'Break-In Parties' and Changing Patterns of Democracy in Latin America

Although Lijphart's typology of consensus and majoritarian democracy can be regarded as the most widely used tool to classify democratic regimes, it has been rarely applied to Latin America so far. We try to fill this gap by adapting Lijphart's typological framework to the Latin American context in the following way. In contrast to previous studies, we treat the type of democracy as an independent variable and include informal factors such as clientelism or informal employment in our assessment of democratic patterns. On this basis, we aim to answer the following questions. First, how did the patterns of democracy evolve in Latin America over the two decades between 1990 and 2010 and what kind of differences can be observed in the region? Second, what are the institutional determinants of the observed changes? We focus on the emergence of new parties because of their strong impact on the first dimension of Lijphart's typology. From our observations we draw the following tentative conclusions: If strong new parties established themselves in the party system but failed to gain the presidency, they pushed the system towards consensualism. Conversely, new parties that gained the presidency produced more majoritarian traits.

尽管李普哈特（Lijphart）提出的共识民主与多数民主类型学可被视为应用最广泛的民主政体分类工具，但迄今为止该框架极少被应用于拉丁美洲地区。本研究旨在填补这一研究空白，具体方式是将李普哈特的类型学框架适配至拉美语境，具体调整如下：与既往研究不同，本研究将民主类型视为自变量，并在民主模式评估中纳入庇护主义（clientelism）与非正规就业等非正式因素。基于此，本研究旨在解答以下两个问题：其一，1990年至2010年这二十年间，拉美地区的民主模式经历了怎样的演变，区域内又存在哪些差异？其二，观测到的民主模式变化的制度性决定因素是什么？鉴于新政党对李普哈特类型学的首个维度具有显著影响，本研究重点关注新政党的兴起。基于观测结果，本研究得出如下尝试性结论：若强势新政党在政党体系中站稳脚跟却未能赢得总统职位，其将推动该体系向共识民主模式倾斜；反之，若新政党成功赢得总统职位，则会催生更多多数民主特征。