Launched as a leftist vehicle for the presidential candidacy of Rafael Correa, the Alianza País (AP) dominated Ecuador’s electoral politics for a decade. Electoral success, however, was never paired with a democratically minded project of party building. Wielding expansive executive powers as president from 2007 to 2017, Correa consolidated his personal control over the AP and set the country on a course of democratic backsliding. Horizontal coordination among elites and operatives inside the party was enforced through a top-down command structure. Decisions about messaging, candidates, and discipline were tightly controlled by Correa and his inner circle of hand-picked loyalists. Eschewing grassroots participation in favor of technocratic governance, Correa systematically undercut independent groups in civil society and used executive-branch resources to subsidize select groups and maintain electoral support. For the most part, the AP was consigned to the sidelines, purposefully diminished by its leader. While mobilizing effectively for elections, the AP failed to develop as a conduit for citizen participation and interest representation. Rather than acting as a democratizing agent of change, the AP evolved into a caudillista-style vehicle reminiscent of personalistic parties in the country’s past.

Although Peru’s political system has long been depicted as a “democracy without parties,” several recent studies have suggested that Fujimorismo might posses the assets to become the sole Peruvian political party. In this chapter, we evaluate this proposition using the conceptual framework set out by volume’s editors. We find that Fujimorismo is a loose electoral coalition that, in vertical terms, lacks the stable social links required to aggregate interests. In horizontal terms, Fujimorismo can only coordinate politicians to a limited degree. Finally, our study suggests that even when Fujimorismo performs both horizontal and vertical functions, it is a party that has shown a tendency to use its organizational assets to erode democracy and not to strengthen it.

During Argentina’s 2001–02 crisis, new political groupings were created. Most of them were derived from preexisting parties and most failed to survive much beyond that juncture. The Republican Proposal (PRO) is one of the rare cases of successful party building. From a small group centered around an entrepreneur, it was built up with political newcomers from the business world and NGOs and with long-standing politicians – radicals, Peronists – from the traditional Right. Its success marked a break with the historical weakness of center-right parties in Argentina. However, due to the conditions of its emergence and the strategy carried out by its leaders, PRO is more rooted in some parts of the country than in others. In the City of Buenos Aires, its stronghold, and in certain other provinces, it behaves like a fully functioning political party, while in other districts it would be better defined as a diminished subtype, specifically an unrooted party. This chapter focuses on the PRO’s centralized horizontal coordination strategy and the impact of this strategy on the party’s uneven rootedness throughout the country. In this way, the case of the PRO helps elucidate the subnational variations of the theoretical model proposed in this volume.

This chapter describes the Chilean Partido por la Democracia (Party for Democracy, PPD) as a group of independents. Since its inception during the transition to democracy, the PPD has achieved meaningful electoral support. However, its electoral stability contrasts with its lack of organizational structure, its difficulties executing horizontal coordination during elections, in Congress, and between local and national levels. Regarding vertical interest aggregation, the PPD builds upon personalistic linkages with particular interest groups in the different electoral districts. The PPD is thus no more than a group of politicians with personal electoral capital in their districts who achieve a minimum level of coordination during elections and in Congress.

This chapter analyzes the case of the Frente Amplio (Broad Front, FA) in Uruguay as an unusual organization. Since its founding, the FA has exhibited a dual structure: a coalition of various factions that compose the party and a movement comprising a common grassroots structure (Base Committees). The latter is not necessarily affiliated with any particular faction and it participates in all of the party’s decision-making structures. The FA fulfills the essential functions required to qualify as a political party. These functions manifest themselves in the participatory processes that develop the party’s electoral platforms and also control the nomination of presidential candidates. More critically, the coalition and the grassroots movement tended to influence the policy decisions of the party’s parliamentary caucus when the FA was an opposition party, as well as the decisions of the executive branch when the FA was in government (2005–20). In this process, grassroots party activists exercised significant influence over political decisions that were particularly sensitive for the Left. Regarding vertical interest aggregation, the FA has developed strong, informal links with various social actors, especially with labor unions.

Creating new parties is hard. It requires the development of permanent or at least semipermanent mechanisms of (1) horizontal coordination and (2) vertical interest aggregation. In Latin America, new “electoral vehicles” – organizations that do not meet one or more of the above criteria – are everywhere. Few of these electoral vehicles become political parties in the full sense of the term This chapter offers an account of one of Latin America’s rare party-building successes – the Bolivian MAS (Movement toward Socialism). It explains an under-theorized path to party-building, via autonomous social movements, and shows how movements can shape party organizational models. The analysis reveals that the MAS meets the two criteria for successful party building but retains strikingly fluid organizational attributes. In the absence of strong national and local party structures that can serve as “transmission belts,” it accomplishes horizontal coordination and vertical aggregation through predominantly informal channels, rather than through party structures. The chapter describes these informal channels and discusses their effects on broader issues related to democratic representation, responsiveness, and accountability.

This chapter departs from the classic definition of parties and applies a novel theory that casts doubt on the validity of the minimalist definition using two Costa Rican cases. Discussion of horizontal and vertical mechanisms as applied to the National Liberation Party (PLN) and Citizens Action Party (PAC) reveals strong similarities in terms of party organizations and challenges for policy consistency at the local level combined with marked contrasts in their capacities to process collective demands. The main finding of this chapter is that the PLN and PAC, two of the most prominent parties in the country, are quite different one from another. Regardless of their remarkable differences, both parties share the feature of having evolving constituencies, though their respective constituencies are evolving in opposite directions. The PLN fits the classic definition of a party with a well-organized and fully developed constituency suffering from decreasing membership over the last two decades. The PAC, on the other hand, does not have a sufficiently developed constituency to be considered a fully functioning party. The PAC does, however, have activists and is developing its membership.

Unidad Nacional de la Esperanza (National Unit of Hope, UNE) has been Guatemala’s most successful electoral vehicle in the democratic period. The UNE’s architects aimed to construct a programmatic and institutionalized political party. However, it is a formation that has much more in common with the modal Guatemalan electoral vehicle. An empirical evaluation of the UNE’s horizontal coordination and vertical aggregation capabilities reveals that, as an organization, it fails along both dimensions. Central-to-local party coordination, campaign strategy harmonization, and party loyalty in the legislature are limited. Pervasive factionalism within the UNE, weak mechanisms of harmonization, as well as the autonomy of local and regional caudillos, restrict possibilities for horizontal coordination. The UNE did construct an intertemporally loyal clientele of voters via a politicized cash-transfer program. But its ability to represent and develop organic linkages with society were limited by the stranglehold of party financiers, the absence of encompassing societal mobilizing structures, the abysmal disparity in relational power between the private sector and social sectors, and other factors.

The Paraguayan party system, centered on two 132-year-old parties seemingly poised to remain alive and well for years to come, constitutes an anomaly in Latin America. This chapter discusses the evolution of the Paraguayan traditional parties highlighting their changes and continuities in two different historical settings: the nondemocratic period, which includes a semi-competitive (1870–1940) and a dictatorial subperiod (1954–89) and the post-1989 democratic period. The findings point to three distinctive features of the Paraguayan party system: the ability of the traditional parties to plant deep roots into the country’s social structure facilitated by historic and institutional factors; the capacity of the parties to aggregate in a clientelist mode the interests of a population that lacks strong collective actors, made possible by a socioeconomic societal matrix; and the versatility with which parties have coordinated interests, both in semi-democratic as well as in democratic settings, which includes electoral mobilization but also civilian recruitment for armed uprisings. Finally, the chapter discusses possible future trends in light of the growing influence of illegal financing and recent changes to the rules governing elections mandating the system of “open lists.”

During the last thirty years, Mexico saw two successful left-of-center political parties, the Partido de la Revolución Democrática (Party of the Democratic Revolution, PRD) and Movimiento de Regeneración Nacional (National Regeneration Movement, MORENA). The PRD was launched in 1989 and grew throughout the 1990s, becoming the second or third largest political force in the country. In 1997, the party won Mexico City’s mayoral post, which it retained until 2018. MORENA was officially born in 2014, in the midst of an internal PRD crisis, and quickly achieved electoral success, winning the presidency in 2018. The PRD and MORENA satisfy the definition of political party presented in the introduction to this volume, that is, a political organization that establishes horizontal coordination mechanisms among its leaders and vertically aggregates social interests. Moreover, the analytical model proposed by Luna et al. provides useful guidelines for studying the evolution of parties of the Mexican Left. In particular, this chapter highlights the heuristic value of analyzing the impact of the interaction between horizontal coordination and vertical interest aggregation. The case of Mexico illustrates that taking into account how parties connect with their environment helps explain the stability (or instability) of the party.