Patronage is present in the Asian countries examined in this collection. Several factors influence the extent and type of patronage. More institutionalised or stable party systems may be more effective in organising patronage on a partisan basis. If social structure is a strong influencing factor on patronage, then one would expect to see country studies identifying loyalty to clan, tribe or ethnic group. In fact, few countries claimed social structure as the dominant mode of patronage. We anticipated that political regime types were important in explaining patronage. The evidence across Asian countries is somewhat nuanced. Appointees in highly developed countries are more likely to be chosen for their public policy expertise than political loyalty. The evidence of the link between path dependency and political patronage is mixed. These studies of patronage in a range of Asian countries demonstrate both similarities and differences in how these appointments are used within governments. Although some countries attempt to disguise the existence of patronage, it does exist in some form. Despite its ubiquity, patronage manifests itself in different forms, and to differing degrees.

This chapter turns to the comparison of cases. By analyzing the discontented cases, a clear pattern emerges. The positive cases share few characteristics save one: democratic discontent that arose when sharp economic contractions intensified the imperfections and contradictions of the political status quo. This argument is made using paired comparisons of the positive and negative cases (Canada with the USA/UK, Portugal with Spain, Uruguay with Brazil/Chile) to evaluate competing explanations. The second section of the chapter analyzes how discontent was avoided during the Great Recession by looking for shared features of the three negative cases. It finds that escaping the initial pain of a crisis was not a necessary condition for avoiding discontent. Instead, the key to maintaining democratic legitimacy lay in the political response to the crises, and in the adaptability and health of left-wing parties. In all three negative cases, center-left parties recognized crises as indictments of neoliberalism, rejected its calls for austerity. By responding to popular demands for help in difficult times, these parties deprived cultural conflicts of the oxygen needed for them to rage and avoided major upsurges of discontent.

This chapter analyzes the complex interplay of economic and cultural issues that provoked discontented movements on both the left and right in Spain. Initially, resentment over EU-backed austerity policies allowed the left-populist Podemos party to break into Spain’s party system. But the rise of a populist left that embraced multiculturalism, exacerbated by continuing economic struggles, provoked a powerful reaction on the other side of the aisle when Catalonia attempted to declare independence. This threat to national unity led to the reemergence of right-wing nationalism in the form of a new radical right political party, VOX. Using original data collected as part of the Political Systems Attitudes Study, the chapter shows that support for VOX was driven primarily by cultural discontent, but as argued throughout the book, cultural discontent itself was driven by the ongoing economic crisis.

Chapter 6 considers the transformation of competition in the political sphere and the functions of the state. While prefigured in British politics of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, like the modern company the modern political party and party systems first emerged in the young US, largely in the same period. Despite early condemnation of parties and factions by political leaders (Washington, Adams, Jefferson), within a few decades the modern party system had taken shape, emerging out of more rough-and-tumble, quasi-militarised factionalism, before spreading to Europe as democracy supplanted aristocracy across the nineteenth century. The chapter also briefly examines the rise of adversarial law, and the replacement of patronage by competitive examinations for government appointment, as two further examples of the state’s institutionalisation of conflict through formalised competition.

Why are religious minorities well represented and politically influential in some democracies but not others? Focusing on evangelical Christians in Latin America, I argue that religious minorities seek and gain electoral representation when (a) they face significant threats to their material interests and worldview and (b) their community is not internally divided by cross-cutting cleavages. Differences in Latin American evangelicals’ political ambitions emerged as a result of two critical junctures: episodes of secular reform in the early twentieth century and the rise of sexuality politics at the turn of the twenty-first century. In Brazil, significant threats at both junctures prompted extensive electoral mobilization; in Chile, minimal threats meant that mobilization lagged. In Peru, where major cleavages divide both evangelicals and broader society, threats prompt less electoral mobilization than otherwise expected. The multi-method argument leverages interviews, content analysis, survey experiments, ecological analysis, and secondary case studies of Colombia, Costa Rica, and Guatemala.

Parties have emerged as a central concern of comparative constitutional law, and for good reason. Parties should be at the forefront of descriptive analyses of how constitutions function. In practice, for instance, the separation of powers depends heavily on the shape of the party system, as do many other aspects of constitutional performance.1 Moreover, breakdowns of party systems have been a significant factor in explaining recent episodes of democratic erosion or breakdown.2 In other words, crises of liberal democratic constitutionalism are often caused by crises in party systems.

But what is more challenging is developing a normative theory linking constitutions and parties. In other words, to what extent can constitutions (or comparative constitutional law) prevent or fix breakdowns in party systems? On that question, this chapter offers some skepticism, or at least outlines a series of challenges.

Section 17.2 develops a brief map of the different ways in which party systems break down.

In this chapter we review some of the prominent arguments regarding the relationship between political institutions and democracy. In keeping with the theme of this volume we use data from the Varieties of Democracy Project to (re)evaluate these arguments. Specifically, we focus on two primary outcomes of interest – the durability of the democracy/likelihood of breakdown, and the quality or level of democracy. We review the theoretical reasoning connecting state capacity, executive regime type, and the party system to democratic outcomes.We re-evaluate the strength of these theories based on data from V-Dem. We find strong support for the role of state capacity, but mixed or no support for executive regime type or party system variables. Finally, we conclude by discussing the important role of electoral experience in many of our models.

Chapter 7 focuses on political parties as agents of representation that channel citizen interests and values into the policy-making process in contemporary Latin America. It illustrates the flaws of democracy without representative parties through a discussion of Peru, and shows that many Latin American democracies have experienced crises of representation because citizens see many party leaders as cut off from common citizens. To explain the state of parties, it argues that crises of representation persist when neoliberalism is treated as inevitable. It also maintains, through an analysis of parties in Bolivia, Brazil, and Uruguay, that parties become agents of representation due to the work of skillful political leaders, committed activists, and vigorous social movements. It also highlights that a weak state undermines party building because it limits the possibility that elected officials can deliver public goods and engender popular support. It concludes that, although democracy has become the norm in Latin America, few democracies have parties that act as agents of representation, and that this lack of a deep, substantive sense of representation is a key problem of democracy.

Latin America’s recent inclusionary turn centers on changing relationships between the popular sectors and the state. Yet the new inclusion unfolds in a region in which most states are weak and prone to severe pathologies, such as corruption, inefficiency, and particularism. The first part of the chapter outlines an argument, developed at more length elsewhere, regarding how “state crises” helped drive the consolidation of three distinct party system trajectories among the eight South American countries where the Left would eventually win power. The second part of the chapter argues that these trajectories differed in three ways that likely conditioned how the concomitant inclusionary Left turn unfolded in each case: the institutionalization of left-wing parties, the occurrence of state transformation via constitutional reform, and the level of state capacity. The discussion helps highlight the central role of the state and its pathologies in both driving alternative paths of political development and in conditioning the politics of inclusion. By putting the emphasis on the state and its pathologies, we can better consider not just the sources of sociopolitical exclusion but also the limits of sociopolitical inclusion.

This chapter links the political consequences of the Great Recession on protest and electoral politics. The economic voting literature offers important insights on how and under what conditions economic crises play out in the short run. However, it tends to ignore the closely connected dynamics of opposition in the electoral and protest arena. Therefore, this chapter combines the literature on economic voting with social movement research. It argues that economic protests act as a ‘signalling mechanism’ by attributing blame to decision-makers and by highlighting the political dimension of deteriorating economic conditions. Ultimately, massive protest mobilization should thus amplify the impact of economic hardship on electoral punishment. The empirical analysis to study this relationship combines the data on protest with a dataset of electoral outcomes in thirty European countries from 2000 to 2015. The results indicate that the dynamics of economic protests and electoral punishment are closely related and that protests contributed to the destabilisation of European party systems during the Great Recession.

Chapter 2 begins by describing how prewar partisan politics and violence led to mass partisan warfare. Next, I detail the theoretical foundations of mass partisanship under duress, drawing on research from political science and psychology. Lastly, I show the persistence of partisan voting patterns across party systems in the North – surprisingly stable electoral coalitions despite changes in name and issue emphasis. That continuity provides a solid basis for predicting strong partisanship in individual identities, leaders, and communities during the war.