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Modeling New Party Performance: A Conceptual and Methodological Approach for Volatile Party Systems

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2017

Thomas J. Mustillo
Thomas J. Mustillo*
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, 503A Cavanaugh Hall, 425 University Boulevard, Indianapolis, IN 46202-5140
*
e-mail: [email protected] (corresponding author)
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Abstract

This study of new political parties in the Third Wave democracies of Bolivia, Chile, Ecuador, and Venezuela conceptualizes the early life of a party as a developmental phase. The analysis uses latent trajectory modeling to identify five qualitatively distinctive performance profiles, which the author calls “explosive,” “contender,” “flash,” “flat,” and “flop” trajectories. This finding challenges the conventional approaches used in the study of new party performance, where scholars classify parties using subjective criteria, often into the successful/failed dichotomy. In unstable party systems, where we expect greater diversity in the performance profiles of new parties, latent trajectory modeling is preferred because it yields a result more consistent with extant theorizing on new parties. In stable systems, as in the case of Chile, the approaches can yield similar results. Nevertheless, the case of Venezuela (1958–88) demonstrates that even in stable party systems, the modeling approach used here can identify important variation that alternatives might miss.

Type
Research Article
Information
Political Analysis , Volume 17 , Issue 3 , Summer 2009 , pp. 311 - 332
Copyright
Copyright © The Author 2009. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for Political Methodology 

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Footnotes

Authors' note: I thank Jonathan Hartlyn, Marco Steenbergen, Raúl Madrid, Simón Pachano, Carlos de la Torre, Sarah Mustillo, and three anonymous reviewers at Political Analysis for comments.

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