The Importance of Strong Political Parties

The reading for this week by Levitsky and Cameron discusses the importance of political parties in Latin America, and I agree with the major points made in the article. Levitsky and Cameron that strong political parties are what help keep democracy strong, as seen in various Latin American nations. They use Peru as an example of the importance of strong political parties, as a large reason for the rise of Alberto Fujimori was the weakening of the party system, which enabled candidate centered movements to gain traction and defeat the deeply unpopular existing parties. In the 1980s, the major parties in Peru had been growing more and more unpopular, leading to an almost-collapse in the 1990 general election where the presence of many weak parties allowed Fujimori to make it to the second place in the presidential runoff election with just 29% of the vote from the first round. The first place candidate, Mario Vargas Llosa won close to 37% in the first round, but many unpopular policy positions held by his conservative FREDEMO party alliance, as well as Fujimori’s status as a political outsider, led to his 25-point loss in the second round of voting.

The presence of solid political parties could have prevented Fujimori’s regime, as his victory in the 1990 election was largely due to overwhelming unpopularity of existing political parties, as well as the splintering of Peru’s left-wing parties. In the election, various left-leaning parties, won about 37% of the popular vote, and had they consolidated at all they would have most likely taken the second place spot in the runoff election. Instead, party infighting and the creation of several smaller, independent Leftist parties let a traditional fiscally conservative party and new right-wing populist party go on to runoff. A similar situation happened in 2016, as Alberto Fujimori’s daughter Keiko and her conservative Fuerza Popular party and Pedro Pablo Kucyznski’s center-right Peruvians for Change party made it to the runoff election because of all the various left-wing parties taking smaller percentages of the vote. Even though Peru had become democratized since Alberto Fujimori left office in 2000, the weak political party system led to several elections that were still largely centered around specific candidates and not political parties.

I do agree that strong political parties are important to democracy, as they are able to better inform voters about the issues and also help the government run more efficiently. While I definitely think strong political parties are a major factor in how democratic a country is, they are not a cure-all for a countries political problems, as nations with strong parties can be severely undemocratic as well, such as in Colombia where for 16 years the major political parties had an agreement to share power, despite however the general population would have voted. That being said, this system is still preferable to one with weak parties as despite their problems, Colombia has had an easier time staying more democratic than nations with weak parties, such as Peru.