Competing for Parties, Organizations and Candidate

• In Event: Voter Preferences in Multiparty Systems

Abstract

In the context of weak party systems, social organizations and political parties face a coordination problem: the establishment of an alliance would benefit them both, by providing voters to the party and resources to the organization; however, parties are tempted to renege from the alliance once in office as incentives while governing are different than electoral incentives. If parties cannot credibly commit to abide by their agreement with social organizations once they reach office, social organizations are hesitant to enter into alliances with any particular political party.

Strong party systems are marked by an enduring solution to this coordination problem either through long-term alliances between organizations and parties such as the Partido Socialista de Chile (PS) in Chile with labour unions or by social organizations building their own political parties such as Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS) in Bolivia. However, in Peru, where parties are weak, short-sighted and have shifting political goals from election to election, social organizations are unsure about the alignment of their own ideological and programmatic goals with those of political parties but lack the strength to form their own political parties.

Individual candidates serve as brokers between social and political organizations. Individuals who are motivated to achieve political office compete for the endorsement of parties, using different strategies that signal their capacity to mobilize voters and establish alliances with social organizations. In turn, a party's choice of candidate signals to the social organization their level of commitment. Candidates' strategies to mobilize voters, then, become crucial to solving the coordination problem because they provide information to both parties and social organizations.

In this paper, I apply my theoretical framework of voter mobilization in the absence of strong parties to explain the failure of party institutionalization in Peru in comparison with the Bolivian case, where an alliance between social organizations and political forces led to the rise of the Bolivian Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS). I use a mixed method design that combines in-depth interviews, archival work, and statistical analysis of archival data on social organization endorsement and candidate selection processes over the last two general elections in both countries.

My research has important implications for our understanding of the enduring weakness of political parties, and the conditions under which political agents can promote stable but geographically limited alliances between organizations and parties. Existing research on weakly institutionalized parties has overly focused on candidates' decisions to form transitory electoral coalitions, highlighting the high costs associated with party building. If this argument is true, we would expect that electoral alliances form and reform from election to election, without any stability. This is not the case. In Peru, an example of party system collapse, we still observe processes of stable electoral alliances at the sub-national level. My theoretical framework provides an explanation for this dynamic, and points to the limitations of reproducing these stable alliances at the national level.

Author

• Veronica Hurtado Lozada, Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez