{"title":"What is to be Done? How Radical Leftists Help to Solve the Problem of Personalist Party-Building in Latin America","authors":"F. Resmini, J. Abbott","doi":"10.1177/00104140231194907","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"Political leaders around the world increasingly rely on personalist parties to win elections and govern. While existing scholarship assumes that personalist parties do not build territorial organization, in fact they vary substantially in terms of organizational strength. In this paper, we move beyond existing structural explanations of party-building and focus on the role of party elites’ preferences to explain the source of this variation. Through a mixed-method approach combining process-tracing of the case studies of Venezuela’s MVR/PSUV and Ecuador’s Alianza PAIS and statistical analysis of Latin American parties, we find that party elites’ past political experiences shape whether personalist parties successfully invest in party organization. Party officials who were socialized in radical-left parties are more likely to advocate for party-building and their presence within party cadres is associated with stronger party organization.","PeriodicalId":10600,"journal":{"name":"Comparative Political Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":4.2000,"publicationDate":"2023-08-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Comparative Political Studies","FirstCategoryId":"90","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00104140231194907","RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q1","JCRName":"POLITICAL SCIENCE","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
Political leaders around the world increasingly rely on personalist parties to win elections and govern. While existing scholarship assumes that personalist parties do not build territorial organization, in fact they vary substantially in terms of organizational strength. In this paper, we move beyond existing structural explanations of party-building and focus on the role of party elites’ preferences to explain the source of this variation. Through a mixed-method approach combining process-tracing of the case studies of Venezuela’s MVR/PSUV and Ecuador’s Alianza PAIS and statistical analysis of Latin American parties, we find that party elites’ past political experiences shape whether personalist parties successfully invest in party organization. Party officials who were socialized in radical-left parties are more likely to advocate for party-building and their presence within party cadres is associated with stronger party organization.
期刊介绍:
Comparative Political Studies is a journal of social and political science which publishes scholarly work on comparative politics at both the cross-national and intra-national levels. We are particularly interested in articles which have an innovative theoretical argument and are based on sound and original empirical research. We also encourage submissions about comparative methodology, particularly when methodological arguments are closely linked with substantive issues in the field.