¹ The 2000 presidential contest did not meet high standards of freedom or fairness.

² Comisión de la Verdad y Reconciliación, Informe final (Lima, 2003).

³ APRA was founded by Haya de la Torre in 1924, although the Peruvian Aprista Party (PAP) was founded only in 1930, two years after the Peruvian Socialist Party (which became the Communist Party in 1930). Two reformist parties, Acción Popular (AP) and the Partido Democrático Cristiano (Christian Democrat Party, PDC), emerged in the 1950s and 1960s. However, periods of open electoral competition proved fleeting.

⁴ Giovanni Sartori, Parties and Party Systems: Framework for Analysis (Oxford, 2005 [1976]), p. 31.

⁵ Ibid., p. 24.

⁶ Seymour Lipset and Stein Rokkam, Party Systems and Voter Alignments: Cross-National Perspectives (New York, 1967).

⁷ Kenneth Roberts, ‘Do Parties Matter? Lessons from the Fujimori Experience’, in Julio Carrión (ed.) The Fujimori Legacy: The Rise of Electoral Authoritarianism in Peru (University Park PA, 2006), pp. 81–101.

⁸ Ibid., p. 82.

⁹ On the significance of indigenous parties for deepening democracy in Latin America, see Madrid, Raúl, ‘Indigenous Parties and Democracy in Latin America’, Latin American Politics and Society, vol. 47, no. 5 (2005), pp. 161–79CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁰ Julio Cotler, Clases, Estado y nación en el Perú (Lima, 1978); Julio Cotler, La mecánica de la dominación interna (Lima, 1967).

¹¹ Cotler, Clases, Estado y nación, pp. 15–16.

¹² See, for example, James Payne, Labour and Politics in Peru: The System of Political Bargaining (New Haven and London, 1965). Payne details how political bargaining by unions reinforced authoritarian traditions in the decades prior to the 1960s.

¹³ Alfred Stepan, The State and Society: Peru in Comparative Perspective (Princeton NJ, 1978).

¹⁴ Martín Tanaka, ‘Las relaciones entre Estado y sociedad en el Perú: desestructuración sin reestructuración’ (unpublished paper prepared for UK Department for International Development, 2002).

¹⁵ Up to this point, the Chamber of Deputies had an important say in the distribution of government spending at the local level, affording representatives the ability to legitimise themselves by ensuring funds for specific local projects.

¹⁶ Regarding the impact of agrarian change on the emergence of Sendero Luminoso, see Linda Seligman, Between Reform and Revolution: Political Struggles in the Peruvian Andes, 1969–1991 (Stanford, 1995). For recollections of the agrarian reform and its consequences, many unintended, see Enrique Mayer, Ugly Stories of the Peruvian Agrarian Reform (Durham NC, 2009). Sendero emerged with particular force in those parts of the highlands where the institutional innovations created by the agrarian reform were absent.

¹⁷ Steve Stein, Populism in Peru: The Emergence of the Masses and the Politics of Social Control (Madison, 1980).

¹⁸ It is worth noting that both APRA and AP had a strong regional flavour to them. APRA grew up on the northern coast, an area which it has always considered to be its electoral stronghold. AP grew in the 1960s largely as a result of Belaúnde's attempts to appeal to opinion in the south of the country and in Amazonia.

¹⁹ Steve Stein and Carlos Monge, La crisis del Estado patrimonial en el Perú (Lima and Miami, 1988), pp. 217–32.

²⁰ See, for instance, Carlos Monge, ‘La práctica política aprista como respuesta a la crisis de los 80’, in Heraclio Bonilla and Paul Drake (eds.), El APRA: de la ideología a la praxis (Lima, 1989); and Carol Graham, Peru's APRA: Parties, Politics and the Elusive Quest for Democracy (Boulder, 1992). Also, on the García government more generally, see John Crabtree, Peru under García: An Opportunity Lost (Basingstoke, 1992).

²¹ See Kenneth Roberts, Deepening Democracy: The Modern Left in Chile and Peru (Stanford, 1998).

²² Eduardo Ballón, Movimiento social y democracia: la fundación de un nuevo orden (Lima, 1986).

²³ Romeo Grompone, El velero en el viento: política y sociedad en Lima (Lima, 1991).

²⁴ The main parties of the Right in the 1980s were AP, Belaunde's originally reformist party that had first ruled in the 1960s (1963–68), and the Partido Popular Cristiano (Popular Christian Party, PPC), a right-wing offshoot from Peru's original Christian Democrat Party (PDC). Discredited by their experience in government in the early 1980s, these two parties aligned themselves with Mario Vargas Llosa's Movimiento Libertad in the Frente Democrático (FREDEMO) coalition in the 1990 elections. AP's popularity was closely bound up with that of Belaúnde and has had difficulty surviving his death. The PPC is a more tightly organised party, with its support strongest in the business sector. However, business elites have traditionally tended to use channels other than political parties to influence government decisions, an important reason for the failure of strong right-wing parties to develop in Peru. On this, see Francisco Durand, Riqueza económica y pobreza política: reflexiones sobre las elites del poder en un país inestable (Lima, 2003).

²⁵ Maxwell Cameron, Democracy and Authoritarianism in Peru (Basingstoke, 1994).

²⁶ Maxwell Cameron, ‘Political and Economic Origins of Regime Change in Peru: The Eighteenth Brumaire of Alberto Fujimori’, in Maxwell Cameron and Philip Mauceri (eds.), The Peruvian Labyrinth: Polity, Society, Economy (University Park PA, 1997), pp. 37–69.

²⁷ In the short run, the counterinsurgency war in the Andes had a serious impact on the ability of peasant unions and left-wing parties to operate. In the longer run, the climate of fear and insecurity the war created helped to inculcate an aversion to parties and party politics and to generate support for ‘strong’ government. See, for example, Steve Stern (ed.) Shining and Other Paths: War and Society in Peru 1980–1995 (Durham NC and London, 1998), especially pp. 377–470. On Sendero itself there is a large literature, of which probably the best work is Carlos Iván Degregori, Sendero Luminoso: Los hondos y mortales desencuentros (Lima, 1985) and his Ayacucho: los raíces de una crisis (Lima, 1986).

²⁸ Carlos Iván Degregori and Romeo Grompone, Demonios y redentores en el nuevo Perú: una tragedia en dos vueltas (Lima, 1991). The successful candidacy of Ricardo Belmont, a TV personality, in the 1989 mayoral elections in Lima is often taken as evidence that parties were in decline before Fujimori appeared on the scene a year later.

²⁹ See, for example Schmidt, Gregory, ‘Fujimori's 1990 Upset Victory in Peru: Electoral Rules, Contingencies and Adaptive Strategies’, Comparative Politics, vol. 28, no. 3 (1996), pp. 321–54CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³⁰ Kenney, Charles, ‘The Death and Rebirth of a Party System, Peru 1978–2001’, Comparative Political Studies, vol. 36, no. 10 (2003), pp. 1210–39CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³¹ Martín Tanaka, Los espejismos de la democracia: el colapso del sistema de partidos en el Perú (Lima, 1998). In Bolivia, President Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada helped transform his party, the previously statist Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario (National Revolutionary Movement, MNR) into the engine of neoliberal transformation. In Argentina, Carlos Menem did much the same with the old Peronist party, and Carlos Salinas likewise with the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (Institutional Revolutionary Party, PRI) in Mexico. Fujimori, by contrast, a political outsider, eschewed Peru's traditional parties and bolstered his own legitimacy by vilifying them.

³² Laurence Whitehead has advanced the notion of democratic ‘viability’ as a more appropriate metaphor than consolidation in that it takes into account the possibility of democratic retreat as well as advance. See Laurence Whitehead, ‘The Viability of Democracy’, in John Crabtree and Laurence Whitehead (eds.) Towards Democratic Viability: The Bolivian Experience (Basingstoke, 2001), pp. 5–8.

³³ Catherine Conaghan, Fujimori's Peru: Deception in the Public Sphere (Pittsburgh, 2005).

³⁴ Crabtree, John, ‘The Collapse of Fujimorismo: Authoritarianism and its Limits’, Bulletin of Latin American Research, vol. 20, no. 3 (2001), pp. 287–303CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³⁵ See Roberts, Kenneth, ‘Neoliberalism and the Transformation of Populism in Latin America: the Peruvian case’, World Politics, vol. 48, no. 1 (1995), pp. 82–116CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³⁶ Weyland, Kurt, ‘Clarifying a Contested Concept: Populism in the Study of Latin American Politics’, Comparative Politics, vol. 34, no. 1 (2001), pp. 1–22CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³⁷ A comparison between the two cases is to be found in Ellner, Steve, ‘The Contrasting Variants of Hugo Chávez and Alberto Fujimori’, Journal of Latin American Studies, vol. 35, no. 1 (2003), pp. 139–62CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³⁸ See, for instance, Carlos Meléndez, ‘Partidos y sistema de partidos en el Perú’, in Rafael Roncagliolo and Carlos Meléndez (eds.), La política por dentro: cambios y continuidades en las organizaciones políticas de los países andinos (Lima, 2007), pp. 213–72.

³⁹ Fernando Tuesta, Representación política: las reglas también cuentan (Lima, 2005).

⁴⁰ Martín Tanaka, Democracia sin partidos. Perú 2000–2005 (Lima, 2005).

⁴¹ John Crabtree, Making Institutions Work in Peru: Democracy, Development and Inequality in Peru since 1980 (London, 2006).

⁴² Levitsky, Steven and Cameron, Maxwell, ‘Democracy without Parties? Political Parties and Regime Change in Fujimori's Peru’, Latin American Politics and Society, vol. 45, no. 3 (2003), pp. 1–33CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Taylor, Lewis, ‘Politicians without Parties and Parties without Politicians: The Foibles of the Peruvian Political Class’, Government and Opposition, vol. 40, no. 4 (2006), pp. 565–95CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴³ This literature overstated the importance of elections in defining democratic outcomes and understated the structural obstacles to democratisation. See Carothers, Thomas, ‘The End of the Transition Paradigm’, Journal of Democracy, vol. 13, no. 1 (2002), pp. 5–21CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴⁴ Juan Linz and Alfred Stepan, Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation (Baltimore MD, 1996).

⁴⁵ Scott Mainwaring and Timothy Scully (eds.), Building Democratic Institutions: Party Systems in Latin America (Stanford CA, 1995), p. 17.

⁴⁶ Diamond, Larry and Gunther, Richard, ‘Political Parties and Democracy’, Party Politics, vol. 9, no. 2, pp. 507–23Google Scholar.

⁴⁷ Latinobarómetro (Santiago), various years.

⁴⁸ United Nations Development Programme, Democracy in Latin America: Towards a Citizens' Democracy (New York, 2004).

⁴⁹ United Nations Development Programme, La democracia en el Perú: el mensaje de las cifras (Lima, 2006).

⁵⁰ The continued popularity of the Fujimori ‘brand name’ was made clear in the 2006 congressional elections, in which his daughter, Keiko, received far more votes than any other candidate. She seemed a likely option for the 2011 presidential elections.

⁵¹ With the process of economic liberalisation in the 1990s, the business community, through its various lobby organisations, increased its sway over state decision making. This continued after 2000 under Toledo and García, whose policies sought to build on the economic liberalism introduced by Fujimori. See Francisco Durand, Riqueza económica y pobreza política, and his La mano invisible en el Estado (Lima, 2005). Both the Catholic Church and the armed forces had become increasingly conservative by this time. The Catholic hierarchy was led by Juan Luis Cipriani, the Cardinal Archbishop of Lima and a member of Opus Dei. The armed forces, whose power recovered from the debacle at the end of the Fujimori period, became particularly resistant to attempts to make them judicially responsible for human rights crimes committed in the war against Sendero. The more conservative elements of the business sector, the Church and the armed forces further tightened their grip on policymaking under García after 2006.

⁵² While there were some cases of this happening, for instance in Limatambo (Cuzco), such cases were exceptional and subject to subsequent reverse.

⁵³ Cotler, Clases, Estado y nación, pp. 388–9.

⁵⁴ Julio Cotler, Política y sociedad en el Perú: continuidades y cambios (Lima, 1994).

⁵⁵ O'Donnell, Guillermo, ‘Delegative Democracy’, Journal of Democracy, vol. 5, no. 1 (1994), pp. 55–69CrossRefGoogle Scholar. O'Donnell addressed himself here to the first García government, but much the same could be said of the Fujimori administration.

⁵⁶ Herbert Kitschelt and Steven Wilkinson (eds.), Patrons, Clients and Politics: Patterns of Democratic Accountability and Political Competition (Cambridge, 2007).

⁵⁷ Paulo Drinot, ‘Nation-building, Racism and Inequality: Institutional Development in Peru in Historical Perspective’, in John Crabtree (ed.), Making Institutions Work in Peru, pp. 5–23.

⁵⁸ Beatriz Magaloni, Alberto Diaz-Cayeros and Federico Estévez, ‘Clientelism and Portfolio Diversification: A Model of Electoral Investment with Applications to Mexico’, in Kitschelt and Wilkinson (eds.), Patrons, Clients and Politics, pp. 182–205.

⁵⁹ Here is not the place to cite the large bibliography on Latin American populism, but it is worth mentioning Margaret Canovan, Populism (London, 1981); Michael Conniff, Populism in Latin America (Tuscaloosa, 1999); and Francisco Panizza (ed.), Populism and the Mirror of Democracy (London, 2005), especially pp. 1–31.

⁶⁰ Stein, Populism in Peru. On the right-wing Unión Revolucionaria, see Tirso Molinari Morales, El fascismo en el Perú (Lima, 2006).

⁶¹ For a more detailed account of the continuities in populist politics, see John Crabtree, ‘Neo-populism and the Fujimori Phenomenon’, in John Crabtree and Jim Thomas (eds.), Fujimori's Peru: the Political Economy (London, 1998), pp. 7–23.

⁶² Arguably, NGOs have come to perform some of the mediating functions between social movements and the state that would otherwise be the role of political parties. The range of NGOs that has emerged in Peru over the last 30 years is truly impressive, often articulating the interests of community groups, financing their activities and systematising their experience through studies and publications. Many of these NGOs adopt an overtly political stance and have become sources of employment for people who were previously involved in parties, particularly those of the Left.

⁶³ See Pegram, Thomas, ‘Accountability in Hostile Times: The Case of the Peruvian Human Rights Ombudsman’, Journal of Latin American Studies, vol. 40, no. 1 (2008), pp. 51–82CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁶⁴ I would go along with the definition offered by Charles Tilly, whose many writings on social movements draw together different theoretical approaches. Tilly identifies three crucial elements: (i) a sustained public effort making collective claims on target authorities; (ii) the use of a repertoire of forms of political action, including demonstrations, vigils, rallies, etc.; (iii) the involvement of people who are ‘worthy’, act in a unified way, are numerically relevant and display strong commitment. See Charles Tilly, Social Movements, 1768–2004 (Boulder CO, 2004). For a general discussion of the significance of social movements as a spearhead of change, see Alain Touraine, The Voice of the Eye (Cambridge, 1981).

⁶⁵ Joe Foweraker, Theorizing Social Movements (London, 1995).

⁶⁶ Roberts, Deepening Democracy. The degree to which the parties of the Left, mainly Leninist in inspiration and top-down in their praxis, managed to achieve real social insertion at this time is a topic that is worth revising more critically than was customary at the time.

⁶⁷ See, for instance, Margaret Keck, The Workers' Party and Democratization in Brazil (Ithaca NY, 1992).

⁶⁸ John Crabtree, Patterns of Protest: Politics and Social Movements in Bolivia (London, 2005).

⁶⁹ Ursula Durand, ‘El camino cocalero’, in Eduardo Toche (ed.), Perú hoy: nuevos rostros en la escena nacional (Lima, 2006), pp. 89–116.

⁷⁰ Anthony Bebbington (ed.), Minería, movimientos sociales y respuestas campesinas: una ecología política de transformaciones territoriales (Lima, 2007).

⁷¹ See Madrid, ‘Indigenous parties’. Also see Donna Lee Van Cott, From Movements to Parties in Latin America: The Evolution of Ethnic Politics (Cambridge, 2003); José Antonio Lucero and María Elena García, ‘In the Shadows of Success: Indigenous Politics in Peru and Ecuador’, in A. Kim Clark and Marc Becker (eds.), Highland Indians and the State in Modern Ecuador (Pittsburgh PA, 2007), pp. 234–49.

⁷² In particular that of 2006, in which Ollanta Humala's support was concentrated in the sierra and selva, whereas support for Alan García was concentrated mainly on the coast and in Lima. In 2001, support for Toledo was strongest in the sierra, whereas García similarly polled strongest on the coast.

⁷³ Lucian Pye, ‘Asian Values: From Dynamos to Dominos’, in Laurence Harrison and Samuel Huntington (eds.), Culture Matters: How Values Shape Human Progress (New York, 2000), p. 255.

⁷⁴ Eckstein, Harry, ‘A Culturalist Theory of Political Change’, American Political Science Review, vol. 82, no. 3 (1998), pp. 789–803CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁷⁵ In their book on political culture in the Andean world, Nils Jacobson and Cristóbal Aljovín de Losada put it thus: ‘We understand political culture as a malleable ensemble of symbols, values and norms that constitute the signification linking individuals to social, ethnic, religious, political and regional communities’. Nils Jacobson and Cristóbal Aljovín de Losada (eds.), Political Cultures in the Andes, 1750–1950 (Durham NC, 2005), p. 2.

⁷⁶ See, for instance, Diego Zavaleta, ‘Oversimplifying Identities: The Debate over What is Indigena and What is Mestizo’, in John Crabtree and Laurence Whitehead (eds.), Unresolved Tensions: Bolivia Past and Present (Pittsburgh PA, 2008), pp. 51–60.

⁷⁷ This is the case of Confederación Nacional de Comunidades del Perú Afectadas por la Minería (National Confederation of Peruvian Mining Communities CONACAMI), whose objectives are expressed in terms of ethnic demands that draw on the Bolivian and Ecuadorean experiences. See www.conacami.org.

⁷⁸ Julio F. Carrión and Patricia Zarate, Cultura política de la democracia en el Perú, 2008 (Lima, 2009). This volume forms part of the Americas Barometer (LAPOP), edited by Mitchell A. Seligson.

⁷⁹ Taylor, ‘Politicians without Parties’.

⁸⁰ Due largely to the protagonism of its presidential candidate, APRA polled 24 per cent in the first round of the 2006 presidential elections. However, in his second government, García gave scant priority to the institutional development of his party. APRA's lack of a solid regional organisation was made clear in the subsequent regional elections in November 2006, in which the party won only two regional presidencies. Due partly to the selection of an unpopular candidate, the party even failed to win the mayoralty of Trujillo on that occasion. Haya de la Torre surely would have turned in his grave.

⁸¹ Typical are figures like Luis Castañeda Lossio, the mayor of Lima; ex-president Toledo; and Keiko Fujimori (Alberto Fujimori's daughter). All are likely to contest the next presidential elections in 2011.

⁸² See Carlos Monge, ‘Decentralisation: An Opportunity for Democratic Governance’, in John Crabtree (ed.), Making Institutions Work in Peru, pp. 45–65.

⁸³ The experiences of some regions, such as Lambayeque in the north and Arequipa in the south, have proved quite successful. However, the degree of social participation in local government has been limited and the spaces for dialogue between regional and local government have proved disappointing. See Bruno Revesz, ‘Descentralización, la reforma inconclusa’, Perú Hoy, July 2009, pp. 35–50.

⁸⁴ A welcome, albeit incipient, move in this direction is Julio Cotler (ed.), Poder y cambio en las regiones (Lima, 2009). This document, sponsored by the UNDP, looks at politics and patterns of social change in four regions: Piura, La Libertad, Arequipa and Puno.