Where do national profiles of programmatic party system structuration come from? What are their correlates and consequences and what are their potential implications for the future of democracy in the region, particularly given that we can see a decade beyond our point of observation in the late 1990s and consider intervening developments? Part II is devoted to these causal questions, whereas the conclusion takes up more speculative themes concerning the subsequent development of Latin American politics after the turn of the millennium. Chapters 6 and 7 deal with the long-term and short-term developments that might have influenced economic PPS, the most powerful issue dimension in Latin American party systems insofar as they have any programmatic structuration. In Chapter 8, we take up religion and regime as further programmatic dimensions that make a difference in some of our countries.

Long-term causal mechanisms turn out to be decisive in accounting for the rise and tenacity of economic and religious programmatic alignments, whereas regime divides are driven by recent episodes of authoritarianism or manifest performance failures of current democracy. Nevertheless, exceptionally sharp and prolonged economic decline since the 1980s also erodes established economic PPS, at least within the subgroup of countries with favorable long-term conditions for economic PPS. Our analysis, however, suggests that neither good nor bad performance builds up economic PPS in countries with inauspicious long-term dispositions to programmatic party competition.