Seawright - Party-system collapse: the roots of crisis in Peru and Venezuela

PARTY-SYSTEM COLLAPSE

The Roots of Crisis in Peru and Venezuela

Jason Seawright

Stanford University Press

Stanford, California

Stanford University Press

Stanford, California

2012 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University.

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press.

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Seawright, Jason, author.

Party-system collapse : the roots of crisis in Peru and Venezuela / Jason Seawright.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8047-8236-4 (cloth : alk. paper)

ISBN 978-0-8047-8392-7 (e-book)

1. Political partiesPeru. 2. Political partiesVenezuela. 3. VotingPeru. 4. VotingVenezuela. 5. ElectionsPeru. 6. ElectionsVenezuela. 7. PeruPolitics and government1980- 8. VenezuelaPolitics and government19741999. I. Title.

JL3498.A1S43 2012

324.285dc23

2012016317

Typeset by Bruce Lundquist in 10.5/15 Adobe Garamond

CONTENTS

FIGURES AND TABLES

FIGURES

TABLES

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book is the product of many years research, and my efforts have been assisted in various ways by more people than I can count. Even so, let me here thank a number of people and organizations whose support has been invaluable.

This project would have been impossible without the love and support of my family: Taryn Nelson-Seawright, Artemis, and Athena. Through fieldwork trips, statistical analysis, and countless revisions of drafts, you have been patient and supportive. I think it is fair to say that I could not have done this without you.

Likewise, this book has been fundamentally shapedas has my intellectual development as a wholeby Henry E. Brady, David Collier, Ruth Berins Collier, and David Freedman. All four have always been generous with their time, challenging with their feedback, and supportive beyond the call of duty.

My work on this project in Venezuela, Peru, and Argentina was furthered significantly by help and support from a range of institutions. In particular, Adolfo Vargas and the Political Science Department at the Universidad Simn Bolvar in Venezuela provided suggestions, contacts, and access to survey data. The Social Science Department at the Universidad del Pacfico likewise provided contacts and an institutional home in Peru. The Political Science Department at the Universidad Torcuato di Tella in Argentina provided similar services and offered valuable feedback on an initial presentation of key arguments made in this volume. The associations Alternativa, Arariwa, and Transparencia in Peru provided essential help in carrying out survey and experimental research in that country.

Invaluable contributions to the success of the fieldwork for this project, as well as in the overall intellectual framing of the book, were made by numerous people including Julio Cotler, Steve Ellner, Sebastian Etchemendy, Miriam Kornblith, Gustavo Mata, Martin Tanaka, Javier Tantalean Arbulu, Alfredo Torres Uribe, Adolfo Vargas, and my teams of interviewers in Argentina, Peru, and Venezuela.

I was fortunate to receive feedback on this project at various stages from a wide range of brilliant scholars, established and emerging. Thanks go, in particular, to Taylor Boas, Jennifer Cyr, Pradeep Chhibber, Michael Coppedge, Henry Dietz, Thad Dunning, Zach Elkins, Sebastian Etchemendy, Natalia Ferretti, Daniel Galvin, Edward Gibson, Kenneth F. Greene, Kirk A. Hawkins, Maiah Jaskowski, Diana Kapiszewski, Terry Lynn Karl, Herbert Kitschelt, Loan Le, Steven Levitsky, James Mahoney, Scott Mainwaring, Matthew Marostica, Sebastian Mazzuca, Jana Morgan, Scott Morgenstern, David Myers, James Robinson, Ben Ross Schneider, Kathleen Thelen, participants in the 2004 Workshop on the Analysis of Political Cleavages and Party Competition at Duke University, the 2005 writing workshop in the Political Science Department at the University of California, Berkeley, my fellow students in the 2006 Latin American politics graduate research seminar at the University of California, Berkeley, participants in the 2007 Midwest Regional Workshops on Latin America at the Kellogg Institute for International Studies at Notre Dame, students in the 2009 seminar on comparative political parties at the University of Texas at Austin, participants in the 2010 Political Psychology Workshop at the University of Chicago, participants in the Conference on New Methodologies and Their Applications in Comparative Politics and International Relations, at Princeton University in 2010, students and faculty members in the Department of Political Science at Loyola University, participants in the 2011 Political Parties Working Group at Northwestern University, and discussants and audience members at various conference panel sessions.

This material is based on work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 0418459, as well as a Graduate Research Fellowship. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. This research was also supported by an International Dissertation Research Fellowship from the Social Science Research Council, a Research Grant from the University Research Grants Committee at Northwestern University, as well as funding from the University of California, Berkeley.

My apologies to those I may have inadvertently omitted in this section; I appreciate your contributions, even so. As always, any mistakes are my own.

ONLINE APPENDIX

An online appendix to this volume can be accessed at www.sup.org/partysystemcollapse.

The appendix contains additional methodological discussion, supplementary figures, and supporting statistical results related to the arguments of .

C HAPTER 1

PARTY-SYSTEM COLLAPSE IN SOUTH AMERICA

Before the 1990s, Venezuelas two-party system was among the most stable and well-institutionalized party systems in the developing world (Coppedge 1994: 17477). One of the two traditional parties won every fully democratic presidential election in the countrys history. From the early 1970s through 1988, these traditional parties, in effect, faced no challengers, winning a combined share of at least 85 percent of the presidential vote in 1973, 1978, 1983, and 1988. Over this period, the traditional parties also dominated the legislature.

In 1993, however, these established electoral patterns began to change rapidly. Both traditional parties lost roughly half of the support they had enjoyed in the previous presidential elections, andfor the first time in Venezuelan democratic historythe winner of the election was not endorsed by either of the established parties.

What began as traditional-party decline in 1993 culminated, in the 1998 presidential elections, in a party-system collapse (Dietz and Myers 2007; Morgan 2007). Neither of the two traditional parties was able to get any traction for its selected candidate. One party endorsed a candidate from outside the party system early in the campaign cycle; the other waited until days before the election to throw its support to that same outsider candidate. Thus the election became a contest between two candidates from outside the established party system. Both traditional parties have been electorally marginalized since that election.

The same election that saw the collapse of the Venezuelan traditional parties also elevated Hugo Chvez to the presidency. Subsequently, Chvez has departed dramatically from the moderate, pro-U.S. politics that were previously traditional in Venezuela, striking out instead in the direction of a bold, confrontational populist leftism (Hawkins 2011)an approach that regularly reaches provocative symbolic heights, memorably including the moment when Chvez used a United Nations speech (on September 20, 2006) to characterize U.S. President George W. Bush as the devil (Lapper 2007: 1920); more substantive moments of provocation include Chvezs repeated statements that he intended to construct 21st-century Socialism and remake his country as a Socialist Republic of Venezuela. In a country that had once been a leading U.S. ally in Latin America and a model of moderate democracy, the degree of political change represented by these events is breathtaking.