Democracies without Political Parties?

This week’s reading was mostly focused on the relevance of political parties in democracies with a special historical emphasis on Peru around the Fujimori regime. Letvitsky and Cameron address the importance that the political party has in keeping a democracy “workable” because they allow citizens to easily make stances on issues. Another purpose that parties serve is they kind of create a check on the politicians who belong to the party. This occurs because if a politician takes his/her own route on an issue, they lose a lot of support and no longer have as much power as they would if they were simply to follow a party’s platform. The reading emphasizes this being important in young democracy because it forces politicians to work within the institutions, and the more often politicians work within the institutions the more valid they become. All of this coming together makes a democracy more legitimate and all around brings a higher quality to the new democracy.

This ties into Peru because before Peru even had an opportunity to become a solidified democracy, their party system began to breakdown, creating opportunities for “outside” politicians to get elected to prominent positions. This included Fujimori, who later used the weakness in the democratic institutions to execute a self-coup. During his regime, especially after his self-coup political parties were severely weakened. In fact, much of Fujimori’s success in getting elected in the first place can be traced back to the already crippled party system, where different parties were helping Fujimori in order to weaken other parties. But, ultimately this backfired dramatically because none of the four established parties that existed before Fujimori’s reign lasted.

This is (in a much less extreme way) what is happening in American politics with the Republican party nominating Donald Trump, who is by all standards an outsider when it comes to politics. With a majority of the American people being sick of political parties, the Republican party is seeing a huge divide in what it’s future should represent. So the result was seeing an unpredicted outsider to win the nomination. Now, it is very important to mention that the U.S.’s democracy is much stronger than Peru’s was, so recent events will probably not have such a large effect, such as that Fujimori’s success had on Peruvian democracy. Especially because parties are such an integral part of American political culture.

American political party culture contrasts a lot with Peruvian parties, because they had much shorter tenure than the current parties in America. According to Letvitsky and Cameron Peru, in order to rebuild and strengthen its democracy, it will not necessarily need to rebuild its party structure. This is due to the fact that parties are no longer the only things, this is mostly due to technology advancing to a point where politicians no longer need a large support group to get their voices heard. So Peru’s political party future is still very much in the air.