Peru's "democracy without parties" fails to deliver essential democratic functions including governability, responsiveness, horizontal and vertical accountability, or democratic representation, among others. Omar Sanchez-Sibony is Associate Professor of Political Science at Texas State University.

Natural resource extraction has fueled protest movements in Latin America and existing research has drawn considerable scholarly attention to the politics of antimarket contention at the national level, particularly in Ecuador, Bolivia, and Argentina. Despite its residents reporting the third-highest level of protest participation in the region, Peru has been largely ignored in these discussions. In this groundbreaking study, Moises Arce exposes a long-standing climate of popular contention in Peru. Looking beneath the surface to the subnational, regional, and local level as inception points, he rigorously dissects the political conditions that set the stage for protest. Focusing on natural resource extraction and its key role in the political economy of Peru and other developing countries, Arce reveals a wide disparity in the incidence, forms, and consequences of collective action. Through empirical analysis of protest events over thirty-one years, extensive personal interviews with policymakers and societal actors, and individual case studies of major protest episodes, Arce follows the ebb and flow of Peruvian protests over time and space to show the territorial unevenness of democracy, resource extraction, and antimarket contentions. Employing political process theory, Arce builds an interactive framework that views the moderating role of democracy, the quality of institutional representation as embodied in political parties, and most critically, the level of political party competition as determinants in the variation of protest and subsequent government response. Overall, he finds that both the fluidity and fragmentation of political parties at the subnational level impair the mechanisms of accountability and responsiveness often attributed to party competition.Thus, as political fragmentation increases, political opportunities expand, and contention rises. These dynamics in turn shape the long-term development of the state. Resource Extraction and Protest in Peru will inform students and scholars of globalization, market transitions, political science, contentious politics and Latin America generally, as a comparative analysis relating natural resource extraction to democratic processes both regionally and internationally.

Offers a comprehensive assessment of President Alberto Fujimori's regime in the context of Latin America's struggle to consolidate democracy after years of authoritarian rule. This book also helps illuminate the persistent obstacles that Latin American countries face in establishing democracy.

Latin American states took dramatic steps toward greater inclusion during the late twentieth and early twenty-first Centuries. Bringing together an accomplished group of scholars, this volume examines this shift by introducing three dimensions of inclusion: official recognition of historically excluded groups, access to policymaking, and resource redistribution. Tracing the movement along these dimensions since the 1990s, the editors argue that the endurance of democratic politics, combined with longstanding social inequalities, create the impetus for inclusionary reforms. Diverse chapters explore how factors such as the role of partisanship and electoral clientelism, constitutional design, state capacity, social protest, populism, commodity rents, international diffusion, and historical legacies encouraged or inhibited inclusionary reform during the late 1990s and early 2000s. Featuring original empirical evidence and a strong theoretical framework, the book considers cross-national variation, delves into the surprising paradoxes of inclusion, and identifies the obstacles hindering further fundamental change.