Although some Latin American economies such as Chile, Peru, and Bolivia have always been strongly shaped by the mining sector, mining activities in Latin America have increased dramatically over the last decades. Dur-ing the 1990s, four of the ten countries with the highest mining investments worldwide were Latin American, and natural resource extraction is one of the region’s main drivers of economic growth. Permissive legal envi-ronments adopted to attract foreign investors often allow for environmentally precarious practices with external-ities affecting the bases of livelihood and human health in many host communities. As a result, mining activities have caused widespread social resistance over the past years. The simultaneous process of democratization in the region, starting in the late 1970s, opened up the necessary political space to effectively express such grievances. In almost every Latin American country, social mobilization has occurred around issues of environmental pro-tection and indigenous territories, often resulting in massive, at times violent protest against mining companies and states’ resource politics. However, patterns of social resistance against mining projects differ considerably in form and intensity, both within and across countries, as well as over time. Political responses by governments in the region, too, vary widely. What explains different levels of mobilization against mining projects? And what kind of institutions and actors help to avoid or mitigate social conflicts over natural resource extraction? Studies on political solutions to mining conflicts are still exceedingly scarce. There is, in particular, a striking lack of cross-country comparative studies on the issue. Building on both grievance and social movement theories, we propose a project that addresses this research gap based on a theoretical framework that combines motivational and structural approaches to explain ethno-environmentalist mobilization. To this end, we construct a new multi-level dataset on mining conflicts in Latin America between 2000 and 2013, using an innovative, semi-automated strategy of news media event coding. To our knowledge, this will be the first comprehensive quantitative study analyzing the social consequences of resource extraction in Latin America and the possibilities to manage its adverse effects.
This project employs comparative history to analyze two critical junctures that have shaped South American party systems. It then develops a quantitative measurement of party system responsiveness to test the historical predictions and to chart diverging party system trajectories during Latin America's “Left Turn”. In terms of their responsiveness to voter preferences, South American party systems that experienced prolonged periods of ideological conflict in the first half of the 20th Century continue to differ starkly from those in which elites avoided or where military coups ended polarization. The duration in historical polarization constitutes a critical juncture that sets Uruguay, Chile, and Argentina apart from the rest of South America. While not fully determining the paths party systems have taken at later critical junctures, this basic distinction between two types of party systems has survived the authoritarian regimes of the 1960s and 1970s, the “neoliberal critical juncture” of the 1980s, and for the most part also the subsequent “left turn”. In a first step, the project studies critical junctures and historical legacies that set countries apart by adopting a comparative historical cleavage perspective. It then uses data on party positions and voter preferences to show how autocratic-democratic regime divides in the aftermath of authoritarianism have nurtured new programmatic alignments in Brazil, Bolivia, and Mexico. Levels of responsiveness prior to the “left turn” then predict quite well which type of left party succeeded. Furthermore, I show that the nature of the populist left is radically different in Bolivia and Venezuela, in that it helped to realign the party system in the first case, but failed to do so in the second. Project publications: Bornschier, S. (2019). Historical Polarization and Representation in South American Party Systems, 1900–1990. British Journal of Political Science, 49(1), 153–179. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0007123416000387 Bornschier, S. (2020). Combining deductive and inductive elements to measure party system responsiveness in challenging contexts: An approach with evidence from Latin America. European Political Science, 19(4), 540–549. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41304-020-00272-z Bornschier, S. (2013). Trayectorias históricas y responsiveness del sistema de partidos en siete países de América Latina. América Latina Hoy, 65(diciembre), 45–77. https://doi.org/10.14201/alh2013654577
The point of departure of this project are the vast differences in the degree to which party systems reflect voter preferences in contemporary Latin America. These differences are of vital interest for researchers seeking to explain the formation of party systems and how they adapt to changes in social structure, economic conditions, and the international context after the end of the cold war. Explaining differences in party system responsiveness is also central, however, for those interested in the quality of democracy: The responsiveness of representatives to voters preferences is an integral component of a high-quality democracy (e.g., Dahl 1971; Diamond and Morlino 2005; Bühlmann et al. 2008, 2012; Przeworski 2010; Kitschelt et al. 2010a). And there is growing evidence that party systems impinge on other dimensions of the quality of democracy as well (e.g., Chavez 2003, Ríos-Figueroa and Pozas-Loyo 2010). In a prior project, we studied two routes that result in responsive party systems, one historical and one open even to those countries that lack the favorable historical preconditions of the forerunners in terms of responsiveness. Along the historical route, left-wing parties with strong ideological credentials challenged the established political forces in some countries in the early 20th century. Gradually, this crowded out the clientelistic linkages between voters and political patrons that represent the main impediment to programmatic responsiveness. In the current project, we look at a similar process observable since the process of re-democratization swept Latin America in the 1980s. Although tentatively addressed in the prior project, this process is complicated by the fact that two very different types of left parties have emerged in contemporary Latin America. Theorizing the distinction between the “moderate” and the “populist” or “radical” left has become a major research topic in recent years (Castañeda 2006; Castañeda and Morales 2008; Weyland 2009; Weyland, Madrid, and Hunter 2010, Levitsky and Roberts 2011, Remmer 2012). These authors have hypothesized that policy-based appeals are much more important in the mobilization of the moderate left, while a mixture of charismatic and clientelistic strategies is employed by the populist left. To date, however, this claim rests on shallow empirical foundations. Even more importantly, no empirical research has been conducted on the impact these two types of new leftist parties have on the party system as a whole, and more specifically on the levels of responsiveness it exhibits. This project contributes to these issues in three ways: It develops the difference between the moderate and the populist left in theoretical terms, expands our prior empirical analyses in temporal terms, and explores the dualism of programmatic (responsiveness-enhancing) and clientelistic (responsiveness-blurring) mobilization strategies. This project thus contributes to two related, but still distinct literatures. On the one hand, there has been growing interest in explaining variations in party system formation (e.g., Kitschelt et al. 2010). On the other hand, the study of the two lefts has strongly grown as well, as outlined above. Combining the first perspective, on which our prior research project was based, with the distinction between the two types of left parties both refines our prior argument, and contributes to the literature on the Latin American left.
The point of departure of this project is the failure of the major theories of democratization to explain differences in the consolidation of democracy across Latin America. We argue that an important determinant for the successful democratization is the emergence of a party system that is responsive to the citizenry. Because many parties in Latin America and elsewhere use clientelistic appeals to mobilize voters, they fail to represent the programmatic preferences of their electorate, which would be one of democracy’s most central goals according to democratic theory. In this research project, we study under which conditions programmatic linkages replace clientelistic linkages. The project combines comparative historical analysis and quantitative statistical methods to empirically analyze this process. We postulate two routes to programmatic party competition. One is historical and took place during the first wave of democratization in the early 20th century, similar to the formation of ideological cleavages in Western Europe. The other is more recent and depends on the presence of parties that actively seek to overcome clientelistic patterns of mobilization. We study the first route by adopting a “Rokkanian” perspective that focuses on critical junctures and historical legacies that set countries apart (Lipset and Rokkan 1967, Rokkan 1999, Collier and Collier 1991). In some countries in Latin America, such as in Chile and Uruguay, strong ideological cleavages emerged during the early steps towards democracy, and this resulted in an early prevalence of programmatic party competition. In other countries, a different historical sequencing allowed the established political elites to maintain clientelistic modes of mobilization. As a result, party systems may remain unresponsive to the demands of the citizenry for decades. The first step of the project is to develop a cleavage account of party system formation that explains the stark contrasts between ten Latin American countries in terms of party system development. In order to apply the cleavage approach to contexts outside the old democracies, we must, however, adapt it. In particular, we will extend the approach by integrating the deliberate attempts of political elites to prevent socio-structural conflicts from manifesting themselves politically. We then use the insights generated from this historical analysis to derive predictions concerning contemporary patterns of interest representation across the continent. Our hypothesis is that the way conflicts were mobilized early on affects the long-term balance between clientelistic and programmatic mobilization strategies employed by parties. We test these predictions in a quantitative analysis of contemporary linkage practices in our ten Latin American countries. For this analysis, we measure party system responsiveness combining data on the programmatic position of parties with data on the preferences of voters for various points in time between the mid-1990s and the 2000s. In this quantitative analysis of contemporary linkage practices, we also address the second, alternative route to programmatic party competition. This route is open even to those countries that lack the favourable historical circumstances of the forerunners in terms of democratic accountability. In line with recent research pointing to the role of agency in cleavage formation, we do not expect the early historical experience to fully determine contemporary patterns of party competition. Consequently, we study the extent to which clientelistic linkages are successfully being crowded out in a gradual process that started with the most recent wave of democratization in Latin America in the 1980s. Indeed, in a number of countries such as Brazil, new parties of the left have appeared, which explicitly aim at changing the dominant ways of voter mobilization. There is some evidence that in refusing to make clientelistic appeals, parties opting for programmatic linkages can force the other, established parties to adopt more clear-cut programmatic profiles as well. In other countries, recent movements of the left centred on charismatic personalities have succeeded in breaking into party systems where historically rooted parties failed to respond to the preferences of voters. Venezuela is a case in point. We hypothesize that these two forms of left-wing mobilization have diverging consequences for the emergence of responsive party systems, and consequently for the quality of democracy. While programs play the dominant role in the first case, they are amalgamated with charismatic linkages and selective incentives in the latter case. Presumably, this undermines the institutionalization of a party system and the establishment of firm mechanisms of accountability.