Networked Failures: Explaining Party-Building Strategies and Outcomes in Peru

• In Event: Party Networks, Indigenous Politics, and Civil Society in Latin America

Abstract

The collapse of Peru’s party system in 1990 generated a representational vacuum that has proved impossible to fill for the past three decades. This paper examines how organizational network structures—the configurations of organizational nodes and the ties that bind them—have conditioned party-building strategies and outcomes in Peru. It argues that three organizational network properties—rootedness, reach, and resilience—have constrained nascent parties’ mobilization and linkage party-building strategies and driven countless political projects to collapse. The paper examines comparable indigenous party-building experiences in two of the historical epicenters of indigenous social organizational activity in Peru: Puno and Cusco. Using a mixed-methods approach that combines process tracing and qualitative network analysis to analyze original interview and archival data, the paper demonstrates, first, that the ongoing party-building failures in Peru occur despite the salience of ethnic identities, the presence of leaders with significant organizational experience, and the availability of organizational bases for establishing a political project. Second, I show that party-building efforts have varied significantly in their expansion strategies and that this variation is driven by differences in organizational networks’ rootedness and reach. These structural properties have driven nascent parties to adopt different combinations of mobilization (mass-centric vs leader-centric) and linkage (programmatic vs clientelistic) strategies to expand through their networks. Third, I show that recurring party-building failures result from the limited resilience of the organizational networks within which parties emerge; too much competition from similar political projects in a context of organizational network structures lacking resilience, has continuously undermined party-building efforts in Peru. The paper contributes to emerging scholarship on social networks and party building. Its findings shed light on the precise mechanisms through which organizational network structures condition party-building outcomes.

Author

• Mariana Giusti-Rodriguez, Naval Postgraduate School