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Market reform has dealt a serious blow to traditional alliances between governing parties and labor unions. This article examines the fate of these alliances by applying a revised version of Albert Hirschman's schema of exit, voice, and loyalty to party-union relations in Mexico, Spain, and Venezuela. After refining the concept of loyalty, the author argues that it is embedded in the principles and norms on which these alliances are based. Market reform places party-affiliated labor leaders in a "loyalty dilemma" in which they have no choice but to behave disloyally toward one set of claimants. Their propensity to respond with either voice or exit depends on their vulnerability to reprisals for disloyal behavior and the party's capacity to retain their loyalty even in the face of sacrifices imposed on workers and unions. Both variables are linked to the authority structures in which labor and party leaders find themselves. In the short to medium run the alliances most likely to survive are those in which labor leaders have significant autonomy from their bases and/or in which the party is able and willing to challenge its own executive. In the long run, however, even these alliances may be vulnerable to collapse because of popular frustrations with the inadequacy of interest representation and the multiple pressures on political organizations to adapt to a more fluid and uncertain environment.

Why the Socialist Workers party (PSOE) continued to receive the support of labor after the major labor union, General Union of Workers, defected from the ruling socialist party in 1988; Spain.

The literature on petrostates tends to blackbox the state. We argue, in contrast, that not all petro-states are configured equally. They thus respond to external crises differently. Despite sharing similar background conditions, the petro-state of Venezuela responded to the external oil shock of 2014–2015 by turning more authoritarian and predatory, whereas the petro-state of Ecuador tried to become more democratic and developmental. To explain this difference, we focus on three within-state institutional differences between these cases: the cohesion of hardliners, the reach of the coercive military and paramilitary apparatus, and the viability of the public and private sectors. In short, even petro-states operating under similar regimes (in this case, left-populist, semi-authoritarian) can exhibit different institutional make-ups, and these institutional differences help explain responses to similar external shocks.

This article uses a two-level framework to explain variation in Latin American populist parties' responses to the neoliberal challenge of the 1980s and 1990s. First, it examines the incentives for adaptation, focusing on the electoral and economic environments in which parties operated. Second, it examines parties' organizational capacity to adapt, focusing on leadership renovation and the accountability of office-holding leaders to unions and party authorities. This framework is applied to four cases: the Argentine Justicialista Party (PJ), the Mexican Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), the Peruvian APRA party, and Venezuelan Democratic Action (AD). In Argentina, the combination of strong incentives and substantial adaptive capacity resulted in radical programmatic change and electoral success. In Mexico, where the PRI had high adaptive capacity but faced somewhat weaker external incentives, programmatic change was slower but nevertheless substantial, and the party survived as a major political force. In Peru, where APRA had some capacity but little incentive to adapt, and in Venezuela, where AD had neither a strong incentive nor the capacity to adapt, populist parties achieved little programmatic change and suffered steep electoral decline.