Trial by Fire: Surviving the Loss of a Foundational Party Leader

• In Event: Political Incorporation: Conceptualization, Measurement, and Implications

Abstract

Parties are essential for democracy, and democracy is a system in which parties lose elections. Yet, it is surprising how little political science scholarship studies what happens to parties when they actually lose elections or experience some other major setback. In this paper, we examine the internal processes that parties must undergo when they suffer a very particular type of loss: the sudden and unexpected departure of the party leader. Parties in Latin America rely to a large extent on the actions of their leaders. No single person remains party leader into perpetuity, and so this is the kind of loss that all parties face.

However, some departures are unexpected and even traumatic for the party. Evo Morales’ sudden departure from office and self-exile in Argentina represents one of these. The leader of a movement-based party, the Movimiento al Socialismo, Morales’ unexpected departure provoked a crisis of leadership that reverberated all the way to the party’s bases. In this paper we proffer a theory of how parties like the MAS may withstand the loss of their foundational leader. We find that the bottom-up origins of the MAS limited the paths available to secondary party leaders who had to re-organize the party without (at least in the short-term) their foundational leader. Specifically, we show that it was necessary for the MAS to lean in to the bottom-up nature of the party, incorporating channels from below that allowed for internal channels for disputing power that began at the party’s bases. We use the negative case of PT (Brazil) to help sustain the argument.

Authors

• Jennifer Cyr, Universidad Torcuato Di Tella

• Santiago Anria, Cornell University

• Gabriel Vommaro, National University of San Martín/CONICET