Party system change during the transition from ISI to neoliberalism cannot be understood merely by analyzing political alignments and events during the critical juncture itself. Neither can it be understood by examining national cases in isolation from others. A comparative perspective suggests that different countries entered the transition period with distinct antecedent conditions that shaped their respective critical junctures. As such, the causal chains that produced the divergent political outcomes of neoliberal critical junctures can be traced back to development patterns during the ISI era – that is, to the institutional legacies of the earlier, labor – incorporating critical junctures that ushered in the era of mass politics in Latin America.

This chapter and the next explore the party system effects of these two critical junctures. They trace the development of elitist and labor-mobilizing (LM) party systems following the first critical juncture, locate them within their different political economies, and explain why the LM cases were susceptible to more severe political and economic crises during the transition to market liberalism. These two critical junctures demarcate three distinct eras of socioeconomic and political development in Latin America, each of which possessed an alignment of states, markets, and societal actors that shaped national party systems. The first of these alignments, the oligarchic order, was characterized by elite political domination, commodity-export development models, and exclusive, oligarchic party systems. This order prevailed from independence in the early 19th century until the early decades of the 20th century, when industrialization, labor mobilization, and eventually the Great Depression undermined oligarchic rule and launched a new era of mass politics. This critical juncture led to the emergence of what Cavarozzi (1994) calls the state-centric matrix, which was characterized by state-led industrialization, corporatist patterns of interest intermediation, and the formation – in part of the region – of mass parties with programmatic linkages to organized labor.

The process of market globalization – understood as the transnational integration of markets for goods, services, and capital – is inevitably shaped by the particularities of world regions (Katzenstein 2005; Stallings 1995), including their distinctive patterns of political development and their modes of insertion in the global economy. The realignment of states, markets, and social actors associated with globalization and market liberalization in late 20th-century Latin America occurred in a context of redemocratization that inevitably imposed major adjustment burdens on political parties. Although democratization restored parties to political prominence after extended periods of military rule, the “dual transitions” to democracy and economic liberalism were deeply unsettling to party systems in much of the region.

The economic crises of the early 1980s undermined military governments and helped trigger democratic transitions (see Remmer 1992–1993), but they also imposed political costs on incumbent parties after democracy had been installed. Although the ensuing process of market liberalization may have contributed to the stabilization of new democratic regimes by defeating hyperinflation and forging a technocratic consensus in key areas of public policy, it also eroded many of the social and programmatic linkages that bound parties to popular constituencies. Indeed, market liberalization inevitably clashed with modes of political representation that had been forged during a half-century of state-led capitalist development.

As shown in Chapter 5, antecedent structural and institutional conditions weighed heavily on the political dynamics of neoliberal critical junctures. The transition from ISI to market liberalism was associated with more severe economic crises, greater electoral volatility, and deeper electoral realignments in countries that developed LM party systems during the ISI era. If political outcomes were fully determined by antecedent conditions, however, there would be no reason to characterize the transition to neoliberalism as a critical juncture; political change would merely reflect the unfolding of earlier, path-dependent development trajectories beset by exogenous shocks. For this transition to constitute a critical juncture, political outcomes and their institutional legacies must also be conditioned by the competitive alignments and strategic choices of political actors who ultimately decide on policy and/or institutional change.

During neoliberal critical junctures, the most important strategic choice was the adoption of structural adjustment policies in response to the exhaustion of the ISI model and the exogenous shock of the debt crisis. Although every country in the region adopted market reforms, the political consequences of such reforms varied widely depending on the political orientation and partisan alignment of supporters and opponents of the reform process. These alignments enhanced the programmatic structuring of some party systems – in both elitist and LM cases – contributing to relatively stable forms of post-adjustment partisan competition. In others, however – a majority of cases – they undermined or failed to produce programmatic structuration, destabilizing party systems in the aftermath period. Indeed, reactive sequences in the aftermath period – driven largely by societal resistance to market liberalism – sometimes altered the institutional outcomes of the critical juncture itself; party systems that were relatively stable during the critical juncture encountered new disruptive forces in the aftermath period, while in a few cases inchoate and volatile party systems progressively consolidated.

Preface and Acknowledgments

This book began as a relatively straightforward attempt to understand why some party systems are more stable than others in Latin America, but it quickly evolved into a larger and more ambitious effort to identify the impact of economic crises and market reforms on democratic representation. Ultimately, it sought to explain how and why a transition from one economic era to another was also a major turning point in Latin America’s political development. I began, perhaps naively, to conceive of that economic transition as a critical juncture in political development long before I was able to identify the full range of its institutional effects, much less its longer-term political legacies. To put it in Gramsci’s more eloquent terms from the epigraph, I began this project in a moment of crisis in Latin America, an interregnum “when the old was dying and the new could not be born,” and a great variety of “morbid” (and often fleeting) symptoms appeared. Enough time has now passed for me to hazard a claim that new political orders were born during this watershed period, even if some of them veered off in unexpected directions or remain institutionally fluid (as the reader will quickly discover). The purpose of this book is to trace where these new orders came from, explain why some are more stable than others, and identify what makes them different, both from each other and from the political orders that preceded them.

Any research project this long in the making is bound to incur debts to individuals and institutions that are too numerous to mention. That is surely the case with this book. Although I cannot acknowledge everyone who deserves to be thanked, I want to at least recognize a number of individuals who made especially vital contributions. From the outset of this project, Ruth Berins Collier and David Collier provided intellectual inspiration and constructive feedback. They have been remarkably generous in supporting my efforts to build upon the intellectual foundation they laid in their study of earlier critical junctures in Latin America. I also learned a great deal from intensive workshops centered on earlier drafts of my book that were organized by Erik Wibbels and Margaret Levi at the University of Washington, Jorge Lanzaro at the Universidad de la República in Uruguay, and Juan Pablo Luna at the Universidad Católica in Chile.