Even a cursory review of Latin American history since the 1970s reveals that the subcontinent has undergone fundamental, if not traumatic, economic and political change over the course of the past quarter century. Such momentous shocks and prolonged periods of social dislocation in the recent past may account better for the programmatic profile of party systems evidenced by our twelve Latin American countries in 1997–98 than can older political-economic patterns of party system building and long-term political experiences.

Given the power of long-term causal factors to account for party system structuration in the 1990s, it is an uphill battle, methodologically and empirically, to establish that recent developments in Latin America – economic growth, political economy, political regime change, and the design of democratic institutions – have left their mark on patterns of partisan accountability and citizen-politician linkage in the democratic process. Statistically, recent causes will be collinear with powerful predictors based on the past (e.g., 1973 social policy expenditure) and, in substantive terms, possibly endogenous to such prior developments. Moreover, before they are fully articulated, new partisan alignments may need more time to gestate than the brief period running from the “lost decade” to the late 1990s.

The lower the chance that any recent political-economic or institutional developments accounting for party system programmatic alignment in Latin America are endogenous to prior conditions, the stronger the claim that party systems are malleable in light of relatively short-term developments outside a long-term causal chain of determination.