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This book explores the impact of economic crises and free-market reforms on party systems and political representation in contemporary Latin America. It explains why some patterns of market reform align and stabilize party systems, whereas other patterns of reform leave party systems vulnerable to widespread social protest and electoral instability. In contrast to other works on the topic, this book accounts for both the institutionalization and the breakdown of party systems, and it explains why Latin America turned to the Left politically in the aftermath of the market-reform process. Ultimately, it explains why this 'left turn' was more radical in some countries than others and why it had such varied effects on national party systems

AbstractAlthough populist figures are often thought to thrive during crises that allow them to 'perform' decisive leadership, the US experience under Donald Trump during the COVID-19 crisis demonstrates that the opposite may sometimes occur. Despite its scientific and medical prowess, the US suffered more coronavirus cases and deaths than any other country in the world during the first year of the pandemic, and this abysmal performance was largely attributable to a failure of government. Fixated on the pandemic's economic effects and its potential political fallout, the Trump administration's framing of the crisis tried to minimize the public health emergency, externalize blame through a focus on the Chinese scapegoat and accuse the media and Democrats of hyping the pandemic to undermine Trump's presidency. In responding to the pandemic, Trump and his allies cast doubt on scientific and medical expertise that called for more aggressive testing, mask wearing and social-distancing measures. Trump delegated responsibility for crisis management to subnational governments and the private sector, and he politicized their efforts to regulate social behaviour in the public interest, intensifying partisan polarization.

AbstractPolarization may be the most consistent effect of populism, as it is integral to the logic of constructing populist subjects. This article distinguishes between constitutive, spatial and institutional dimensions of polarization, adopting a cross-regional comparative perspective on different subtypes of populism in Europe, Latin America and the US. It explains why populism typically arises in contexts of low political polarization (the US being a major, if partial, outlier), but has the effect of sharply increasing polarization by constructing an anti-establishment political frontier, politicizing new policy or issue dimensions, and contesting democracy's institutional and procedural norms. Populism places new issues on the political agenda and realigns partisan and electoral competition along new programmatic divides or political cleavages. Its polarizing effects, however, raise the stakes of political competition and intensify conflict over the control of key institutional sites.

The study of party system institutionalization in Latin America is complicated by the fact that political development in the region has been indelibly marked by period-specific stages and challenges of capitalist development. These periods are associated with distinct patterns of social mobilization, class conflict and political incorporation or exclusion of labour and popular constituencies. These patterns heavily condition the programmatic structuring of partisan competition and its impact on party system institutionalization. Important theoretical insights can be derived from the study of intra-regional variation in period-specific challenges and effects, but this requires careful attention to the factors that differentiate cases.

AbstractAlthough scholars of West European politics have long debated whether the region's highly institutionalised party systems were becoming de‐aligned and electorally unstable, the political fallout from the post‐2008 financial crisis has lent a new sense of urgency to the debate. The threats posed to party systems by economic crises are hardly unique to Europe, however. The Latin American experience with the debt crisis of the 1980s and 1990s suggests that party system upheaval was not simply a function of retrospective economic voting during the period of crisis. It was also attributable to programmatically de‐aligning policy responses to crises – namely the 'bait‐and‐switch' imposition of austerity and adjustment measures by labour‐based, left‐leaning parties that were traditional champions of statist and redistributive policies. Such patterns of reform made it difficult for party systems to channel societal resistance to market orthodoxy in the post‐adjustment era, setting the stage for convulsive 'reactive sequences' when such resistance arose outside and against mainstream parties through varied forms of social and electoral protest, typically on the left flank. This article explores the political fallout from the European and Latin American economic crises from a comparative perspective, arguing that it is essential to think beyond the short‐term political dynamics of crisis management to consider the longer‐term institutional legacies and fragilities of the different political alignments forged around crisis‐induced policy reforms.

I first taught Shaping the Political Arena in a graduate seminar in the Fall of 1994, when I was a relatively new assistant professor. I still remember the class ending with a vigorous debate about whether or not the institutional legacies of the labor-incorporating critical junctures studied by Ruth Berins Collier and David Collier—including populism, corporatism, and state-led development—had run their course in Latin America and been eclipsed by a new era whose defining features were political and economic liberalism.

The plea by Murillo, Shrank, and Luna (MSL) for a more "grounded" political economy approach to the study of Latin America is much welcome, and it merits a serious debate among scholars of the region. To help advance that debate, this essay raises several issues regarding the substance and methods of the political economy they advocate.