8 - Programmatic Structuration around Religion and Political Regime

Summary

In Latin American countries at the turn of the twenty-first century, programmatic party structuration over economic-distributive issues is clearly more important and more starkly articulated than other forms of PPS. For this reason, the two preceding chapters have been devoted to accounting for cross-national diversity in patterns of political accountability that involve economics. But a number of countries also display programmatic structuration over religion and political regime form. In this chapter, we try to make sense of the diversity of religious and regime PPS by employing a similar logic as in the analysis of economic PPS.

First, we probe long-term determinants of political learning. Are religious and regime PPS more pronounced where general resource endowments and opportunities to engage in partisan competition have enabled politicians and citizens to construct programmatic partisan divides more easily over long periods of time? If strong capabilities and opportunities have developed gradually, have correspondingly high “stakes” of political conflict over religion or regime become the decisive catalysts to trigger the formation of durable partisan divides within a polity? Second, we probe into more recent conditions conducive to partisan mobilization around religion or regime that have arisen during the so-called Third Wave of political democratization in Latin America. Are there specific political and economic experiences or cultural developments in the recent practice of political rule across Latin America that have induced citizens and politicians to coordinate around regime or religion-based programmatic party divides?