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"More often than not, contemporary works on political parties start by referring to Schattschneider's now famous dictum concerning democracy's need for political parties. At the same time, many authors have identified parties that, in democratic contexts, fail in various ways to fulfill the function of democratic representation. Mainstream political science has defined a political party as a group of candidates who compete in elections (Downs 1957, Schlesinger 1994, among many others). This minimal definition has important analytical implications. When analyzing electoral politics, we run the risk of looking for parties - and thus, finding them - without realizing that what we have found, empirically, is only weakly related to democratic representation"--
Info autore
Juan Pablo Luna is Professor of Political Science at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile. He is the author of Segmented Representation: Political Party Strategies in Unequal Democracies (2014) and co-author of Latin American Party Systems (Cambridge, 2010).Rafael Piñeiro is Associate Professor at the Catholic University of Uruguay. With Verónica Pérez Bentancur and Fernando Rosenblatt, he has coauthored How Party Activism Survives: Uruguay´s Frente Amplio (Cambridge, 2020), which won the APA's Leon Epstein Outstanding Book Award.Fernando Rosenblatt is Associate Professor of Political Science at the Diego Portales University, Chile. He is the author of Party Vibrancy and Democracy in Latin America (2018) and co-author with Verónica Pérez Bentancur and Rafael Piñeiro of How Party Activism Survives: Uruguay´s Frente Amplio (Cambridge, 2020).Gabriel Vommaro is Full Professor at the Institute of Higher Social Studies, University of San Martín, Argentina, and researcher in the Argentinian National Research Council. His books include La larga marcha de Cambiemos (2017), Mundo PRO (2015; with S. Morresi and A. Bellotti) and Sociologie du clientélisme (2015; with H. Combes).
Riassunto
This volume proposes a new, analytically more powerful conceptualization of political party. It provides in-depth analyses of seventeen contemporary political parties in Latin America and shows how and why they vary in the degree to which they fulfill the functions of democratic representation.
