Reconsidering the Conceptualization of New Parties: Break-in-Parties in South America

Abstract

Latin American party systems are characterized by a proliferation of new parties of very different sizes, backgrounds, and developmental trajectories, which poses a conceptual challenge. Historically, conceptualizations of new parties have often prioritized data accessibility over methodological and theoretical rigor. As a result, they have produced a plethora of highly heterogeneous cases that are ill-suited for theory testing. To address this problem, we propose the development of a conceptual tool aimed at identifying a subset of relevant new parties, termed “break-in parties” (BIP) because of their potential impact on prevailing patterns of representation and party competition. We have identified a corpus of 24 such parties founded between 1960 and 2002 in South America. These parties exhibit sufficient similarity to facilitate meaningful attributions, while also providing variability in relevant independent and dependent variables for testing theories of party system change through the emergence and success of new parties, a topic that has received considerable attention in recent years.