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.