Democracy without Parties in Peru: The Politics of Uncertainty and Decay 3030875784, 9783030875787

Table of contents :
Acknowledgements
Contents
List of Figures
List of Tables
1 Introduction: Party System Decay across Latin America
1 Introduction
2 Party System Deinstitutionalization Across Latin America
2.1 Brazil
2.2 Mexico
2.3 El Salvador
2.4 Panama
2.5 Continuing Party System Weakness: Bolivia and Colombia
2.5.1 Bolivia
2.5.2 Colombia
2.6 Partyless Landscapes: Party Nonsystems
2.6.1 Ecuador
2.6.2 Guatemala
2.7 Institutionalized Party Systems No More: Costa Rica, Honduras, Chile
2.7.1 Costa Rica
2.7.2 Honduras
2.7.3 Chile
3 Theoretical Reasons to Forecast Continued Party System Decay
4 The Personalization of Politics in Latin America and Its Correlates
5 Consequences of Party System Decay on Democracy
6 Book Objectives
6.1 Adequate Labeling of “Party” Species and Theoretical Implications
6.2 Political Personal Brands Versus Party Brands
6.3 A New Concept: A Negative Legitimacy Environment
6.4 Endogenous Factors in Party Non-Building
6.5 Determinants of Elections in “Democracies Without Parties”
6.6 Empirical Contributions: Peru’s Electoral Vehicles
6.7 Relationship Between Electoral Vehicles and Democratic Governance
7 Plan of the Book
8 A Note on Terminology
Bibliography
2 Structural Impediments to Party System Reconstruction in Peru
1 Introduction
2 The Longue Duree: Or the Weight of History
3 The Legacy of Political Agency (I): Alan Garcia
4 The Legacy of Political Agency (II): Alberto Fujimori
5 Absence of Political Agency to Politicize Societal Cleavages
6 Self-Perpetuating Dynamics in Democracies Without Parties
7 The Genetic Code of Electoral Vehicles: Entropy and Decay
8 Conclusion
Bibliography
3 Party Non-systems, Personal Brands, and Negative Legitimacy Environments
1 Introduction
2 Defining a Party Non-system
3 Does Peru Qualify as a Party Non-System?
4 Partisanship in Peru: A Rara Avis
5 Institutional and Behavioral Personalism in Peru
5.1 Complex Political Environments and Personalism
6 Party Brands Versus Personal Brands in Peru
6.1 Conceptualizing Political Personal Brands
6.2 Examples of Personal Brands
6.3 Personal Brand Dilution: Causal Factors
6.4 Personal Brands and the Mass Media Ecosystem
7 A New Concept: Negative Legitimacy Environments
7.1 Effects of Negative Legitimacy Environments
8 Conclusion
Bibliography
4 The Involution of Peru’s Electoral Vehicles
1 Introduction
2 Conceptualizing Party Institutionalization
2.1 Scoring and Placing Peruvian Electoral Vehicles
2.2 Party Institutionalization, Party Systems, and Democracy
3 The Fate of the Traditional Parties in Post-Fujimori Peru
3.1 Alianza Popular Revolucionaria Americana (APRA)
3.1.1 Autonomy
3.1.2 Partido Popular Cristiano (PPC)
3.1.3 Societal Roots
3.2 Accion Popular (AP)
3.2.1 Autonomy
3.3 Partido Popular Cristiano (PPC)
3.3.1 Social Rootedness
3.4 The Conservative Right: Partido Popular Cristiano
3.4.1 Autonomy
3.4.2 Coherence
3.4.3 Social Rootedness
4 The New Electoral Vehicles of Post-2001 Democracy
4.1 Fujimorismo
4.1.1 Autonomy
4.1.2 Coherence
4.1.3 Societal Roots
4.1.4 The Recent Decay of Fujimorismo
4.2 Partido Nacionalista Peruano (PNP)
4.2.1 Autonomy
4.2.2 Coherence
4.2.3 Societal Rootedness
4.3 The Fractured Left
5 Frente Amplio
5.1 Autonomy
5.2 Coherence
5.3 Social Rootedness
6 Conclusion
Bibliography
5 Electoral Dynamics in a Partyless Environment
1 Introduction
2 Understanding Voter Behavior with a Classic Funnel Approach
2.1 Group Attachments
2.2 Issue-Based Voting
2.3 Valence Considerations
2.4 Campaign Effects
3 The Inevitable Absence of Inter-Temporal Programmatic Structuration
3.1 Coherent Issue-Based Stands
3.2 Meaningful Policy Differences Among Candidates
3.3 Correspondence Between Campaign Platforms and Enacted Policies
4 The Primacy of Electoral Supply over Electoral Demand
5 The Importance of Strategic Voting: Expecting the Unexpected
5.1 The 1990 Presidential Election
5.2 The 2006 Presidential Election
5.3 The 2010 Lima Mayoralty Election
5.4 The 2011 Presidential Election
5.5 The 2016 Presidential Election
5.6 The 2021 Presidential Election
5.7 Explaining Peruvian Strategic Voting
6 A Stylized Account of Peruvian Electoral Campaign Dynamics
7 Conclusion
Bibliography
6 How a Democracy without Parties Malfunctions
1 Introduction
2 The Absence of Democratic Responsiveness: Institutionalizing Policy Certainty
3 Vertical Accountability: Repeated Betrayal of Mandates
3.1 Mandate Reversals Across Time
3.2 Consequences of Repeated Betrayals of Mandate
4 Horizontal Accountability: From an Innocuous to a Transgressive Congress
4.1 Executive–Legislative Relations: Moving Toward Serial Brinkmanship
5 Serial, Low-Intensity Populism in Peru
6 Imperiled Governability in State–Society Relations
7 Democratic Consolidation? Avoiding Democratic Breakdown by Default
8 Conclusion
Bibliography
7 Conclusion

Citation preview

Democracy without Parties in Peru The Politics of Uncertainty and Decay Omar Sanchez-Sibony

Democracy without Parties in Peru

Omar Sanchez-Sibony

Democracy without Parties in Peru The Politics of Uncertainty and Decay

Omar Sanchez-Sibony Department of Political Science Texas State University San Marcos, TX, USA

ISBN 978-3-030-87578-7 ISBN 978-3-030-87579-4 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-87579-4 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

This book is dedicated to my parents, Olga Sibony and Lorenzo Sanchez for their love and unwavering support

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the Palgrave blind reviewer of this book. She or he went well beyond the call of duty by providing detailed, many pages-long feedback that far superseded a standard review in both quality and length. Clearly a senior scholar with deeply rooted and longstanding expertise in Peruvian politics, the quality of the reviewer’s insights and suggestions convinced me of the need to author a longer book, one that turned out to double the size of the original manuscript. I could not be more grateful for the selfless, extended effort she or he exerted to painstakingly assess the original manuscript on a chapter-by-chapter basis, alongside more general observations. My only hope is that I have done some justice to the reviewer’s vision of what the original manuscript could become. The intricacies, nuances, volatility, velocity, and baffling developments inherent to Peru’s complex political environment pose a steep challenge to comprehension. I am fortunate to count with two friends who are among the most distinguished scholars on the politics of Peru: Carlos Melendez and Alberto Vergara. Carlos and Alberto have smoothed that steep learning curve for me via their prolific academic and journalistic writings, as well as by way of informal conversations. Their analytic perspectives have clearly influenced my thinking about Peruvian politics over the years. I also want to extend my appreciation to scholar Mauricio Zavaleta, who graciously agreed to read an advanced stage of the longer version of manuscript and provided excellent feedback.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am thankful to the seven scholars with expertise in Peruvian party politics who agreed to fill out a detailed questionnaire used to rank Peruvian electoral vehicles along the dimensions of horizontal coordination and vertical aggregation capabilities. They are: Jennifer Cyr, Carlos Melendez, Mauricio Zavaleta, Sofia Vera, Rodrigo Barnechea, Felix Puemape, and Valerie Tarazona Kong. I would be remiss not to voice my appreciation for my academic colleagues in the Department of Political Science at Texas State University, and in particular the department’s chair Ken Grasso. Thank you, Ken for providing me with the working environment, time, and tools needed for the adequate completion of this work, as well as supporting my research and teaching while at Texas State more generally. The university library staff has also been invaluable in helping me find and retrieve secondary literature on Peruvian politics—not all of which was available at the main Library—via inter-library loan services. My childhood friends from Madrid are never far from my mind. The guadaluperos (Colegio Guadalupe) and those from the Tetuan madrileno neighborhood are lifelong treasures for me: Marcos “cucho” Merz, Juan Arana, Marcos Sanz, Israel Vela Pena, Jaime de la Rocha, Manuel Cepeda, Manolo Alvarez, Jorge Imedio, and others. Two Peruvian friends of mine have been eagerly awaiting the publication of this book: Andrea Martin and Alex Bortnichak (she, certifiably limena; he, hailing from New Jersey but de facto Peruvian in all but passport!). It is my hope that you both enjoy reading it. I am so lucky to count with your invaluable friendship throughout the years. Thank you, Valeria, for your steady support and unwavering belief in me. You have heard my “working on the Peru book” repeated refrain more than anyone. You are a source of pride and inspiration. Finally and most importantly, I need to thank my family. My parents, Olga Sibony and Lorenzo Sanchez, inculcated in me from early on the value of hard work and have consistently supported my intellectual endeavors and academic career at every step of the way. What they have given me is incalculable. My sister Olivia and brother Oscar, both educators, are great examples for me to follow. While working on the manuscript my aunt Ilia Sibony has been a steady source of encouragement, and as always… much needed laughter! To know my family feels proud of my trajectory in life and academia has always been the greatest prize for me. This book is also dedicated to my four nephews: Siena, Nico, Kai, and Luka. We are all impressed by your many achievements

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

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at an early age, in science, music, chess, and sports. No doubt, you will continue to fill our lives with delight with your joie de vivre, warmth, and exploits.

Contents

1

Introduction: Party System Decay across Latin America 1 Introduction 2 Party System Deinstitutionalization Across Latin America 2.1 Brazil 2.2 Mexico 2.3 El Salvador 2.4 Panama 2.5 Continuing Party System Weakness: Bolivia and Colombia 2.6 Partyless Landscapes: Party Nonsystems 2.7 Institutionalized Party Systems No More: Costa Rica, Honduras, Chile 3 Theoretical Reasons to Forecast Continued Party System Decay 4 The Personalization of Politics in Latin America and Its Correlates 5 Consequences of Party System Decay on Democracy 6 Book Objectives 6.1 Adequate Labeling of “Party” Species and Theoretical Implications 6.2 Political Personal Brands Versus Party Brands

1 1 6 7 8 10 11 12 15 18 25 43 51 55 56 58

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CONTENTS

6.3

A New Concept: A Negative Legitimacy Environment 6.4 Endogenous Factors in Party Non-Building 6.5 Determinants of Elections in “Democracies Without Parties” 6.6 Empirical Contributions: Peru’s Electoral Vehicles 6.7 Relationship Between Electoral Vehicles and Democratic Governance 7 Plan of the Book 8 A Note on Terminology Bibliography 2

3

59 61 62 65 66 68 73 74

Structural Impediments to Party System Reconstruction in Peru 1 Introduction 2 The Longue Duree: Or the Weight of History 3 The Legacy of Political Agency (I): Alan Garcia 4 The Legacy of Political Agency (II): Alberto Fujimori 5 Absence of Political Agency to Politicize Societal Cleavages 6 Self-Perpetuating Dynamics in Democracies Without Parties 7 The Genetic Code of Electoral Vehicles: Entropy and Decay 8 Conclusion Bibliography

113 120 121

Party Non-systems, Personal Brands, and Negative Legitimacy Environments 1 Introduction 2 Defining a Party Non-system 3 Does Peru Qualify as a Party Non-System? 4 Partisanship in Peru: A Rara Avis 5 Institutional and Behavioral Personalism in Peru 5.1 Complex Political Environments and Personalism 6 Party Brands Versus Personal Brands in Peru 6.1 Conceptualizing Political Personal Brands 6.2 Examples of Personal Brands 6.3 Personal Brand Dilution: Causal Factors 6.4 Personal Brands and the Mass Media Ecosystem

129 129 132 139 151 153 165 171 176 182 189 196

85 85 87 90 93 98 106

CONTENTS

4

5

xiii

7

A New Concept: Negative Legitimacy Environments 7.1 Effects of Negative Legitimacy Environments 8 Conclusion Bibliography

199 220 229 232

The Involution of Peru’s Electoral Vehicles 1 Introduction 2 Conceptualizing Party Institutionalization 2.1 Scoring and Placing Peruvian Electoral Vehicles 2.2 Party Institutionalization, Party Systems, and Democracy 3 The Fate of the Traditional Parties in Post-Fujimori Peru 3.1 Alianza Popular Revolucionaria Americana (APRA) 3.2 Accion Popular (AP) 3.3 Partido Popular Cristiano (PPC) 3.4 The Conservative Right: Partido Popular Cristiano 4 The New Electoral Vehicles of Post-2001 Democracy 4.1 Fujimorismo 4.2 Partido Nacionalista Peruano (PNP) 4.3 The Fractured Left 5 Frente Amplio 5.1 Autonomy 5.2 Coherence 5.3 Social Rootedness 6 Conclusion Bibliography

247 247 250 252

Electoral Dynamics in a Partyless Environment 1 Introduction 2 Understanding Voter Behavior with a Classic Funnel Approach 2.1 Group Attachments 2.2 Issue-Based Voting 2.3 Valence Considerations 2.4 Campaign Effects 3 The Inevitable Absence of Inter-Temporal Programmatic Structuration 3.1 Coherent Issue-Based Stands 3.2 Meaningful Policy Differences Among Candidates

351 351

259 260 262 277 279 284 293 294 312 318 323 323 326 331 334 338

353 355 360 361 365 369 372 374

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CONTENTS

3.3

Correspondence Between Campaign Platforms and Enacted Policies 4 The Primacy of Electoral Supply over Electoral Demand 5 The Importance of Strategic Voting: Expecting the Unexpected 5.1 The 1990 Presidential Election 5.2 The 2006 Presidential Election 5.3 The 2010 Lima Mayoralty Election 5.4 The 2011 Presidential Election 5.5 The 2016 Presidential Election 5.6 The 2021 Presidential Election 5.7 Explaining Peruvian Strategic Voting 6 A Stylized Account of Peruvian Electoral Campaign Dynamics 7 Conclusion Bibliography 6

7

376 379 386 390 391 393 395 398 401 407 411 415 417 429 429

How a Democracy without Parties Malfunctions 1 Introduction 2 The Absence of Democratic Responsiveness: Institutionalizing Policy Certainty 3 Vertical Accountability: Repeated Betrayal of Mandates 3.1 Mandate Reversals Across Time 3.2 Consequences of Repeated Betrayals of Mandate 4 Horizontal Accountability: From an Innocuous to a Transgressive Congress 4.1 Executive–Legislative Relations: Moving Toward Serial Brinkmanship 5 Serial, Low-Intensity Populism in Peru 6 Imperiled Governability in State–Society Relations 7 Democratic Consolidation? Avoiding Democratic Breakdown by Default 8 Conclusion Bibliography

450

Conclusion

507

431 438 441 447

458 472 479 483 492 495

List of Figures

Chapter 3 Fig. 1 Fig. 2 Fig. 3

Systemic versus extra-systemic volatility Components of a negative legitimacy environment and determinants of regime legitimacy Effects of negative legitimacy environments

140 201 220

Chapter 4 Fig. 1 Fig. 2

Peru parties Latin American parties

253 254

Chapter 5 Fig. 1 Fig. 2

Funnel of causality in Peru: Voting considerations in order of importance Stylized dynamics of a first round presidential election, in four stages.

354 412

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List of Tables

Chapter 3 Table 1 Table 2 Table 3 Table 4 Table 5 Table 6 Table 7

Table 8 Table 9 Table 10 Table 11

Party Universe Institutionalization Continuum Difference between inchoate party systems and non-systems Difference between inchoate party systems and party non-systems Vote in congressional elections (Peru), 2001–2021 Parliamentary election results, 2020 and 2021 Extra-systemic volatility for congressional elections in Peru 2001–2021 (percentages, 0–100) Question: In general, what is the factor that most influences your decision in voting for a candidate for President of the Republic? Question: What factor is most influential in defining your vote for a candidate for President of the Republic? Components of a political personal brand Causes of personal brand dilution Negative identities: Personal brands’ approval and rejection levels, 2021 presidential election

137 139 143 144 145 145

161 161 177 190 214

Chapter 4 Table 1

Dimensions of Party Institutionalization

256

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LIST OF TABLES

Chapter 5 Table 1 Table 2 Table 3 Table 4 Table 5

Difference between nominal and effective electoral supply across Peruvian Presidential Elections Voting intentions during the 2010 mayoralty of lima election campaign Voting intentions during the 2011 presidential election campaign, first round Voting intentions during the 2016 presidential election campaign, first round Voting intentions during the 2021 presidential election campaign

382 394 396 400 403

CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Party System Decay across Latin America

1

Introduction

Party-centered politics is withering throughout Latin America. Almost no country escapes the party system weakening trend roiling democracies across the region. Writing in the early 2010s, scholar Kenneth Roberts averred that a crisis of representation loomed over Latin America, but that it “afflicted some party systems much more than others” (Roberts 2012, 48). Party systems had largely collapsed in Ecuador, Peru, Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, and Bolivia, while partial breakdowns occurred in Argentina and Costa Rica. However, “party systems became more institutionalized or competitive in countries like Brazil, Mexico, and El Salvador” (ibid.). Roberts went on to conclude that “this mixed record makes it very difficult to render a generalized assessment of the status of party systems and democratic representation in the region.” The regional panorama has since changed. From the standpoint of the early 2020s, the record has become much less mixed. With the benefit of a longer timespan to analyze, what emerges instead is a process of regional convergence toward inchoate party systems, in varied degrees of decay. This record of convergence places a premium on research efforts that focus on explanatory forces that are not country-specific, but regional and global—spanning the fields of comparative politics, technological change and politics, international political economy, political sociology, political psychology, and others. While impersonal forces propelling ongoing party © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 O. Sanchez-Sibony, Democracy without Parties in Peru, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-87579-4_1

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system decay will generate convergence across party landscapes, differing national starting-points and specificities will continue to produce some (albeit diminished) cross-country variations. Country-specific historical path-dependency legacies continue to shape the relative state of disrepair and under-institutionalization besetting party universes, and their prospects going forward (see Kitchelt et al. 2010). Some countries display, as of today, more durable party–voter linkages than others, and thus enjoy somewhat better possibilities to avoid the fate of partylessness. The socioeconomic, associational, and civil society landscape upon which party systems are sustained and built also differ across Latin America, providing a more fertile or less fertile terrain upon which to build political parties via interest group incorporation. And political agency is always of import in affecting chances of party and party system survival. Otherwise stated, the actions and decisions of elites may differ across national contexts, even if faced with similar incentive structures. In short, some differences in institutionalization levels across nations can be expected within the general trend toward deinstitutionalization, notwithstanding the common forces that are brought to bear upon all democracies. The array of forces propelling party system decay are collectively very powerful. While political parties have the potential to adapt to challenging politico-economic contexts and survive (Levitsky and Burgess 2003; Wills-Otero 2009; Cyr and Liendo 2020), the overall record of the past twenty years suggests that these forceful currents—including evolving trends in political culture, the atomization of electorates, disaggregation and weakening of mobilizing structures, and not least, structurally induced economic, political, and public security malperformance—are generally overwhelming parties’ adaptation capabilities. There are strong theoretical and empirical reasons to believe that continued deinstitutionalization shall continue to play out across the region, such that the observed path of cross-country convergence will become ever-more acute, as will be explained below. This book aims to capture what the end-state of this trend shall imply for the operating dynamics of electoral vehicles, elections, and democracy wherever this process of party system decay proceeds the farthest; but the book also holds implications and serves as a warning call for polities that may not quite reach democracy without parties status but suffer acute party system decay nonetheless. This monograph seeks to provide a window into that projected future by analyzing a country that has already reached that end-state of partyless politics: Peru. In broad terms, what does the empirical track record of Peruvian

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3

politics over the past two decades teach us? The inter-temporal evolution of new electoral vehicles, on the one hand, and traditional political parties, on the other hand, has been convergent: both sets of entities have undergone political entropy and deinstitutionalization. A feckless party universe comprised of Independents and other electoral vehicles,1 and divorced from society, displays powerful self-reproducing features. Elections become political exercises wherein citizens as a collective can eschew the candidates who are most widely rejected but are rather meaningless as regards their substantive representational consequences. Elections in some partyless environments may not alter the economic policy direction of the country (as in Peru or Guatemala), because partylessness paves the way for, and abets, ongoing state capture by nonparty actors (see: Crabtree and Durand 2017); or otherwise elections can generate damaging gyrations and volatility in economic and public policies (as in Venezuela), because weak party systems do not exert effective check-and-balance functions upon governments bent on radical economic policy change, nor can a personalist ruling party constrain a leader (see: Flores-Macías 2012). Incumbent Presidents, lacking strong mandates and endowed only with negative legitimacy, witness their political capital dissipate quickly, curtailing their ability to enact a defined political agenda—unless it is purely in keeping with the status quo. Without bona fide parties, democracy is structurally incapable of providing a forum for the mediation of interests, or to achieve self-correction—a key quality for which democracy is vaunted as a regime type—falling prey to insurmountable collective action quandaries. If the empirical and theoretical rationales wielded here to project further deinstitutionalization—leveraging insights from various subfields of comparative politics—are anything to go by, we can expect more and more Latin American countries to exhibit the above dynamics, to the detriment of democracy and overall governance. Over the past twenty years, the empirical trend in Latin America is clear: a movement towards party system deinstitutionalization. Electoral volatility across the region rose in the course of the 2000s and 2010s with respect to the 1990s (Roberts 2014, 53), as did the more pernicious variant of volatility, the extra-systemic kind. Successful party-building has been an infrequent phenomenon in Third Wave Latin America, and even 1 The term electoral vehicle is used throughout this book to denote diminished type political parties that do not fulfill some or all of the key functions ascribed to parties, such as vertical aggregation or horizontal coordination.

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more uncommon in the past two decades (Levitsky et al. 2016), while the electoral attrition of old and new parties throughout Latin America has not abated (see: Alcantara 2020). The number of countries that have experienced party system collapses or partial collapses continues to grow. El Salvador and Honduras are the most recent such cases. Party-building has not kept apace to substitute for fallen systemic political parties, nor are there powerful theoretical reasons to expect a broad-based emergence of institutionalized parties. If the tendency of the past three decades continues, polities without institutionalized and systemic parties shall become more common. As a paradigmatic “democracy without parties,” Peru is a forerunner of what the not-too-distant future shall hold for some Latin American democracies. Thus, the importance of studying Peru supersedes the case at hand. The perusal of the Peruvian party universe becomes ever-more relevant insofar as more polities in the region come to increasingly resemble the Andean nation as regards the substance of the entities at the center of political competition, ones that hold seats in, and affect the workings of, legislatures: personalistic electoral vehicles. This ongoing change in the nature of democracy’s competing units inexorably undermines the normative function of elections as a mechanism of representation, alters the nature and regularity of electoral dynamics, and hollows out the substance of democratic governance. In these areas and others, much of Latin America shall also come to develop Peruvian political dysfunctionalities—expounded in Chapters 5 and 6 (see also: Vergara and Watanabe 2017). This introduction chapter begins by documenting the extensive scope of party system deinstitutionalization across Latin America, selecting democracies which had seemingly resisted this trend until very recently— Mexico, Brazil, El Salvador, and Panama—in addition to cases of party system decay or collapse in the post-2000 era, such as Colombia, Bolivia, and Ecuador. It also delves into party universes that have hitherto been hailed as highly institutionalized but have decayed and are showing signs of impending further deterioration—namely, Chile, Costa Rica, and Honduras. This regional picture is intended to show readers, however briefly, the broader relevance of perusing Peru as a paragon of a democracy without parties: it portends what is in store for much of Latin America in the foreseeable future. Ongoing deinstitutionalization trends are difficult to reverse because of environmental factors exogenous to

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party politics proper, and because of endogenous causes inherent to under-institutionalized party universes. Peru shows that partylessness can constitute a self-sustaining political equilibrium (The case of Guatemala is equivalent to that of Peru and could be used as a case study for the very same purpose of providing a real-world forerunner of the end-state of current regional developments; see Sanchez 2009; Sanchez-Sibony 2022). The foreseable future of Latin American democracies shall not be party-based or party-centered. This highlights the importance of understanding the implications of Peru’s partyless environment for the quality and workings of democracy: it holds region-wide lessons. The chapter proceeds to outline theoretical reasons to expect democracies in Latin America to continue to generally move towards more inchoate party systems and party nonsystems. This outcome is predicted on account of inimical structural environments for party-building or the forging of durable party–voter linkages, low incentives to invest in party-building on the part of politicians, systemic regime malperformance in the provision of public goods abetted by decaying party systems, endogenous factors inherent to low party system institutionalization settings inimical to party building, and predicted growth in the prevalence of party-eroding presidential agency, among other causal factors. After taking the reader on a region-wide tour documenting decaying party systems across Latin America, this introduction spells out the book’s objectives, both theoretical and empirical. The monograph’s overall objective is to provide a framework or conceptional structure that can furnish a better understanding of the workings of a democracy without parties, as well as flesh out the conceptional structure’s empirical manifestations. For this purpose, we deploy a combination of new, as well as underused, analytical concepts—political entropy, electoral vehicles, personal brands, party nonsystems, negative legitimacy environments, compressed temporalities—to make comprehensible what underlies the disruption, chaos, and volatility that characterize partyless polities, while uncovering reoccurring processes and outcomes that may not be apparent to the naked eye. To use a common expression, there is a logic to the (political) madness witnessed in these environments, but some of the standard concepts used for institutionalized party settings are insufficient and/or inadequate to the task of understanding such a logic, that is, to make sense of underlying patterns of political behavior and reocurring outcomes. It is here maintained that these new and underused

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concepts shall be increasingly pertinent and helpful to analyze and understand Latin American politics as the region’s party systems continue to deinstitutionalize. This introduction provides reasons why the weakening of party-based politics is likely to proceed across the region. Finally, a chapter-by-chapter outline of contents is provided to inform the reader about the contents of the book and how it is organized.

2

Party System Deinstitutionalization Across Latin America

Party systems have weakened throughout most of Latin America over the past quarter century. Some countries have experienced dramatic party system collapses (Bolivia, Venezuela, Ecuador, and Colombia) which have completely reshaped political dynamics and paved the way towards electoral authoritarian regimes or delegative democracies. Peru, of course, suffered the first such party system transformation, blazing a trail as a precursor of later regional political developments. Other polities witnessed partial party system collapses (Argentina, Costa Rica), such that a major opposition party crumbled and became confined to political marginality, amplifying by default the power of major party rivals. In Argentina, the collapse of the Radical party allowed the Peronist party under the Kirschners to substantially debilitate formal and informal checks and balances. Yet other countries have experienced the substantial decay of traditional parties, which lost their previous centrality—such as Colombia and Panama. Electoral democracies evincing longstanding partyless landscapes (Peru, Guatemala) have seen a perpetuation of that anemic predicament, dooming prospects for productively channeling long-ignored societal interests and demands. In other countries, the societal discrediting of the traditional parties has paved the way for the emergence of new populist party formations, as exemplified by the rise of LIDER in Honduras or MORENA in Mexico—both centered around individual caudillos. The three mainstay Mexican political parties which have structured the party system since the late 1980s face an unprecedented level of disrepute in the eyes of voters and an uncertain future (Greene and Sánchez-Talanquer 2018). The trend is not uniform, as a few countries are experiencing not deinstitutionalization, but rather reconfiguration of the party system—such as Uruguay. However, contra Mainwaring (2018), and with the benefit of observed developments in the three years that have elapsed since the publication of his volume Party

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Systems in Latin America: Institutionalization, Decay and Collapse, it can now be unambiguously asserted that the evolution of party systems in the region is not so much diverse as it is convergent: party system deinstitutionalization is generalized. Party system weakening is by far the most important inter-temporal development in the realm of party politics in Latin America, and perhaps in the broader realm of democratic governance. The four cases that Mainwaring held up as examples of increased institutionalization—Brazil, Mexico, El Salvador, and Panama—have seen their party systems suffer major decay (Panama is a partial exception), a logical denouement stemming from latent sociopolitical forces that were ongoing and simply needed more time to play out. Let us briefly delve into these four cases. 2.1

Brazil

Brazil was until recently showcased as an exception to regional deinstitutionalization patterns because it evinced lowering levels of electoral volatility, as well as evidence of increasingly programmatic party politics, coupled with the consolidation of the PT as a societally rooted party (Hagopian et al. 2009). However, the profound political implications of the Lava Jato corruption scandal, which has tarnished and discredited all major parties in Brazil, triggered a dramatic turnaround in the ongoing party system strengthening trend. The 2018 presidential election saw the rise of a political maverick to the presidency (Jair Bolsonaro), hitherto a marginal member of Congress, amidst the decline of one of the pillars of the extant party system—the PSBD. This unexpected electoral result was facilitated by a process whereby anti-petismo (negative voter sentiment towards the Workers Party) transmuted into generalized anti-partisanship, that is, the popular rejection of political parties writ large (Fuks et al. 2021). The chasm between parties and voters has grown wider. The key pillar of the system, the PT or Worker’s Party, blamed for economic malperformance since 2013 and the Lava Jato corruption scheme, has seen its popular support erode quite dramatically. Petismo (the level of PT partisanship) is not nearly as broad as Lulismo, the social base that accrues to Lula da Silva (Hunter and Power 2019). The Worker’s Party excessive dependence on Lula, as evinced by its lackluster performance in the 2018 elections when he could not head the party ticket, spells ill for the PT’s future electoral competitiveness, which has become confined to Brazil’s northeast (ibid.). The other crucial party pillar of Brazil’s party

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system in the third wave era, the PSDB, suffered an ever-greater decline as a result of Brazil’s multifaceted confluence of crises, posting a dismal performance in recent regional and congressional elections such that the PSBD’s days as a major national party appear numbered (Hunter and Power 2019, 79). Yet a third party, the MDB, which has acted as a kingmaker party adding to forge working congressional majorities, suffered enormous losses in the epochal 2018 election. The Lava Jato corruption coupled with dire economic and security performance in the past half decade have irretrievably shaken a democracy that is moving away from party-based politics. The dealignment of Brazil’s party system has generated levels of political fragmentation so extreme as to pose enormous challenges for governability, which in turn, shall negatively affect the regime’s output performance going forward. The polity’s ability to make coalitional presidentialism function can be expected to dwindle, on account of greater fragmentation, shorter-time horizons, greater polarization, and the encroachment of radical populism. Brazil no longer displays a stable without roots party system, as Zucco (2015) labeled it. It is now more uprooted and much more unstable. It has suffered a major decline in levels of institutionalization. All indications to date point to the prospect that Brazilian politics shall continue to display considerably more instability and unpredictability, amid the further erosion of political parties’ already low social rootedness. The rise of a populist figure like Jair Bolsonaro is a manifestation of the broken bonds of minimal social capital and trust required for stable party–voter linkages. Brazil displays the features of a negative legitimacy environment (see Chapter 3) in abundance, such that negative political identities (anti-Petismo, anti-Lulismo, anti-Bolsonarismo) are predominant in shaping voter attitudes and behaviors, and political outsiders enjoy a priori advantages over discredited old-timer politicos. This bodes ill for Brazil’s party-building prospects. 2.2

Mexico

In Mexico, a political maverick (former PRI member) running outside the three main parties won a governorship (Nuevo Leon) for the first time in Mexican electoral history in 2016, a harbinger of developments to come. The 2018 election rose to the level of a political earthquake of major proportions (Greene and Sánchez-Talanquer 2018). A cocktail of serious economic and public security malperformance, coupled with

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inter-party collaboration (the Pacto por Mexico), combined to dilute the party brands of the hitherto three keystone party pillars of the Mexican party system: PRI, PRD, and the PAN. In addition, the vaunted new PRI headed by President Pena Nieto presided over the highest levels of corruption in the post-2000 era, implicating Nieto and cabinet members as well. The trend toward increased voter dealignment and a concomitant growth in independent voters had been burgeoning in the years before the 2018 general election (for a detailed overview of this trend, see: Moreno 2018, 41–69). There were signs of growing party system deinstitutionalization, gathered from attitudinal and other data (Díaz Jiménez and León Granatios 2019). Political maverick Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador saw these trends early, left the sinking PRD party, and astutely created his own electoral vehicle (MORENA) to run on an unabashedly anti-establishment and populist platform. His strategy paid off handsomely in the 2018 presidential elections, in which voters departed the three traditional political parties en masse and subsumed these formations in an existential crisis. Mexico has moved towards a hegemonic party system, such that the ruling party’s opponents are rather small outfits with little capacity to enforce a check-and-balance function. The diminished opposition parties have short-term incentives to cooperate to confront the juggernaut that is Lopez-Obradurismo, in ways that may well dilute their party brands further. MORENA, on its part, is a highly personalistic, Lopez Obrador-centered party filled with political opportunists who have jumped aboard at the prospect of power. Olvera (2020, 130) notes that Obrador constructed a political platform that was ideologically incoherent and comprised of groups “that have little in common, except the figure of the leader.” These political elites, low on technical expertise, have been drawn to the ruling party by way of selective incentives, not programmatic affinity. There is little that holds MORENA party notables united other than naked political expedience, given that they comprise a motley crew of opportunists from different ideological persuasions and provenance (PRI, PAN, PRD, Partido Verde). The upshot is that once Obrador leaves the political scene the party’s future is questionable. Concurrently, the social disrepute of the traditional parties appears to be long-lasting. The corruption schemes uncovered implicating all three once-systemic parties, including the Mexican chapter of the Oderbretch region-wide scandal, diluted basic bonds of trust between voters and parties. Thus, the personalistic nature of MORENA, coupled with the enormous opprobrium afflicting the traditional parties, much diminished

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in electoral stature, suggest that a post-Obrador Mexico shall bear the marks of a political system less structured by parties and more dominated by personalities. Obrador’s most lasting political legacy may be his contribution to the insidious onset of serial populism and personalistic politics, a scenario paved by the abysmal legitimacy of performance of successive PAN and PRI post-2000 governments. 2.3

El Salvador

El Salvador also experienced a political earthquake in the 2018 and 2019 general elections, signaling a dramatic rupture with the extant two-party system. In the parliamentary contest of 2018, the FMLN lost almost 40 percent of its vote with respect to the previous two elections. The leftist formation had been declining since 2009. The 2019 presidential election constituted a party system collapse, defined as an event where the systemic parties collectively earn less than 50 percent of the vote. The electoral event left little doubt that voters were deserting not one but both systemic parties, ARENA and the FMLN. Maverick politician Bukele won by a landslide, subsuming one of the most institutionalized party systems in Latin America in an existential political crisis. The FMLN lost 74 percent of its votes, and ARENA 48 percent, with respect to their results in the presidential election of 2014 (Rodriguez and Solano de Martinez 2020). A familiar cocktail of inefficacious government, corruption, low economic growth, and rampant public insecurity, primed voters to choose an anti-establishment, populist candidate. Bukele, former mayor of San Salvador, had left the FMLN to stand as an independent candidate, in a strategic maneuver reminiscent to that of Lopez Obrador’s in Mexico. The March 2021 parliamentary elections confirmed and deepened voters’ flight en masse away from the two traditional parties, as the contest shaped up as a plebiscitarian exercise in support for the maverick incumbent President. ARENA saw its vote haul diminish to 12.1 percent, while the FMLN saw its vote crash to a mere 6.9 percent of the nationwide vote. Bukele’s electoral vehicle, Nuevas Ideas, obtained a sky-high 66 percent of the votes. The two traditional parties became bystanders in the new configuration of power in the legislature. One of the hitherto most institutionalized party systems in the continent has now crumbled, as the polity appears headed toward a competitive authoritarian regime—on account of Bukele’s enormous popularity, his authoritarian proclivities and actions, and the extreme weakness and disrepute of his diminished partisan opponents. The case of EL Salvador shows

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in dramatic fashion how rapidly a seemingly institutionalized party system can collapse, after a prolonged period of political and economic malperformance. The rootedness of the traditional two-party system appears to have been shallower than commonly ascertained by country experts. If theory and past empirics in the region are any guide, Salvadorean politics is entering an era of defined by populism and personalism. Assorted personal vehicles shall challenge a popular caudillo, such that the structuring power of Salvadorean political parties has likely ended for the foreseeable future. Instead politics is now structured around the positive and negative identities revolving around Nayib Bukele’s personal brand. 2.4

Panama

While in the case of Panama the decay of traditional party politics is not as advanced yet, it shows many of the ingredients that render this democracy vulnerable to future party system implosion or decay. In 2019, for the first time three electorally viable independent candidacies stood for the presidency, widely interpreted as a sign that the room available for outsider politics, manifested in the proportion of floating voters, has grown larger (Malamud and Nunez 2019). The Omar Torrijos-founded PRD came back to the presidency by a thin margin, ousting the Cambio Democratico. The Partido Panamenista, the third systemic party, suffered a strepitous decline, hauling barely 10 percent of the total vote, damaged as it was by the unpopular administration of Juan Carlos Varela (2014– 2019). Independent candidate Ricardo Lombana made important strides in the political scene by winning no less than 20 percent of the total vote, the best performance by an independent candidate to date. Party brands in Panama have weakened, and ideology is an unimportant source of party–voter linkage, in a country bereft of a bona fide leftist party. Personalism has become an ever-more central form of linkage with voters, with all signs pointing to its continuing growth. Popular dissatisfaction has been mounting during the 2010s, with high level corruption and economic maldistribution of growth, and the rising cost of living, emerging as key themes. Two of the country’s most prominent politicians face corruption charges, Ricardo Martinelli and Juan Carlos Varela, besmirching the politics profession writ large. As the Varela administration came to an end, growing dysfunction among political parties and their inability to work together in the National Assembly, much less to achieve legislative and executive collaboration to advance citizen interests point

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to increasing governability problems (Conniff and Bigler 2019, 319). The increase in overall electoral volatility over the 1999–2009 period and attendant meteoric rise of a new third party—Ricardo Martinelli’s Cambio Democratico—reconfigured the party system. By contrast, the new rise in overall volatility over the 2014–2019 period is attributable to a significant degree to newfound extra-systemic volatility, that is, vote-shifts away from Panama’s three systemic parties. The 2019 parliamentary elections also saw a qualitative jump in the electoral performance of independents (Brown Arauz 2020). While Panama’s macroeconomic performance has been the best in Latin America since 2000, levels of economic informality remain around 50 percent of the workforce, and income inequality remains extremely high. This is a structural socioeconomic profile that renders Panama vulnerable to the advent of a much more inchoate party universe in the future, should current popular dissatisfaction with political parties continue to deepen and the electoral returns accruing from clientelism wane. 2.5

Continuing Party System Weakness: Bolivia and Colombia

2.5.1 Bolivia The collapse of Bolivia’s party system proved, like elsewhere in the region, a momentous event with non-reversible consequences (Faguet 2019). In place of the old promiscuous power sharing of the tripartite party system, a hegemonic party system emerged, led by the Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS) party. The MAS constitutes a notable exception in a region where electoral vehicles have become the norm, as opposed to bona fide parties. The MAS is socially rooted, organized, and is broadly representative of a historically marginalized indigenous peoples of Bolivia (Anria 2018). However, the feckless and disorganized political opposition to the MAS did not engage in party-building. Notwithstanding the staying power of the MAS, the Bolivian party system post 2005 has been very fluid. The coterie of opposition figures that have attempted to defeat the ruling party in nationwide elections have run atop personalistic vehicles. Many of these figures have been recycled politicians from the pre-party system collapse era, thus tarnishing their legitimacy and ability to build bridges with governors and civil society leaders (Vergara 2011). The electoral coalitions built to challenge the MAS were inorganic and hastily put together, irretrievably breaking apart in less than one electoral cycle (Cyr 2017, chap. 7). Politicians such as Manfred Reyes Villa,

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Carlos Mesa, Jorge Quiroga, Samuel Doria Molina, Luis Revilla, and others evinced an ambition for power, but largely eschewed constructing organization that could help rebuild a healthy party system. The upshot was the advent of an exceedingly asymmetric party system: a veritable party (the MAS) surrounded by ephemeral electoral vehicles with little claim to institutionalized representation. The enormous disparity in social and institutional power between the MAS and this changing collage of electoral vehicles has contributed to the rise of an electoral authoritarian regime (Sánchez-Sibony 2021), which undermined the few earnest if incipient party-building projects that emerged. The MAS actively worked to suppress the partisan political opposition, with notable success. In addition, the MAS was beset by growing levels of personalism during the 2010s, as Evo Morales came to wield de facto dominance within the MAS organization well beyond the rule-based party statutes. Bolivia’s strong civil society and organizational density offer mobilizing structures for party-building; however, the fragmentation of the political space associated with its political decentralization (Eaton 2016) has so far proven inimical for scaling up efforts aimed at nationwide party-building. As Bolivia enters the 2020s, it evinces one party with high levels of social rootedness (MAS), amid an otherwise barren partisan landscape. 2.5.2 Colombia The Colombian traditional party system, dominated by the Conservative and Liberal parties had undergone significant decomposition by the early 2000s (Boudon 2000). The two traditional parties, built upon clientelistic networks and sociocultural party brands, suffered erosion in their social rootedness throughout the 1980s and 1990s. The malperformance of these parties in the eyes of citizens comprised the areas of public security, corruption, economic growth, and the continuing scourge of the civil conflict against the guerillas. Alvaro Uribe, a former Liberal party member, sensed an opportunity to disrupt the two-party duopoly of power by running as an independent. His maverick campaign delivered a resounding victory and precipitated a party system collapse, insofar as the two traditional parties gathered less than a combined 50 percent of the vote (Morgan 2011). It was an asymmetric collapse insofar as the Conservative party’s loss of popular support was much more pronounced than that befalling the Liberal party. However, it was less asymmetric than the collapses seen in Argentina or Costa Rica. The new central political cleavage in Colombia became the Uribismo versus anti-Uribismo

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fault line. Both traditional political parties scrambled for position in that novel political environment, with the Conservative remnants alongside some Liberal party factions jumping onto the Uribista electoral juggernaut. Liberal party dissidents formed the Partido de la U , configuring the largest of support for Uribismo in the national Congress. Other Uribista parties have appeared in the past twenty years, but they never created robust party organization (Albarracin et al. 2018, 249). The evolution of the party system since 2002 has been marked by high volatility, manifested in the entry by many new parties. The Peace Accords spawned the division of Colombia’s elites: the urban elites sided with President Juan Manuel Santos (Santismo) and the peace efforts, while the rural elites backed Uribismo and its partisan representation, the Centro Democratico. This division is part and parcel of Colombia’s more fluid party politics. Uribismo is increasingly losing its former political appeal, as Alvaro Uribe now ranks as the most rejected former President, amid his serious judicial travails. The 2022 general elections are geared to be the first in the past 20 years in which the Uribismo versus anti-Uribismo cleavage is not the most decisive in shaping outcomes. The emergence of that political cleavage manifested the rise of personalism in Colombia; the cleavage’s decline does not, however, indicate the return of party-based politics. The electoral appeal of the political Left has burgeoned in Colombia, a development facilitated by the end of the armed conflict with the FARC guerillas. Indeed, the most significant new party to irrupt on the scene in recent years has been the leftist Polo Democratico Alternativo. While a salutary development from the viewpoint of broader ideological representation and pluralism, there are reasonable questions about the extent to which the growth of the Polo entails a case of party institutionalization. Its success owes much to the coattail effects of Petrismo, that is, the electoral appeal of former Bogota mayor Gustavo Petro. There are other relevant developments that showcase the insidious entrenchment and growth of personalism, in contrast to party-based politics. Progressive, center-left forces have scored important victories in Bogota, Medellin, and Cali on the back of strong personal brands, such as those of Claudia Lopez and Sergio Fajardo. In short, there is abundant evidence that the prospects of political parties and electoral vehicles in Colombia are ever-more dependent on the appeal of individual candidates that head the ticket. In line with what has transpired in other countries in the region, Colombian politics has been rocked by mass-level protests (in 2018 and 2021) that evince a greater

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chasm between the state and society, particularly among the young. The popular distrust heaped on political parties has spawned new citizen initiatives to directly scrutinize and publicize the behavior and voting patterns of lawmakers in Congress, bypassing political parties (Avila 2021). The features of a negative legitimacy environment are increasingly in evidence in Colombia’s politics, foreshadowing fast-paced changes and ongoing deterioration in party–voter links. The new post-Uribista era showcases a greater level of political uncertainty than any in recent memory, amid a more fluid electorate and a less party-bound political class. As the 2022 presidential elections approached, the contest was one largely shaped— clientelistic networks notwithstanding—by the popular appeal of three political personal brands: on the left, Gustavo Petro; on the center, Sergio Fajardo; and on the political right, Federico “Fico” Gutierrez. Political journalist Juanita Leon, director of the reputable La Silla Vacia online outlet, described the electoral campaign as a referendum on “Gustavo Petro, and less about continuity or change” (El Pais 2022). The trend toward the personalization of politics continues unabated in Colombia, if impregnated with ideological content. 2.6

Partyless Landscapes: Party Nonsystems

2.6.1 Ecuador Ecuador has not recovered from the implosion of the party system effected in the 2002 and 2006 elections. From the mid-1980s to the late 1990s, the country was structured by a party quartet. While volatility was high, it was largely of an intra-systemic character, such that vote-switching occurred among the aforementioned systemic parties. The electoral vehicles of banana magnate Alvaro Noboa (PRIAN), university economist Rafael Correa (Alianza PAIS), and military officer Gilmar Gutierrez (PSP) emerged as the big winners, displacing the party quartet from political center stage. However, the PRIAN and the PSP were not able to establish themselves as systemic parties. The collapse of the party system paved the way toward an incumbent-engineered construction of a competitive authoritarian regime (Sanchez-Sibony 2017, 2018), once more underlying the importance of robust and rooted political parties to check power-accretion. For over a decade, Correismo, a personalist political movement around the figure of Rafael Correa, stood as a colossus surrounded by small opposition personalist vehicles that could not contain it. While Correa was undoubtedly popular, the slanting of playing fields of

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competition during his tenure in office inevitably overstates the apparent rootedness and the level of popularity of his regime, when measured by electoral results (Sánchez-Sibony 2017). Correa’s legitimizing strategy was based upon an enormous increase in public spending fueled by an oil commodity boom. His regime’s “permanent campaign” centered around the delegitimation of political parties and the politico-economic establishment (Conaghan and De la Torre 2008), drawing much political capital from negative legitimacy-type sources. The regime hardly bequeathed a positive legacy for party-building. Its propagandist efforts of political socialization into anti-partisan attitudes may well have helped entrench the Ecuadorean electorate’s historical penchant for populism and cults of personality. Alianza PAIS never developed effective political autonomy from Correa, nor the makings of a rules-based party endowed with strong internal organization. Once ensconced in the presidency, Lenin Moreno’s surprising break from Correismo divided A-PAIS in two factions and a contingent of defectors; the divisions do not obey ideological lines as much as personalistic ones. Lenin Moreno’s hold on “Correa’s personalist party [was] purely instrumental” (De la Torre 2018), based on the President’s supreme access to sources of patronage in a political system with a longstanding clientelistic party-voter linkage profile. Insofar as Moreno moved the party to the right, not least by way of adhering to neoliberal orthodoxy, the party system deinstitutionalized along a key marker of Mainwaring’s (2018, chap. 1) revised institutionalization criteria. Taking stock of the broader canvas, the party landscape in Ecuador has been in disarray for two decades, with opposition to the Correa and Moreno regimes coming from personalistic vehicles led by businessman Guillermo Lasso (CREO), populist magnate Alvaro Noboa, the much-diminished Partido Social Cristiano led by Cynthia Viteri, and the regional challenge posed by PSC Guayaquil mayor Jaime Nebot. Ecuador has displayed an exceedingly inchoate party universe centered around a personalistic dominant electoral vehicle surrounded by a changing panoply of personalistic vehicles. Correismo bequeathed a legacy of polarization that did not translate into a more institutionalized party system structured on the basis of programmatic differences. Rather, personalism reigned supreme amid the ruling electoral vehicle as well as among political opposition outfits. Not surprisingly, Correa’s electoral vehicle, Alianza Pais, “disintegrated, since its electoral and political machinery had been built from the state and its resources” (Polga-Hecimovich and Sánchez 2021, 11). The polity evinces many of the ingredients that render it a good candidate for

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party nonsystem status, including personalistic vehicles lacking durable linkages vis-à-vis voters and what this book calls a “negative legitimacy environment.” Attitudinal indicators signal profound citizen distrust and alienation vis-a-vis political parties (Moncagatta et al. 2020). 2.6.2 Guatemala The case of Guatemala most closely resembles that of Peru in the Latin American region. Guatemala constitutes a paradigmatic party nonsystem ever since 1985 (Sanchez 2009). Its party universe has exhibited continuously high levels of extra-systemic volatility in that the most prominent electoral vehicles over the past thirty-five years have not been prominent for long, taking center stage in the political system for no longer than two electoral cycles. This has been the short-lived fate of the most relevant vehicles to populate Guatemala’s wretched democracy: Christian Democrats, the PAN, the populist Frente Republicano Guatemalteco (FRG), or the Partido Patriota (PP). None of them enjoyed durable party–voter links, and all of them have suffered from their dependence and lack of autonomy from individual political entrepreneurs and have inexorably succumbed to the logic of party entropy. The Unidad Nacional de la Esperanza (UNE) displays a somewhat longer timeframe of political relevance (2007–2019), on account of its clientelistic networks concentrated support in rural Guatemala and an incipient party brand (party of the poor) (Sanchez-Sibony and Lemus, forthcoming). However, its near-term future appears now cloudy and uncertain, in good part because the personalistic nature of the UNE attaches its fortunes to those of its leader Sandra Torres, who is now imprisoned facing severe corruption charges. Much like in the case of Peru, party-switching in Guatemala is rampant, because individual political survival requires jumping onto new electoral vehicles while they stay afloat, in an electoral marketplace where voters display the lowest levels of partisanship and trust in political parties in all Latin America. Virtually no political entrepreneur has deemed it worthwhile to attempt to invest in party-building (Alvaro Colom could be the partial exception). Guatemalan electoral vehicles hold little political value, they are bereft of valuable brands; rather it is individuals with valuable personal brands who shape electoral trends and outcomes, and on whose coattails, opportunists and free agents seek to make a (brief) political career. Guatemalan politicians display the same content for party labels as voters do, discarding them as soon as it is expedient to do so. The logic of political entropy has been a

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powerful and ubiquitous force in predestining the death or irrelevance of Guatemalan electoral vehicles, which much like their Peruvian counterparts operate in a negative legitimacy environment inauspicious for survival (Sanchez-Sibony, Forthcoming). Thirty-five years after the onset of electoral democracy in 1985, Guatemala continues to be a cemetery of “political parties,” with very damaging consequences for democratic governance. Presidential and parliamentary elections are largely irrelevant for setting the public policy direction of the country, which remains essentially unaltered regardless of what candidate and electoral vehicle comes to office, impervious also to the composition of the legislature. The similarities with Peru are indeed striking and provide a cautionary tale of the serious consequences emanating from, or that correlate with, democracies without parties. The fecklessness and lack of autonomy of Guatemalan electoral vehicles has paved the way for the capture of the Guatemalan state by the business sector and (more selectively) illegal racket groups, including narcos (Sanchez-Sibony 2023). Alongside Peru, the case of Guatemala shows that democracies without parties endogenously perpetuate through time the condition of partylessness. This condition has been conducive to the capture of the Guatemala state by organized business and, in parts of the state apparatus, capture by illicit criminal interests (Waxenecker 2019). 2.7

Institutionalized Party Systems No More: Costa Rica, Honduras, Chile

Party systems that have been hailed up among the most institutionalized in Latin America, namely those in Costa Rica, Chile, or Honduras have undergone decay and show signs of profound impending changes. 2.7.1 Costa Rica Costa Rica displayed a stable two-party system after the 1949 Constitution was drafted, such that the social-democratic party Partido Liberal Nacional and the conservative Partido Unidad Social Cristiana (PSUC) alternated in power. The burgeoning dealignment of the party system became manifested in the 1998 general elections, wherein rates of abstentionism rose by ten percentage points and the fragmentation of the party system began in earnest (Sanchez Campos 2007). A third party, the Partido Accion Ciudadana (PAC), made significant inroads into the party system in the 2002 election, riding the coattails of a former member of the

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PLN, Otton Solis. A string of corruption cases which came to light in the 2000s, involving former presidents Calderon Fournier, Rodriguez Echeverria (PUSC), as well as mass media scrutiny of the suspected corruption surrounding former President Figueres Olsen (PLN), damaged the image of the establishment parties, particularly the PUSC. In the 2014 Presidential elections, PAC candidate Luis Guillermo Solis broke through the two-party monopoly by winning the election (Treminio Sanchez 2018), profiting from his outsider image (he was a university professor) in a country where the politics profession had become seriously devalued in public esteem. But Guillermo Solis’ political capital was eviscerated in short order, a result of unmet expectations and a corruption scandal involving his administration as well as the legislature and the judiciary. The long shadow of corruption once again further dissolved party–voter linkages, granting room for anti-systemic challengers. The 2018 election thus took place in the context of an increasingly free-floating electorate; its outcome was largely shaped by contingent, short-term causal factors, as befits unstructured party systems. Evangelical pastor Fabricio Alvarado drew enormous political capital from his vocal opposition to a ruling by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights urging the Costa Rican state to grant political and civil rights to the LGTB community. The powerful irruption of a pure political outsider shook the foundations of the Costa Rican diminished party system, as the Alvarado phenomenon showed that the gates of populism into one of Latin America’s historically most consolidated democracies had swung open. Neither of the two traditional political parties was able to secure passage to the second round. The vote became more fragmented than in any previous election, as no candidate reached 25 percent of the vote. The PAC candidate, Carlos Alvarado, obtained the presidency on the back of a negative legitimacy, as voters repelled by Fabricio Alvarado’s reactionary and ultraconservative views on social issues flocked to his opponent. The PAC’s modest haul in the legislative election, in comparison with its presidential election performance, was prima facie evidence of the limited rootedness of the PAC qua political party. Electoral volatility for legislative elections for the 2014 to 2018 period stood at over 35 percent, such that Costa Rica was unmistakably converging with regional democracies known for patterns of high party system instability (Picado Leon 2020). In addition, scholars have corroborated that ever-greater portions of the Costa Rican electorate party-unattached, free-floating status (Alfaro Redondo 2019).

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Political parties have diluted their party brands, chiefly because of never-ending high-profile corruption scandals that have undermined public faith in democratic institutions in what was hitherto considered one of the regions’ few consolidated democracies. In addition, the country is facing rising economic problems, including lower GDP growth, public finance quandaries, and higher unemployment, all of which are undermining the economic foundations of a (shrinking) welfare state (Colbrun and Cruz 2018, 50–51). Economic underperformance and lower state services, together with growing governability problems, shall continue to eat away at party–voter links and abet personalist populism. The outcome of the 2022 general elections followed the trends here delineated. The abstention rate of 40 percent of registered voters was the highest in Costa Rica’s electoral history, a manifestation of the electorate’s deepening political alienation. The incumbent PAC party disappeared from congress after failing to gather one percent of the vote. Personalist populism made a powerful irruption onto the political landscape once more. Former World Bank economist Rodrigo Chaves, armed with a populist anti-establishment discourse, was victorious in the presidential contest, while his electoral coattails catapulted his newly created electoral vehicle (Partido Progreso Social Democratico) to become the second largest caucus in the legislature. In a highly fractured legislature, three new electoral vehicles entered the chamber for the first time. Given the structural conundrums ailing the Costa Rican economy and attendant pressures on the welfare state, as well as an attitudinal setting moving in the direction of what this book calls a negative legitimacy environment, incumbency shall become a destroyer of political parties in the Central American nation—as suggested by the dramatic fate of the PAC party. 2.7.2 Honduras Honduras long displayed one of the most stable and oldest party systems in Latin America. The Partido Liberal and the Partido Nacional Hondureno dominated an elitist two-party system that seemed impermeable to change. It was a bipartisan political system built on clientelism as the keystone of its party–voter linkage profile (Taylor-Robinson 2010). While personalist-driven factionalism has pervaded both political parties, there were strong incentives for elites to remain faithful to either party, for the patrimonial benefits accruing from state access occurred via membership in these two parties. The 2009 attempt by President Manuel Zelaya to usher in constitutional changes and the subsequent coup d’etat to drive

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him out of power changed Honduras politics irretrievably. Before these events, party politics had been characterized by low levels of polarization and limited ideological and programmatic differentiation. But Honduran party system rested on weak foundations. Clientlistic linkage profiles are more vulnerable than other linkage types (Morgan 2011). Should state resources decline, or the ability of parties to channel it dwindle, the party system can break down. This scenario afflicted Honduras (Torres-Rivas 2010). The problems of representation befalling the two-party system became manifested in rising rates of abstention throughout the 2000s, reaching 49% of voters in 2009. President Zelaya, evincing a long career as an establishment figure but sensing this rising discontent, turned into a maverick politician, wielding an anti-establishment discourse. The crisis brought about by the 2009 coup, carried out by the military at the behest of the bipartisan establishment, spawned the division of the Liberal party. It also deepened the chasm between citizens and the two ruling parties. This fracture became manifested in the rise of personalist political options, with anti-establishment narratives (Otero Felipe 2013). One such personalist project was the Partido Anticorrupcion (PAC) led by Salvador Nasralla, a renown sports journalist. Another offspring of the 2009 crisis, was the creation of the personalist LIBRE party, led by Manuel Zelaya and his wife Xiomara Castro de Zelaya. In the 2013 elections, Honduras’s social movements closed ranks in opposition to the establishment parties. The combined tally of the two traditionally hegemonic parties totaled 57% of the vote, a marked decline vis-à-vis the historical pattern. The 2017 general elections were fraudulent, reinforcing the nondemocratic nature of National party stalwart Juan Orlando Hernandez’s regime (2013today). The ensuing mass-level protests, incorporating all popular sectors of Honduran society, only further widened the large state–society chasm, with inexorably consequences for the future. Populist candidate Salvador Nasralla was officially declared to have gathered 41 percent of the vote, while the Liberal party candidate only posted a mere 15 percent of the vote total. A genuinely free and fair election would have manifested the irretrievable decay of traditional bipartism in Honduras even more clearly. The party system’s clientelistic linkage profile is fragile, as manifested in the past decade. The success of populist candidates such as Manuel Zelaya and sports journalist/TV personality Nasralla suggest that the polity is headed towards serial populism and personalist politics once the traditional parties, fronts for Honduran elites’ hegemony, fully crumble. The National party Hernandez government, reportedly financed by

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narco money, suffered from enormous levels of unpopularity, reflected in ongoing protests by all manner of social collectivities (Sosa and Almeida 2019). It handled protests with a repressive modus operandi. Honduras approaches a failed state, utterly incapable of providing basic public security and penetrated by illicit rackets and narcos. The 2021 general elections confirmed the downward trajectory of the traditional two-party system. In fact, the presidential results constituted a party system collapse, inasmuch as the two hitherto systemic political parties jointly garnered less than 50 percent of the vote. The LIBRE outfit, a personalist electoral vehicle founded by former president Manuel Zelaya, led by his wife Xiomara Castro, won a decisive victory. Ever since she led protests in 2009 against the coup d’etat that ousted Zelaya, Castro built a personal brand over the years as a political leader autonomous from her husband and a steadfast opponent to the authoritarian Orlando Hernandez regime (Welp and Brown Arauz 2021). While Honduras is seemingly staging a return to electoral democracy, personalism and serial populism shall define its political dynamics going forward. The National party and the Liberal party, among the oldest in the world, will find it very difficult to escape the fallout from their tarnished party brands, and to overcome their reduced access to clientelism as an instrument to amass support. . 2.7.3 Chile All indications are that Chile’s stable without roots (Luna and Altman 2011) party system is also on the cusp of experiencing major change and deinstitutionalization—perhaps profound. The new Constitutional Assembly, summoned with a mandate to renew Chile’s stale politics, will probably lower the barriers of entry into the political system and lower at least some of the built-in institutional advantages accruing to insider political parties that have hitherto limited political competition and limited the erosion of the main parties. Thereafter, governed by new rules of the game, the degree of social uprootedness besetting Chile’s party system— manifested in very low levels of partisanship—will come into full view when it transforms the partisan landscape. As of 2019, Chile displayed the very lowest level of societal trust in political parties, registering a staggeringly low 6% of respondents who declared having a lot or some trust (the same level as Guatemala) (Latinobarometro 2019). This baseline level of uprootedness portends large changes to come in the Chilean party system and its degree of institutionalization. The process of Chilean personalization of politics has been ongoing for at least a decade. Longstanding

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parties have plucked candidates with origins outside the world of politics, cognizant that outsiders garner increasing voter appeal. One of the first clear manifestations of the crisis of legitimacy besetting the Chilean party system was the success of a political establishment candidate who decided to run as an independent in the 2009 election, Marco Enrique Ominami (Dosek 2014). Ominami’s foray as a maverick candidate, critical of the political status quo, yielded no less than 20% of the votes in what was widely regarded as one of the most institutionalized party systems in the region. By the early 2010s, Chile was undergoing an incipient process of deinstitutionalization (Dosek 2014). Chile today displays one of the very lowest levels of citizen trust (a mere 6 percent) in political parties and one of the lowest levels of partisanship in Latin America (LAPOP). Until recently, Chilean parties were stable but uprooted, perpetuating their electoral intake of votes in part by dint of self-serving institutional rules that limited competition from challenger-type third parties. The Chilean party system continues to be under stress. The programmatic linkage it enjoyed has become much diluted, while other linkage strategies presently seem ill-equipped to shoulder the burden of that decline (Morgan and Melendez 2016, 52). Chilean politics shows many signs of growing personalization, as Luna (2017) explains, a side-effect of the decline of party-based democracy. The institutional reforms that Chilean party elites have embarked upon are defensive reforms aimed at damage control, but they are unlikely to rebuild the party–society ties that have been lost. The Constituent Assembly election scheduled for 2021 could lower barriers to entry and allow for citizen discontent to undermine the standing of the political parties that have dominated Chilean democracy in recent decades. The epochal 2019 mass protests in Chile, with precedents in previous years, underscored the enormous chasm that has arisen between state and society (Palacios-Valladares 2020). Said chasm is already having political ramifications that may engender the collapse, partial or total, of extant party system. In the May 2021 elections to select representatives for the Constituent Assembly independent candidates earned a sizable 30 out 155 seats, while establishment parties suffered major losses. This result confirmed ongoing deinsitutionalization trends and provided a glimpse into future Chilean voting patterns. The 2021 presidential and parliamentary elections signified a collapse of the Chilean extant party system—as collapse is conventionally defined, that is, the systemic parties put together garner less than 50 percent of the total vote. Gabriel Boric, heading the party Convergencia Social

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and prominent leader of the student revolts that shook up the Chilean establishment, surpassed the tally of the traditional center-left to enter the second round of the presidential elections. His meteoric political rise would not have been possible but for a context of profound party system decay. The leftist Frente Amplio coalition he led built political capital on the basis of negative legitimacy, namely, a narrative that offered a devastating critique of the political pillars sustaining the post-Pinochet democratic regime as well as its inherited neoliberal economic model. On the political right side of the spectrum, the traditional political right was outflanked by a far-right order-and-stability personal brand, that of Jose Antonio Kast. In 2016, he had defected from the rightist Unidad Democratica Independiente to create his own outfit, the Partido Republicano. Electoral dealignment also allowed other political entrepreneurs to cast an electoral imprint. Political outsider Franco Parisi, an economist armed with an anti-party discourse and campaigning from the United States, obtained a significant 12.8 percent of the presidential vote. These dramatic political changes have been enabled by underlying mutations amid Chilean society: “the burgeoning of a party-skeptic sector of the electorate, skeptical about longstanding political practices and ideologies, irritated by political, military and business corruption, individualist in orientation and more complex in its judgements and opinions” (Granados Roldan 2021). As an expected side effect of electoral dealignment the new political landscape was characterized by a newfound level of party system fragmentation, such that 21 parties entered the Chamber of Deputies. Evincing a large cohort of independent voters, higher levels of political alienation, and an unanchored party system in flux, future Chilean politics entered the 2020s with a much higher level of uncertainty about its future direction and contours. The secular trend towards rising volatility is not new; it can be traced to the early years of the Third wave of democratization in Latin America. Regional electoral volatility was higher in the 2000s than in the decade of the 1990s, which itself displayed higher levels of region-wide electoral volatility than the 1980s (Roberts 2016). Electoral volatility has not declined in the 2010s (Carreras and Acácio 2019). This sustained record of instability in inter-temporal patterns of voting has shattered the famous notion that the passage of time would naturally lead to a process of mutual adjustment between parties and voters that would stabilize electoral patterns. Successful party-building has been exceedingly scant in Latin America during the Third wave, with only 11 parties having passed the

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threshold proposed by Levitsky et al. (2016) to measure party success— namely 10 percent or more of the vote across 5 consecutive elections. The empirical reasons to think that party system decay will proceed apace in the 2020s are powerful. The record of the past thirty years provides a picture of long-term secular decay, indicating that powerful undercurrents pushing electorates toward floating voter status are at work—even if the nature of all these undercurrents have not been yet fully identified, nor have their complex interactions. There is no example today of a Latin American country that has experienced continued institutionalization of its party system from the 1980s or 1990s until the early 2020s, except for Uruguay—where the emergence of the Frente Amplio realigned the party system into one with three systemic parties rather than two, such that the mass of voters who became dissatisfied with the Colorado–Blanco duopoly found an adequate institutional avenue to oppose that duopoly. As the above account has depicted, three of the four countries that scholars once believed to be on a trend towards party system institutionalization—Brazil, El Salvador, and Mexico—have been rocked by electoral earthquakes that laid bare the underlying vulnerability of their voter-party links. In all three countries, voters have deserted hitherto systemic parties in large numbers and opted for personalistic vehicles, upsetting previous system-wide alignments. The fourth, Panama displays incipient signs of dealignment with consequences for the near future—already manifested in the large electoral inroads of a political outsider. The following section aims to outline several structural, historico-contextual, technological, as well as sociological reasons why we can reasonably expect party system decay into the future, beyond a simple extrapolation of past empirical trends.

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Theoretical Reasons to Forecast Continued Party System Decay

There are also important theoretical reasons to forecast an indefinite continuation of the observed deinstitutionalization pattern across Latin American party systems. This section will paint the political landscape of the region with broad brushes, necessarily eliding country specificities. It provides theory-informed reasons for why Latin America can expect to witness the further decay of party-based politics. There is, of course, cross-country variation in the degree to which some of the arguments put forth in this section apply. However, other forces bearing

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down upon the region’s party systems are more homogenous in their impact. Six sets of structural reasons to expect generalized party system weakening will be spelled out in this section: the nature of the terrain (technological, economic structure, sociocultural, state–societal linkages, etc.) in which politics operates in this era; the party-shunning incentive structure facing politicians given said political terrain; the party-eroding effect of political agency in contexts pervaded by free agents, populists and political outsiders; the mutually reinforcing relationship between, on the one hand, state malperformance and democratic regime malperformance, and on the other hand, party system deinstitutionalization; global sociological trends Latin America partakes in that affect its state– society relations and citizen attitudes toward political parties; and finally, given the actual state of disrepair of Latin American party landscapes, endogenous sources inherent to inchoate party systems that perpetuate and deepen under-institutionalization. We start by outlining a short-term reason why the 2020s shall prove to be a decade that is inimical for partisan institutionalization before delving into the longer term structural causal forces. A factor that presages increased party system deinstitutionalization in the medium term relates to the impact of the commodity boom period (2003–2013) on the socioeconomic composition of Latin American electorates. That era of prosperity, fueled by high raw material prices, led to a significant augmentation in the size of the region’s middle class, on the order of an additional 100 million middle-class citizens (World Bank 2013). This development transpired in most countries across the sub-continent during the resource bonanza, alongside low international interest rates and ample availability of foreign capital. Political scientists have associated the growth of the middle class with an expansion of political participation and a “revolutions of rising expectations” on the part of upwardly mobile populations (Huntington 2006). Middle classes are vocal advocates for the expansion and better quality of welfare-enhancing public goods in realms such as education, health care, transportation, etc. When real-world delivery of public goods falls short of heightened expectations, disenchantment with party politics writ large grows, and social unrest erupts. In line with theoretical predictions, this newly minted middle class comprised the bulk of the citizen protest movements that rocked the region in the post-2015 period, from Brazil and Ecuador to Colombia and Peru (Anderson 2020; Murillo 2021).

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Political scientists have deemed the dashed expectations of this (precarious) new middle class, as economic conditions worsened soon after the commodity boom ended in 2013, to be an important factor underpinning the electoral losses racked up by incumbent parties in recent years. Hopes of upward mobility have also been dash because of the economic downturns brought about by the COVID pandemic. This points to the effect of larger-sized (even if precarious and downwardly mobile) middle classes on political and voting behavior: higher expectations of office holders and concomitantly higher levels of (electoral) vertical accountability—manifested also in higher levels of street political activism. As Penfold and Rodriguez (2014, 47) have written, much of this new middle class remains in a situation of “high vulnerability and this can contribute to the generalized rejection of politics…in response to the inefficiencies and deficiencies experienced in the provision of certain public goods such as health, education, and social assistance.” Political parties are finding it devilishly difficult to adequately meet the increasingly “complex needs of a middle class that is crying out for improvements in services and quality of life” (ibid., 48). All in all, the enhanced societal expectations created by the commodity boom (2003–2013), coupled with its temporal end, shall continue to have a sizable political impact going forward, insofar as dashed popular expectations of prosperity and public goods provision should be reflected in anti-incumbency and antiestablishment voting patterns. The end of the commodity boom has already prompted serial governmental turnovers. Indeed, the seemingly confusing or time-inconsistent electoral results of the 2010s decade in Latin America are best understood as anti-incumbency voting, rather than an ideological social choice to vote for the political left or the political right (Luna and Kaltwasser 2021). It will be difficult for extant and new political formations to gain the inter-temporal loyalty of the region’s now larger and more vocal middle-class group of voters. In this new sociopolitical context, there is another medium-term consideration to note: the 2020s may well become another “lost decade,” as CEPAL has forecasted (CEPAL 2020), because of the damaging short-term economic impact and longer term economic legacies bequeathed by the Covid pandemic. If so, not only will the (economic) performance legitimacy of governments suffer, but the ability of governing parties to stake out different economic policy positions, and thus protect programmatic brands, will be very limited, given a much-reduced fiscal room of maneuver and the added power global markets wield in lean economic conditions to demand

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market-friendly policies (see: Campello 2015). In short, favorable conditions for programmatic brand dilution shall obtain during the 2020s. This, alongside generalized economic malperformance (a lost decade or half decade) across the region, may well spawn a new round of political party collapses to join the list of Latin American parties that fell out of public favor due to mandate reversals and convergence in programmatic platforms during the 1990s and 2000s (Stokes 2001; Lupu 2015). A first set of structural reasons for expecting continuing deinstitutionalization of party systems relates to the nature of Latin America’s current social-organizational environment for party-building. This structural context includes less expansive mobilizing structures and atomized electorates that are exceedingly difficult to represent, let alone encapsulate. The neoliberal era of free-market reforms damaged some key mobilizing structures, particularly labor unions (Murillo 2002; Cook 2010). Labor unions across Latin America have lost membership and mobilizing capacity. The neoliberal reform era also involved extensive privatization and outsourcing efforts that diminished the size of the public sector. The growth of the informal sector workforce in many Latin American economies, associated with the neoliberal reform era, has similarly presented enormous challenges for political incorporation and representation (Centeno and Portes 2006). The enormous size of the informal sector in Latin America, about 50 percent of the overall working population dovetails with truncated welfare states and contributes to vast state–society chasms and attendant support for populism (De la Torre 2017) and rentier populism (Mazucca 2013). Not only does this feature of the economic landscape seriously limit interest group incorporation into institutional politics, but also renders more difficult the forging of programmatic links with (informal sector) voters. Political parties saw their ability to sustain interest group linkage diminished during the neoliberal era (Morgan 2011, 54–60), insofar as the economic structural foundations of such linkages had changed under their feet. The regional landscape of organized interest groups and their relationship with the state and political parties have also changed. In the past, many key interest groups were integrated into the state and the party system via corporatist arrangements. The new interest regime in Latin America features social organizations with weak ties to political parties, showcasing linkage patterns that are generally more distant, fluid, and instrumental (Collier and Handlin 2009, 59). Popular associations have partially supplanted parties in their representational functions—albeit they confront enormous

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collective action problems. Social organizations also enjoy greater societal trust than political parties do, as consistently seen in polling data. In a growing number of national contexts, linkages between electoral vehicles and organized interests are barely discernable. Amid negative legitimacy environments where parties and vehicles are beset by widespread social disrepute (see Chapter 2), social organizations face few incentives to link up with such entities, shunning them instead. All in all, the legacy of the neoliberal era leaves an economic structural landscape inimical for interest group-party linkages. A powerful theoretical rationale for forecasting weaker party systems going forward involves the technological landscape in which politics is inserted in the contemporary era. Several developments have changed the terrain wherein democracies operate in ways that are inimical for partybuilding. The technological environment of the XXI century provides ready-made party substitutes that obviate the need to engage in the costly, arduous, and time-consuming tasks associated with party-building. Social networks (Twitter, Facebook, and Wattsapp) allow politicians to reach a wide audience and communicate with followers without party infrastructure (Zullianello et al. 2018). Politicos wielding a populist strategy are fond of using these technologies because they make possible the circumvention of traditional mass media controlled by the economic establishment. The new technological environment also abets the shortening of political cycles; new technologies spread information rapidly and without filters. This background contributes to rendering the stock of legitimacy accruing to governments and political parties more evanescent. Ceteris paribus, the advent of Television as a mass consumer phenomenon signified an invaluable political asset for anti-party political outsiders (Boas 2005). As former Brazilian president and public intellectual Henrique Fernando Cardoso famously put it, “it is more useful for a politician to own a TV channel than to own a political party.” These early advantages for nonparty politicians have been further reinforced with the advent of social networks such as Twitter, WhatsApp, and Facebook. Social networks can act concurrently as sources of misinformation and qua accountability instruments that dramatically shorten de facto presidents’ traditional four- or five-year constitutional mandates. It becomes very difficult for politicians to hide inconvenient information from the voting masses, while their ability to engage in effective damage control is also constrained insofar as traditional mass media outlets are no longer all-encompassing or effective gatekeepers of information. The result is

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that such technologies accelerate political time. What is more, there is growing evidence that the spread of social media across Latin America is heightening mistrust in democratic institutions (Lupu et al. 2020, 160). Political parties are among the chief targets of this enhanced societal mistrust. Political parties qua organizations have lost, and stand to continue losing, electoral competitiveness amid this new technological environment, particularly in relational terms vis-à-vis nonparty political outsiders and mavericks. Liberation technologies, as they once were branded, have a mixed effect on democracy and party politics (Diamond and Platner 2012). Some of the elements that produce a deleterious impact on party-based politics are increasingly clear (Tucker et al. 2017). Social media contribute to the creation of echo chambers which often undermine the cognitive foundations of democracy, chiefly, a fact-based standard of truth that is widely shared by citizens. These technologies also undermine the ability of political parties to engage in successful political damage control, because there are no longer important gatekeepers of informational flows, in light of the hyper-fragmentation of mass media and informational environment writ large. Additionally, social media facilitate the work of populists (and not infrequently, non-populist outsiders, mavericks and other political entrepreneurs) in their ambition to delegitimize party politics and undermine party norms (Siles et al. 2021). On balance, new social media instruments are a boon to personalism and to anti-party populism, facilitating their rise and grip on the body politic. It is a technology that allows populist figures to circumvent traditional mass media outlets wherever anti-party populists wage politicoinformational warfare against political parties. The technopopulism of Rafael Correa or more recently that of Nayib Bukele, provide notable examples. Finally, much as occurred with Television’s irruption into mass politics (Sartori 2012), social media outlets act as party substitutes, thus sharply lowering incentives for political entreprenuers to engage in the hard work of constructing on-the-ground party organization. Armed with social media and TV, political outsiders and independents can thrive electorally without troops of activists, militants, and party workers to canvass political territory, to knock on doors, and to talk to voters face to face as in traditional campaigns. There is broader period effect that explains the higher electoral volatility of Third Wave democracies, as demonstrated by Mainwaring and Zocco (2007). During the pre-Third Wave era, political parties incorporated and created new citizens (Collier and Collier 2001). Political parties in the contemporary historical era are no longer central

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in their putative roles of political incorporation and the forging of citizenship. Other than exceptional cases such as the Bolivian MAS, the political parties that have emerged in the post-1978 Third Wave period in Latin America have not fostered the strong identities and social functions characteristic of previous historical eras. The period in which democracy emerges is thus revealed as important for understanding relative levels of stability in patterns of inter-party competition. This underscores the broader importance of historical world time for coming to terms with the nature and configuration of state–society intermediation. Yet another force bearing down on party systems relates to the institutional environment in which politics shall operate. In democracies undergoing profound political legitimacy crises, societal pressure builds to enact permissive institutional reforms that lower party-formation costs. As Negretto shows (2013), reforms promoted in contexts of political crisis mostly ambition to regain some of the broad-based legitimacy political systems have lost. To the extent that they lower barriers to entry into institutional politics, social demands to open up political systems can foster political renewal, but also foist deinstitutionalization pressures upon party systems. Party systems that are relatively uprooted from society have persisted through time helped, in part, by institutional features that limit political competition. In such settings, excluded groups and disenchanted democrats have wielded democratic arguments to expand political participation. This rationale has underpinned more permissive institutional rules to allow for the entry of new political parties and independent candidates, including lower registration or congressional entry requirements. These efforts to lower system legitimacy deficits transpired in a number of countries: Colombia at the time of its 1991 Constituent Assembly; Peru as democracy winds were blowing in 2001, in the wake of the implosion of the Fujimorato; Argentina in the wake of the 2001 economic debacle and attendant political legitimacy crisis; Mexico after the 1988 electoral fraud (Scherlis 2014); and quite possibly the case of Chile as a Constituent Assembly in 2022 debates institutional reforms amid a system-wide political legitimacy crisis. After the fragmentation of party system and the governability costs of such permissive electoral reforms becomes obvious and onerous, within-the-system political elites often introduce restrictive reforms, in part for strategic self-serving reasons (Scherlis 2014). However, while institutional changes can mechanically reduce congressional fragmentation and attain some temporary rationalization of the party system, there is little evidence that these reforms were able

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to slow down the ongoing trajectory of party system deinstitutionalization. Electoral reforms cannot repair voter alienation, recuperate lost societal trust toward political parties, or rebuild damaged party–voter linkages. Institutional frameworks shape incentives and thereby, presumably, political behavior. But the relationship between institutions and behavior can be circuitous, as it is muddled by confounding intervening variables. The effects of formal regulatory frameworks designed to help the process of party organizational building are often disappointing, due to pervasive institutional weakness as well as the influence of pernicious informal institutions (Helmke and Levitsky 2006). The defensive institutional reforms witnessed in Latin America—defensive in that they are aimed at mitigating the legitimacy deficits burdening democracies—entail presumed benefits from the viewpoint of inclusion and representation, but often accelerate the deinstitutionalization of party politics. For example, pressures for political decentralization have had the unintended effect of disarticulating mainstream political parties’ center–periphery relations, granting regional and local party apparatuses more autonomy and thereby damaging the ability of parties to act as a disciplined, cohesive political actor nationwide (Morgan 2011, 62–63). Decentralization has also fostered the growth of regional movements and assorted electoral outfits that fragment party systems and encroach upon and undermine national parties’ geographical reach (Sabatini 2003). Party system nationalization levels have suffered as a result (Harbers 2010). Other institutional reforms that contribute to party or party system weakening include the spread of open party primaries or the lowering of thresholds of entry into Congress. While purposeful agency aimed at strengthening party system is certainly possible and observed in some countries, the relative adequacy of new institutional designs is impacted by the existing level of party system institutionalization. In party-scarce settings, short-term oriented, feckless electoral vehicles with legislative responsibilities are the drafters of such legislation. In consequence, we can expect party system weakness to result in policy and institutional cycling as well as instability surrounding the national electoral laws drafted to govern the behavior of political parties. To sum up, the prospects of competent party-strengthening legislation that is sustained through time shall decrease in tandem with party system deinstitutionalization across the region. Prospective institutional changes in the rules that govern political parties, by dint of their frequency and/or inadequacy, shall contribute to deepen ongoing trends.

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A second set of reasons for predicting further party system-weakening relates to the incentive structure facing actual politicians and wouldbe politicians in the contemporary political and electoral environment. Public opinion data is unequivocal in evidencing a widespread aversion toward traditional political parties, mass publics’ disdain for politicians, and derision of “politics-as-usual” modalities of behavior. Political parties consistently rank as the most distrusted institution, and overall trust in parties has diminished through time, as is true of most other key political institutions (LAPOP 2001–2019; Latinobarometro 2010–2020) Grosso modo, an ever-larger share of disgruntled voters in the region is attracted to anti-establishment figures who eschew political parties. This political environment, therefore, selects for political outsiders or mavericks atop personalist electoral vehicles, which in due time come to dominate the political supply vis-a-vis establishment politicos. Promising newcomers to the political scene who display externally appealing personal brands are well aware that their political future is more promising by way of crafting political careers that circumvent existing party labels, particularly traditional ones. Political outsiders are less socialized into democratic and party politics, and generally discount the value of party organization to advance their political ambitions. Relatedly, outsiders are less inclined to invest in party-building than longstanding insider politicians, not least because they are less predisposed to accept the check-andbalance function and restraining effects that party organization and internal rules impose upon party leaders (Mayorga 2006). For all the benefits institutionalized political parties can theoretically bring to political actors—including the provision of institutional power resources and collective action capabilities—outsiders are more likely to discount such benefits, and perhaps to be less aware of them to begin with. Political neophytes not socialized into democratic politics are more disinclined to invest in partisan institutional strength and nationwide organization, notwithstanding the electoral benefits that party organization can purchase for electoral success (see: Van Dyck 2014). Insofar as political outsiders create and manage electoral vehicles intended as personal instruments, these political entrepreneurs are much less likely than other politicians to endow inherited or newly created vehicles with significant levels of independent institutional authority. The genetic origin of electoral vehicles/political parties is essential in accounting for their future institutional evolution. Legal entities born as personalistic vehicles rarely escape their initial institutional fecklessness, that is, they rarely transmute

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into bona fide institutions. Because Latin America shall continue to move in the direction of political ecosystems populated by outsiders, there shall be little political agency geared towards party-building. The new electoral vehicles that intrude on the scene and replace the existing ones tend to be of comparatively lower levels of institutionalization, thereby weakening the organizational fortitude of the party universe writ large. To summarize, in the contemporary period, the growing vote shares earned by personalist electoral vehicles, coupled with the erosion of extant political parties, yields a net loss in terms of party system-wide institutionalization. Over time, as more institutionalized parties come to command lower shares of the overall vote and the reliability of their electoral performance also diminishes, the incentive structure facing extant and would-be politicos alike is progressively altered. Growing party system weakness also heightens the cost–benefit ratio entailed in party-building from another perspective. A powerful rationale for engaging in party-building lies in confronting the organizational prowess of the political opposition; that is, investing in party organization can be a way to reduce or overcome some of the advantages that opponents enjoy in mobilizational and/or collective action capabilities. However, as party universes move towards the generalized underinstitutionalization of their constituent units, political entrepreneurs simply do not necessitate, or have less of a need, to fend off (institutionally feckless) political oppositions via party-building. Diffusion and imitation also play a role in explaining the absence of party-building. Because political neophytes atop feckless electoral vehicles are increasingly triumphant in electoral competitions across Latin America, current and future Independents are enticed to copy the winning partyless strategic playbook (Levitsky and Zabaleta 2019). Because campaigns are public in nature, would-be politicians are provided with ready-made templates of, and vehicles for, successful electioneering. The cross-polination of experiences and political learning beyond national boundaries has long been documented among established politicians, but it is also common among political outsiders. Another important feature of the prevailing incentive structure facing politicos relates to the nature of political time. Political horizons in the contemporary era are not what they once were. Luna (2021) shows that Latin America exhibits much compressed temporalities, in that political legitimacy has become much more transient. For illustration, the legitimacy of sitting presidents declines more precipitously than in times

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past. At the onset of the Third Wave, it took an average of around 40 months for Latin American presidents to suffer a 10 percent drop in popularity, whereas in recent times (i.e. across the most recent three general elections) that timespan has been reduced to less than half of the original timespan, that is, less than 20 months (ibid., 13). The data unambiguously shows that virtually all Latin American countries have suffered compressed temporalities, as manifested in the increasing transience of presidential approval levels. Party-scarce and partyless countries, such as Peru have predictably experienced an even more drastic compression of political time, for incumbents in these countries face public opinion in naked fashion, without the cushion of partisans. This compression of political time can be made extensive to political actors other than Presidents. The acceleration of political time inevitably shapes the strategic calculations of political entrepreneurs across the board. In addition, the increasing transience of power as a generalized phenomenon, following Naim (2014), is also manifest in the political sphere: representatives and office holders witness their power resources and social appeal evaporate more quickly than before. This shortening of political cycles, which translates into more evanescent political capital, necessarily shortens the time horizons shaping political behavior. Newcomers to the political scene are more likely to discount the future, which itself reinforces the acceleration of political time. In a context of ever-shifting political winds (i.e., changing preferences, fickle popularity ratings, and high electoral volatility), political entrepreneurs are incentivized to do what is expedient in the very short term, which may involve defecting, switching parties or electoral vehicles, or creating a new political outfit. Partly as a result, nonparty norms of conduct become more prevalent, accepted, and ultimately entrenched, inasmuch as individual politicians’ imperative to instrumentally adapt to changed political scenarios trumps party-loyal behaviors. This generalized behavior lowers prospects for party durability, not least because it weakens internal coherence, deprives parties of valuable cadres, multiplies splits and defections, and renders brand building or brand maintenance much more challenging. Relatedly, partisan incoherence is known to be punished by voters. Ceteris paribus, the growing transience of power, including social power, shall contribute to more frequent turnovers of incumbent parties—provided that the relevant political playing fields have not been tilted in favor of the incumbent. The shortening of political cycles also enhances overall political uncertainty (which can be disaggregated into political, economic,

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and institutional variants). This landscape helps generate puzzling patterns of party development, because systemic uncertainty shapes the strategic decision-making calculus of party leaders (Lupu and Riedl 2013). Indeed, elites with short time horizons, “invest less in programmatic appeals, consistent party brands, and institutionalized party organizations” (Lupu 2015, 135). Thus, where time compression obtains, a mutually destructive vicious circle between short-term guided political behavior and party deinstitutionalization can be expected to befall more Latin American democracies. Political agency has been undertheorized as a source of party system deinstitutionalization. It constitutes a third reason to expect weaker parties and party systems in the foreseable future. How leaders exercise power, for example whether they engage in extensive institutional self-dealing or not, is of consequence for our dependent variable. The net effect of political agency going forward shall also be to undermine party systems rather than to build or shore them up. To be sure, the identification of political agency as a factor that can weaken party systems (see: Tanaka 2006), can no longer be considered a curiosity limited to Alberto Fujimori’s Peru; new episodes of presidentially orchestrated delegitimation and destruction of opposition parties have over the past two decades ensued in Venezuela, Honduras, Ecuador, Bolivia, Nicaragua, and others (Levitsky and Loxton 2013; Sanchez-Sibony 2017, 2021; Balderacchi 2018; Marti i Puig and Serra 2020)—and it is a process currently underway in El Salvador (Melendez-Sanchez 2021). Purposeful political agency destructive of parties has arguably become the modal type of agency exerted upon the partisan arena from the perch of the presidency. Agential forces destructive of political parties shall spread more widely still across Latin America. It is important to underscore how agency and structure are here intertwined: should party systems continue to unravel, the rise to power of anti-democratic individuals wielding populist strategies will become a more prevalent phenomenon, alongside presidentially-engineered party system deinstitutionalization. Anti-establishment populists have the predisposition, incentives and enjoy the windows of opportunity (i.e. legitimacy crisis junctures), to undertake actions that erode opposition political parties. In short, the erosion of parties accelerated by top-down presidential agency is a phenomenon endogenous to party weakening. Therefore, we cannot conceptualize agency-driven party destruction as emanating from independent, discrete political episodes which occasionally happens

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to batter a democracies. Rather, agential top-down party destruction as a phenomenon is a travel companion of larger party system deinstitutionalization undercurrents. Anti-party outsiders are best positioned to enter the democratic political game when party systems are about to collapse or decompose, which they proceed to undermine further via formal and informal stratagems. Thus, while the deinstitutionalization of party systems continues apace, we can expect the further diffusion of topdown political agency aimed at the electoral and organizational damage of extant party rivals as well as the pre-emption and hindering of opposition party-building. A fourth rationale to forecast the continuing decay of party systems centers upon the relationship between regime performance and party system institutionalization. It is difficult to conceive how Latin American democracies can deliver better performance across a range of issue-areas (economy, education, health care, public safety, corruption control) without a sustained process of state-building. The formidable baseline constraint on output performance posed by low infrastructural state power is essential to comprehend why many democracies perform poorly, almost irrespective of the particular governments in office (Fukuyama 2015). Weak party systems and party nonsystems foster populism, a form of exercising power and conceiving of the political game that produces measurably deleterious effects on the relative impartiality and effectiveness of state institutions. Populists who are successful in their quest to patrimonialize the state inevitably hamper democratic regime performance across manifold issue-areas—from economic growth and job creation to public security performance to corruption control. Free-floating electorates also yield, ceteris paribus, more fragmented legislatures, rendering social choice more difficult. The collective actions problems standing in the way of institution-building can thus become more daunting should party universes continue to fragment. In addition, inchoate party systems are associated with the disarticulation between the legislative and executive branches (Mainwaring and Scully 1995), contributing to ungovernability and muddling-through politics that impede the tackling of important problems. Furthermore, weak party systems fill legislatures with neophytes, compromising the production of competent, problem-solving legislation. Policy-cycling is also more prominent in polities where the identity of the most important electoral vehicles changes with regularity. Newcomers to the political scene who

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amass support on the basis of negative legitimacy have political incentives to do away with past public policies, regardless of their efficacy. In consequence, the forging of politicas de estado (policies that are purposely placed above partisan competition, so that they remain unchanged overtime) on crucial matters—from fiscal rectitude to crime policies to battling corruption—proves ever more elusive. These political and public policy performance-related quandaries contribute to producing more dealigned electorates that punish party actors on the basis of retrospective valence-type evaluations—an evaluative criterion that becomes more prominent as floating voters grow amid an electorate. (The ceteris paribus condition surely applies here, for clientelism and other factors mitigate retrospective accountability voting behaviors. However, partisanship shall be a less effective shielding factor as it continues to decline). Outsider candidates and new electoral vehicles even less predisposed to the arduous task of state-building than the diminished political parties inhabiting the current Latin American political fauna, shall come to populate the body politic. As congressional and party universe fragmentation increases as a result of ever more dealigned electorates, the collective action dilemmas confronting state-building and public-regarding public policy will become more onerous. To be sure, institutionalized political parties and party systems do not display a solid track record of state-building in Latin America. All politicos are beset by a quandary, as Barbara Geddes (1994) famously explained in her monograph The Politician’s Dilemma. This dilemma alludes to the notion that politicians have a priori incentives to co-opt or politicize state institutions as a power-accretion strategy, because patrimonialism affords them discretion and control and thus political power; however, and herein the dilemma, the consequence is that this strategy is the weakening of state bureaucratic capacity. Studies show that usually an extraordinary confluence of historical conditions is required for large-scale state-building to materialize (Soifer 2015; Fukuyama 2015). The record of sustained state-building in Latin America over the recent post-1978 democratic era is poor (Mazzuca and Munk 2020). While state-building is demonstrably a politically difficult enterprise to push forward even amidst robust party system environs, in a context of inchoate and weakening party landscapes, the scales are clearly weighted in favor of state erosion. Latin America’s lackluster generalized record of state-building in the Third Wave era will predictably become poorer, and many states more

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patrimonial, should political ecosystems ruled by personalism and populated by feckless electoral vehicles become the norm. The prospects for strengthening state institutions are lower where populist formations and political outsiders hold court. The inclination, and often the opportunity, to politicize state institutions for self-serving aims is greater when partisan opponents to a populist government are weak and discredited. Pervasive politicization enfeebles (already weak) bureaucratic capacity across the apparatus of the state. Democracies burdened by diminished state infrastructural power yield worse performance across the board— from continued or worsening corruption to higher levels of common crime—which favors the electoral prospects of outsiders who promise fundamental change and accrue negative legitimacy by discrediting the extant political order. The impact of infrastructurally weak states upon corruption is systemic, for such states both incentivize the scourge and are institutionally incapable of curtailing its metastasis and reproduction through time. The increased political visibility of corruption is a priori a healthy development, in that it can enhance political accountability via retrospective voting. But even when corruption scandals dislodge incumbents from office or “boots the rascals out” (unless entrenched partisanship or high polarization blunt accountability), the ultimate political effect is often pernicious: agents who reap the benefits from voter valence evaluations of past political corruption are often anti-party populists and outsiders (Barr 2017). Heightened citizen perceptions of political corruption has been shown to motivate a search for alternatives outside the established party system (Seawright 2012, 144–164). High corruption environments often select for alternatives with anti-institutional inclinations, because voters are most susceptible to populist appeals in high corruption environs. Moreover, inadequate public goods provision and the attendant lack of public faith in programmatic politics often compels underprivileged voters to cast their ballots for political parties or vehicles they know to be corrupt but nevertheless provide particularistic benefits via clientelism. As a result, corrupt governments can maintain public support (Manzetti and Wilson 2007). Therefore, elections across Latin America are, empirically speaking, poor anti-corruption mechanisms; in practice, the instrument of elections often helps to perpetuate the corruption scourge. Perhaps no other phenomenon undermines social capital and the bonds of trust between citizens and political representatives more

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than corruption. Corruption perceptions are empirically found to diminish social trust (Richey 2010) and trust in political institutions at large (Morris and Klesner 2010), including political parties. Absent statebuilding to enhance the performance, transparency and accountability of state institutions, sustained reductions in corruption levels are unattainable, for good governance is at root a phenomenon that correlates with good institutional design and with institutional strength (Rose Ackerman 2016). The upshot is that, ceteris paribus, the punishment electorates foist upon parties and vehicles with governmental responsibilities shall be ongoing, electoral cycle after electoral cycle. (There are, of course, factors mediating this relationship, perhaps most prominently, levels of partisanship and polarization). Continuing party system weakening can be expected to contribute to higher levels of systemic corruption across Latin America. In principle, democracy qua regime possesses the capacity of self-correction, such that corrupt incumbents and parties can be voted out. However, research shows that high-corruption democracies’ ability to solve corruption-fighting collective action problems is weakened by the tendency of politically alienated voters to withdraw from all types of political involvement (Davis et al. 2004). This alienating side-effect of corruption not only blunts democracy’s presumed self-correcting capabilities but contributes to party system dealignment because more citizens retreat to the private sphere and become free-riders. In conclusion, it is not difficult to envisage how a vicious cycle of inchoate party systems, state-weakening (or state non-building), and sustained regime malperformance in corruption control, inter-temporally reinforce one another, in a mutually destructive dynamic. A fifth overarching development which undermines the staying power of political parties in Latin America and elsewhere involves a worldwide phenomenon. It relates to the global decline in the authority of traditional social and political institutions, with inexorable consequences for politics around the world. Traditional instruments and vehicles of political intermediation are affected. This structural, global trend encompasses the full range of mediating social structures, including political parties, business corporations, churches, labor unions, families, media outlets, voluntary organizations, and the like (Fukuyama 2020). Transparency norms, as they apply to the above-mentioned institutions, are changing dramatically, because citizens place less a priori trust on political parties, judiciaries, legislatures, and other political and social entities. These new transparency standards do not bode well for the capacity of political parties to meet

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(heightened) public expectations. The political culture literature has long revealed that, as societies modernize and attain higher levels of education, traditional value systems decline, and self-expression values become more prevalent (Inglehart 2018). Self-expression and secular values are less accepting, and more questioning of, authority. Research on value change in Latin America shows that self-expression values have grown in the region because of social globalization (De Castro et al. 2020), which has exerted a stronger impact on the erosion of traditional authority than the rise in material well-being. That is, there is a growing masselite convergence of values in the region, such that attitudes and values hitherto exclusive to elites have disseminated across large swaths of the population. Another social development permeating Latin America and other regions is the individualization of society, a concept expounded upon by famed sociologists Zygmunt Bauman (2013) and Alain Touraine (2016). Individualization is the process whereby society becomes institutionally and socially organized around individuals, whose behavioral patterns obey that narrow frame of reference. Institutions such as schools or the family that were once geared toward the socialization of individuals have generally lost that role, promoting individualization instead. In this new context, social norms become more arbitrary, and the ability of institutions (political parties included) to shape societal values and norms vanishes in tandem. According to Touraine, this environment makes for unpredictable societies dominated by arbitrariness and flexibility as pertains to the guiding social, moral, and political codes. Bauman (2013), on his part, defines today’s modernity as liquid, characterized by a dissolution of links between individual decision-making and collective projects. Latin America is not immune to these global trends, which dovetail with the increased number of political orphans or unattached voters. In sum, the growing social and political culture patterns (individualization, distrust of authority) underpinning continued citizen outmigration from political parties are on the march throughout the Latin America and the world. There is much room for the evolving transformation of Latin America’s political culture to play out: the continued evolution towards self-expression value-type societies shall translate into larger and fast-moving societal demands placed upon mediating institutions, posing formidable challenges for the adaptation and survival capabilities of electoral vehicles and the dwindling cohort of full-fledged political parties. A final reason to predict the non-reconstruction and further decay of party systems relates to their baseline level of institutionalization as of the

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early 2020s, as well as the nature of their overall linkage profiles. Today, the level of PSI in most countries in the region is medium to low. Relatedly, few of the still-standing party systems in Latin America today are structured on the basis of durable party–voter linkages (programmatic and ideological connections) (Singer and Tafoya 2020); rather, they rest upon weaker linkage foundations such as clientelism, personalism, and political marketing. Countries with feeble party-voter linkage profiles are more vulnerable to partial or total party system collapse, or otherwise slow but steady decay. Most party systems in the region showcase limited vertical aggregation capabilities (Luna et al. 2021). To the extent that endogenous sources of deinstitutionalization are more powerful among inchoate party systems than among more solid ones, the present (low) average regional level of party universe institutionalization bodes ill for prospects of moving towards party-based democracies. The many current Latin American party universes exhibiting weak to very weak levels of institutionalization are more prone to intertemporally selfreproduce or to decay than to strengthen, in no small measure due to forces endogenous to their very constitutive feebleness: the tendency of dimished political parties towards political entropy and decay; the incentive structures that obtain in arenas with large domains of competition, such that Independents and anti-party populism can perpetually thrive; the inability of political parties to retain or attract electorally promising politicians to their organizations; or the vulnerabilities inherent to personalism, including the proclivity towards dilution of personal brands. Once all of the endogenous sources of inchoate party system self-reproduction and decay are duly taken into account, we can more fully understand why party system institutionalization has been (and will be) rare among inchoate party systems. Meanwhile, the very few party systems that evince reasonably high levels of institutionalization (such as Uruguay) confront challenges to their future stability—some of which are outlined in this section. What the past twenty years of political development in Latin America have shown is that path-dependency conceptualizations of party system evolution (see Kitchelt et al. 2010; Roberts 2014), while illuminating, underpredict change. Empirically speaking, party system change and involution is occurring more rapidly than institutionalist or historical institutionalism paradigms allow for.

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4 The Personalization of Politics in Latin America and Its Correlates Latin America has moved increasingly toward the personalization of politics and political competition. It is well to note that the politics of a growing number of countries over the past two decades has been structured not so much by political parties as it has been structured by individual political figures who elicit mass-level popular adherence and aversion. In such settings, electoral vehicles are epiphenomenal insofar as they position themselves around person-centered political cleavages and are not autonomous sources of political allegiances. At no time since the Third Wave of democratization reached Latin America has personalism played so dominant a role in the political systems of the region. Let us delve into some cases for illustration. In Colombia, Alvaro Uribe has been the “central elector” or determinant of electoral outcomes ever since he irrupted in the national stage in 2002 and realigned mass-level political loyalties. Uribe’s redrawing of the political map forced the diminished traditional parties to play politics along the new personalistic-based cleavage. Uribismo versus antiUribismo became the main political cleavage in Colombia over the past two decades, far eclipsing in its structuring power any partisan allegiances (Gamboa 2019; Kajsiu 2019). After he left the presidency, Uribe’s support for two candidates (Jose Manuel Santos in his first election and Ivan Duque in 2018) propelled them to the presidency. When President Santos departed from Uribismo upon being hoisted to the presidency, politics continued to be framed along personalistic lines: Uribismo versus Santismo. In the same vein, Uribe’s rejection of, and public campaign against, the Peace Accords was the key factor in the astonishing defeat of the 2018 national referendum on the subject (Dávalos et al. 2018). Moreover, the rise of a prominent bona fide leftist party in Colombia owes a great deal to this nationalized pro and anti-uribista cleavage. Uribe’s political influence is much diminished as of 2021, and his judicial problems may well beget his departure from the scene and throw his party project (Centro Democratico) into fractionalization and uncertainty. Nonetheless, the personalist dynamics he ushered in continue unabated in Colombian politics, as personal brands such as those of Sergio Fajardo, Gustavo Petro, Alejandro Gaviria, and Claudia Lopez have taken center stage in

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recent years. Political parties, given their much-diminished social rootedness, will continue to take a backseat to personalism come the 2022 general elections. In Ecuador, the February 2021 general election proved that the political movement that populist leader Rafael Correa spawned, continues to be the country’s most decisive political force. While somewhat diminished since 2017, the personalistic movement that is Correismo continues to hold sway among voters, as Correa has remained in contact with his Ecuadorean followers from Belgium via Twitter. Since 2017, Movimiento PAIS was fractured along personalistic lines between Correistas and Morenistas, or followers of President Moreno. The 2021 general elections reaffirmed that personalism was the key structuring force underpinning Ecuadorean politics. Jorge Arauz won a plurality of votes in the first round of the 2021 elections because he was Rafael Correa’s designated candidate, not on the back of a political party. Meanwhile Correa’s Movimento PAIS has languished qua organization in the absence of its founder. The correismo versus anti-correismo political cleavage continues to be the main structuring force in Ecuadorean politics, to the detriment of a party-based polity. Pachakutik stands as the only relevant political party endowed with social rootedness, while the opposition constitutes an amalgam of personalities (most notably, Guillermo Lasso) and much-diminished traditional electoral vehicles (mainly the Partido Social Cristiano or PSC) that depend on clientelism and appealing personal brands for their political survival. In Argentina, Kirchsnerismo became a formidable force with surprising staying power, aided by the commodity boom and its polarizing tack to the left of the political spectrum, which helped lower the level of voter defection when economic performance suffered. President Alberto Fernandez owes most of his vote to the social base belonging to Kirschnerismo, such that Cristina Kirschner continues to lead the main politico-electoral faction within Peronism. The capacity of the Partido Justicialista (PJ) qua political party to structure Argentine politics has declined, not least because politicians within it have been willing to prioritize their personal ambitions at the cost of weakening the PJ, most notably Nestor and Cristina Kirschner. As Gervasoni (2018, 287) has noted, “by the second half of the 2000s, the main political cleavage in Argentina was not Peronism vs anti-Peronism. It was Kirschnerism vs anti-Kirschnerism,” that is, a personalist-centered cleavage. Several personalistic factions within Peronism have opposed Kirchnerismo, most

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prominently Sergio Massa, as leader of the Masista line (Murillo and Zarazaga 2020). Peronism retains a sociocultural party brand, but Argentine politics has transmuted into an amalgam of ever-shifting and incongruous coalitions of politicians, amid lower levels of partisan loyalty. The 2021 parliamentary elections provided evidence of the decline in the electoral effectiveness of clientelism, on account of the historically bad results Peronism obtained in poor provinces that have been traditional bastions for the movement. This decline can be in good part attributed to the cognitive mobilization fueled by Peronism’s opponents, in particular the CREO party, which has thrust issues such as meritocracy into the national agenda. Enhanced cognitive mobilization shall continue to erode traditional voting patterns and enhance vote volatility. In the midst of a declining party system and a progressively more dealigned Argentine electorate, personal brands find more room to thrive. This has most recently been witnessed in the electoral inroads made by ultraliberal, right-wing extremist Javier Milei. If current trends continue, personal brands will further erode to chip at the personism vs. anti-peronist dichotomy; moreover, personalist logics shall continue to fragment each of these two camps, pre-empting the rise of programmatic politics. Never in the almost forty years since the transition to democracy have Argentine politics displayed such a high level of personalism. In Venezuela, of course, Chavismo versus anti-Chavismo divisions have cleaved a polarized political landscape. The opposition to Chavez over the past two decades has arguably been more personalistic-centered than Chavismo itself, particularly after Chavez created the PSVU. Once Venezuela returns to the democratic fold, Chavismo, in its status as an authoritarian successor party, is likely to remain a significant contender, but a diminished force with respect to the past due to its disastrous performance in office, one of the worst economic track records ever amassed anywhere in the globe, which has depleted its level of support (Corrales and Loxton 2017). It stands to reason that two decades’ of Chavista rule have undermined the basis for party-centric political competition once democracy returns, both because the traditional parties have been repressed and delegitimized and because Chavismo itself has shot its former sources of legitimacy. Polls show that Chavismo enjoys no more than 20 percent support, and a good part of that figure is accounted for by respondents whose freedom of demand is seriously compromised, insofar as they depend on politicized government assistance to survive. The economic and sociopolitical conditions for serial populism

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and personalism to thrive are arguably stronger in the early 2020s than they were in the 1990s, when the old party system collapsed. A Datanalisis public opinion poll carried out in early 2021 revealed that only 12 percent of respondents would vote for Nicolas Maduro, 11.4 percent for opposition leader Juan Guaido, 30 percent did not know, and as many as 45.8 percent would cast their vote for an independent candidate (Alnavio 2021). Nicaragua displays political history dominated by personalism, including very prominently the Somozas dynastic rule. The transition to democracy in 1990, however, held hope that party-based politics would become institutionalized, helped along by the polarization bequeathed by the Sandinista revolution which split voters along ideological left–right alignments. The 2000s saw political competition among “three substantial parties,” that is, the FSLN (Sandinismo), the Constitutional Liberal Party (PLC), and the Alianza Liberal Nicaraguense (ALN) (Marti I Puig and Close 2012, 292). The infamous Pact, brokered by Daniel Ortega and Arnoldo Aleman, aimed at limiting competition and sharing power alongside the spoils of office among the two parties and leaders. Ever since Ortega won the 2006 election, he built a competitive authoritarian regime along personalistic lines by steadily demolishing all of the regime’s partisan enemies, including the Liberal party and Sandinista dissidents (Jarquin 2016). Nicaragua has since consolidated into a hegemonic authoritarian regime with sultanistic traits, such that Ortega, his wife Rosario Murillo and their children rule the country unconstrained by a hollowed-out Sandinista party or (subverted) political institutions at large. Ortega, who successfully turned Sandinismo into his personal instrument, leaves a nefarious legacy for party-based politics once democracy returns to Nicaragua. In El Salvador, the transformational effect of Najib Bukele’s irruption on national political alignments displays all the hallmarks to become lasting, eclipsing the political divisions bequeathed by the civil war embodied in the electoral competition between ARENA and the FMLN. The March 2021 parliamentary election constituted a de facto plebiscitarian contest in which voters chose to approve or reject Bukele’s anti-establishment, person-focused political project. Bukele appears set to continue the task of purposeful demolition of the remnants of ARENA and FMLN, in the institutional and political culture realms alike, reifying the danger of political parties qua institutions in the popular imagination.

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If the experience of other regional polities undergoing similar transformations is any guide, Bukele’s strongest and most legitimate opposition to the new nondemocratic regime shall emerge from other populist figures or non-populist personal brands, rather than from the discredited traditional parties. After the collapse of its tripartite party system, Mexican politics displays the markers of personalism more acutely than at any time in recent memory. Political conflict has largely become realigned along a pro versus anti-Lopez Obrador axis. No previous president in the democratic post-2000 era has matched Lopez Obrador’s power both within the ruling party and throughout the political system writ large. Most of the crucial reforms that have been carried out obey the personal predilections and political convictions of the president, not a party organization. As political scientist Jesus Silva Herzog has put it, Mexico today is a country much more dependent on one man’s will. Some of the political and legal reforms that the executive branch has pursued have been geared at weakening the independence and clout of democratic and oversight institutions, thereby deepening the already high person-centered lines of authority. The political opposition’s future electoral success shall rest heavily on the personal brand appeal of the candidates that parties field, for the party brands of the PAN, PRI, and PRD may have been irretrievably damaged. The consequences of the personalization trend are dire. As floating voters (independents) become the numerical norm across more national electorates, national political spaces become more fragmented. The atomization of political representation is one of the pernicious consequences for democracies that steadily move away from being structured by political parties. This, in turn, exacerbates problems of collective action and social choice, as legislative chambers become hyper-fragmented and presumably more inoperative—if standard political science theory is our guide. In tandem with more fragmented legislatures, minority presidents will become more common, alongside problems of governability resulting from the disarticulation of executive–legislative relations. In addition, the growing importance of personal brands for electoral success is wreaking havoc with the internal functioning and coherence of political parties. Even when reasonably institutionalized political parties win high office in Latin America, it has become more common to witness chief executives who are not in clear command of their parties, for such leaders do not fit the profile of a party notable with a long trajectory

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in the party that postulates them for office. Rather, they are put forth by party apparatuses on pragmatic grounds, precisely because independent or outsider candidates enjoy better polling numbers and electoral prospects. There thus arises an insoluble conflict between the electoral imperatives of political parties and the need to preserve their internal coherence. In Paraguay, the storied Partido Colorado postulated political outsider Horacio Cartes, a businessman. It was a move aimed at enhancing the party’s electoral competitiveness, and thus an acknowledgment of its declining appeal. Not coincidentally, this maneuver came not long after political outsider Fernando Lugo had defeated the Colorados in a national election, signaling popular disgruntlement with the hegemonic party. Even the storied Mexican PRI put forth as its 2018 presidential candidate a bureaucrat without PRista affiliation, Jose Antonio Meade, hoping that his apolitical personal brand would blunt the electoral consequences of the PRI’s damaged party brand and to distract from its scandals. The phenomenon of presidents without parties, as Manuel Alcantara has pointed out, has been growing through time. Alcantara avers that out of 136 third wave Latin American presidencies he analyzed over the past 40 years, 26 had no organic rapport with the party that postulated them for office… and the [remaining] 110 Presidents that did have such a relationship configured a scenario of different levels of relationship intensity, meaning the degree of presidential control over the party (El Pais, November 6, 2017). In short, not only are more outsiders and mavericks accessing the presidency in Latin America, but many old-time or traditional political parties are postulating outsider-type candidates, aiming to blunt or hide discredited party brands. Both trends pose inexorable problems for inter-branch articulation and governability, and ultimately for the performance of democracy as a system of government. Individual politicians who wield an electorally appealing personal brand find large incentives to break free from the political parties that nurtured them, because affiliation with an establishment party often carries electoral costs. Relatedly, the outsiders and mavericks who come to accept the backing of established political parties for their campaigns have often been fatally damaged electorally as a result. Mario Vargas’ Llosa’s 1990 fatal presidential run,—wherein he unwisely accepted the endorsement of establishment parties at substantial electoral cost, constituted a lesson for future political entrepreneurs. As traditional or established political parties become more discredited with time, ambitious politicians are incentivized to postulate independent candidacies atop personalistic electoral vehicles

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while eschewing tarnished traditionally parties that can damage their electoral viability. The precursor of this trend in the Third Wave era was Rafael Caldera in Venezuela. Ditching the very political party he founded, the conservative COPEI, he created his own electoral vehicle to run in the 1994 presidential election as a maverick—i.e., a political insider posing as an outsider. The strategic move proved electorally rewarding for Caldera, who had the political intuition to detect that his old party label had become a liability in a context of widespread and growing popular disenchantment with the political establishment (Dietz and Myers 2007), such that it outweighed the clientelistic and patronage networks and other potential electoral assets associated with COPEI . In Mexico, Manuel Lopez Obrador ditched the PRD and created his tailor-made personalist MORENA party, while Felipe Calderon’s wife Margarita Zavala chose to leave the PAN to pursue her ambition to run for the presidency via an independent candidacy. Also in Mexico, a longstanding member of the PRI, Jaime Rodriguez Calderon (better known as El Bronco) left the historic political party to run as an independent in the 2015 race for the governorship of Nuevo Leon, judging that the PRIista brand was damaged beyond repair and his personal brand was much more valuable (Hernández Alcántara 2017). He became the first independent candidate to win an electoral contest at that level in Mexico, and later tried his luck in the 2018 presidential election. In Colombia, longstanding party politician Humberto de la Calle, left the Liberal party with the aim of running as an independent in the 2018 elections. This trend in Colombia was jumpstarted by Liberal party member Alvaro Uribe with his astute decision to run as an independent maverick in the 2002 presidential election. Another prominent politician who exited an established political formation was leftist Gustavo Petro, who defected from the leftist Polo Democratico party to run under his own Movimiento Progresista label. In El Salvador, Nayib Bukele left the leftist FMLN party after calculating that, in the context of a progressively more discredited party system, his presidential ambitions would be better served by running under his own electoral vehicle and wielding a populist strategy. He was duly rewarded by voters with the presidency in the 2019 landslide presidential election and then again in the critical 2021 parliamentary elections. Ambitious politicians throughout Latin America increasingly find that operating within existing party structures is no longer a prerequisite for electoral success; au contraire, it tends to constitute a political liability. Party-skeptical mass publics have concocted the new incentive structure

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within which seasoned party politicians and upstart political entrepreneurs alike operate. This incentive structure rests upon citizenries that place political parties as the least trusted institution in Latin America. In the most recent Latinobarometro poll, carried out in 2020, Latin American citizens continued to rank parties as the most poorly evaluated of all institutions. On average, political parties elicited the trust of a meager 13 percent of Latin Americans! (Latinobarometro 2021). This figure was the lowest recorded since the year 1996, when Latinobarometro began to ask citizens across the region how much trust they placed on political parties. In only one country (Uruguay) was the level of trust above 30 percent. Another pernicious consequence of personalization, or the process whereby individuals increasingly shape political processes and outcomes in lieu of parties and other institutions, is the continuing power of former presidents long after they step down. Upon leaving the presidency, domineering figures such as Chavez, Uribe, Correa, Nestor and Cristina Kirschner, Evo Morales, and others, have tried to extend their influence through time by naming surrogates to the presidency (Corrales 2021). It is the personalistic origin of their political capital which vested these figures with power well beyond the formal prerogatives of the presidential office and rendered their electoral vehicles unable to constrain them. Presidents Santos (2010–2018) and Duque (2018–2022) in Colombia owe their presidencies chiefly to the electoral prowess of Uribismo. Similarly, President Alberto Fernandez of Argentina owes his 2020 presidential victory to the then formidable electoral strength of Kirschnerismo embodied in Cristina Fernandez de Kirschner. Evo Morales sponsored the candidacy of his former finance minister Luis Arce, who became president in part because of it (notwithstanding the rootedness of the MAS party). In a similar vein, a virtual unknown, Andres Arauz, was catapulted to the runoff of 2021 Ecuadorean election on account of Correismo and Correa’s personal endorsement. In a similar vein, it is widely expected that the candidate that Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador chooses to lead the MORENA party ticket in the 2024 presidential election stands the best chance to become the next Mexican President of the Republic. Lopez Obrador has explicitly named six potential successors, though foreign affairs minister Marcelo Ebrard and Mexico city mayor Claudia Sheinbaum are believed to be the top candidates in the quest to inherit Obrador’s formidable political capital and benefit from his public blessing. In naming candidates who go on to win elections largely because

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of the enormous political capital contained in their personal brands, former presidents can extend their political influence into the future and concurrently avoid accountability for illegal and corrupt actions they may have committed in office. Moreover, by exercising a tutelary role and lending their voting prowess to a chosen individual, these former presidents constrain the autonomy of their successors. Thus, the condition of empowerment necessary for elections to qualify as democratic (Schedler 2002) is compromised de facto. Should surrogate presidents choose to break free from their powerful patrons/sponsors, they encounter an enormous political backlash and associated governability problems, as witnessed in the cases of President Moreno in Ecuador and President Santos in Colombia. The problem of constrained empowerment recently transpired in Argentina, where President Alberto Fernandez witnessed the resignation of five ministers in his cabinet beholden to former president Cristina Kirschner, a “kick the chessboard” high-stakes ploy concocted by Kirschner to force the incumbent to change economic orientation away from austerity. In the event, the constitutional president, under intense pressure and facing the prospect of a hobbled presidency, decided to acquiesce to all of her de facto demands, including the renovation of the government’s cabinet, and veered away from his desired policy stance (El Pais 2021). Inasmuch as the democratically pernicious phenomenon of surrogate successors is rendered viable by the personalization of politics, and the incentives to embark on this practice are large wherever presidents are unable to extend their tenure in office, we can expect the phenomenon to continue to diffuse accross Latin America.

5 Consequences of Party System Decay on Democracy The decline of political parties produces growing deficits in democracy’s ability to deliver institutionalized representation. While some analyses of Latin America have rightly celebrated the growth and increasing sophistication of civil society, as well as recent institutional innovations in participatory democracy (Cameron et al. 2012), these developments cannot substitute for institutionalized parties. Only functional political parties can fully accomplish tasks essential for democratic governance: mediation between state and society, recruitment of cadres for government, the rationalization of the political space (including the legislative

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branch), the formation of political opposition, or the political representation of societal groups at a high level of aggregation, among others. It follows that the quality of democracy in a context of weak and evanescent parties will be fatally damaged. Empirical studies find that, indeed, as political theory holds, party system institutionalization correlates highly with indices of democratic quality in Latin America (Perez Linan and Mainwaring 2015). Because political organization is one of the few weapons the underprivileged can wield, the feebleness or disappearance of parties qua institutions also undermines prospects for furthering the interests and channeling the demands of the lower social classes—this in the context of highly unequal societies. In the absence of bona fide political parties, traditional power holders tend to rule virtually unchallenged and historical patterns of political control gain force and become entrenched. Another consequence of party system deinstitutionalization concerns the arena of governability. As partisanship declines, the larger share of floating voters comprising electoral marketplaces translates into more fragmented vote patterns, and ceteris paribus (i.e., after factoring out differences in electoral systems), more fragmented legislatures. This necessarily translates into the increasing incidence of minority presidentialism. Presidents without dependable majorities in the legislative branch find that their ability to govern and pass legislation declines, and societal problems fester as they remain unaddressed. While coalitional presidentialism norms can tame ungovernability travails (Chaisty et al. 2020), this practice comes with its own associated costs. To build multiparty legislative coalitions often requires the concocting of politically incongruous cabinets and/or otherwise the use of patronage to win legislative support. Patronage often debases the institutional quality of state agencies, as state agencies become politicized via excessive number of political appointees. Patronage politics otherwise worsens the efficiency and coherence of public spending, as parts of the budget are doled out to coalitional partners. These can be seen as forms of legalized corruption. Moreover, coalitions are not infrequently built via under-the-table outright corruption schemes—as famously was discovered in Brazil during the mensalao scandal. Informal institutions such as ghost coalitions (Mejia Acosta 2009) can surely smooth the legislative production process but are not cost-free either. It is difficult to escape the social choice problems generated by permanently fragmented legislatures, spawned by low levels of partisanship and partisan institutionalization writ large.

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Partyless landscapes also bear consequences for political behavior: when political activity is not mediated by political parties, praetorianism— defined as extra-institutional activity—is much more likely to ensue. Praetorianism, including political violence, has the effect of raising the stakes of the political game alongside societal polarization. The road is thus paved for democracy-eroding behaviors on the part of relevant actors. In the absence of effective party-based mediation, democracies dominated by praetorian behaviors can easily escalate into governmental repression and/or oppositional violence, environments that are used to justify standard coup d’états, self-coups, or martial law. Political parties’ inability to channel and give voice to widespread and rising citizen discontent is manifested in the prevalence of street politics. The mass protests movements observed throughout the region throughout 2019 (Wolff 2020), in countries as diverse as Colombia, Chile, Honduras, Ecuador, or Peru, among others, gave public expression to these democracies’ failures of incorporation. As the prime instruments to mediate interactions between state and society, when parties fail to adequately structure this mediating role, we can expect higher levels of non-institutional behavior on the part of disgruntled subaltern and popular sectors and precarious middle classes. Moseley (2018) has shown that levels of citizen protest grew in Latin America even during the left wave (which some scholars called a second incorporation juncture) and throughout the commodity boom period. The road towards the rise of the so-called protest state in the region has been paved by party system decay, inasmuch as the latter contributes to low democratic responsiveness. While mass protests can be very useful to shine the spotlight on issues that the political class has neglected or where democracies display glaring deficits of output legitimacy, there are limitations in protests movements’ ability to map demands onto policymaking arenas. In the absence of representative and socially rooted political parties, thin vertical accountability hobbles the body politic (Luna and Vergara 2016). A crucial threat posed by party system decay centers on the very survival of democratic regimes. There are strong theoretical reasons to believe that the presence or absence of institutionalized parties should affect the viability of democracy. Inasmuch as political parties provide sources of institutional power for the opposition, they are crucial tools for constraining governmental power and preventing incumbent takeovers (Gamboa 2020). Institutionalized parties are first-recourse instruments to

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veto legislation intent on slanting playing fields of competition, or legislation that aims to brazenly increase the power prerogatives of the executive branch, for example. In the absence of political parties, opposition forces are also burdened with greater collective action problems, such that they cannot galvanize unity of action against authoritarian or hegemonicminded governments (Howard and Roessler 2006). In addition, diminished electoral vehicles are much easier for incumbents to co-opt, corrupt, and neutralize than are institutionalized parties, paving the way for a landscape ripe for power-accretion. There are certainly ways to exercise opposition to a government outside of the partisan arena; however, to effectively constrain governmental abuse and power-accretion ambitions, strong opposition parties equipped with social rootedness and a robust presence amid democratic institutions become indispensable. Political parties can be stewards of democracy’s survival by way of internally constraining incumbent presidents. Armed with bureaucratic structures and enforceable internal rules, political parties can hold their own leaders in check and preempt a slippery slope toward the evisceration of horizontal accountability. In addition, parties often have incentives to activate these capabilities, for they may have brands and reputations to uphold, traditions and political careers to defend, and party aspiring party heavyweights with ambitions to substitute the leader. Rhodes-Purdy and Madrid (2020) show empirically in a study of 18 Latin American democracies that personalism negatively impacts the level of democracy by weakening the rule of law and legislative checks on the executive branch. Politicians belonging to diminished electoral vehicles have professional incentives to toe the line of would-be autocrats in command of these vehicles and systematically follow political directives. Even if concerned about creeping authoritarianism, politicos populating personalist parties are bereft of rules and institutions capable of enforcing constraining measures on their masters. In sum, organizationally institutionalized ruling political parties can be a first line of defense against authoritarianism; by contrast, diminished vehicles that reach the presidency are bereft of institutional autonomy, thus enabling authoritarian behaviors. Crumbling party universes may not pave the way to the death of democracies everywhere, but partyless settings hollow out electoral democracy of democratic substance. The study of Peru dramatically reveals what the end-state of a process of party system deinstitutionalization and increasing personalism can yield. The Andean nation has long

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been caught in a self-reinforcing political equilibrium whereby political entrepreneurs rely on their personal brands, use party substitutes, and face scant incentives to construct bona fide political parties. They inhabit a political world pervaded by uncertainty and short-termism. Political inexperience and outsider status are, ceteris paribus, traits rewarded by voters distrustful of politicians. Policy-cycling is endemic (macroeconomic policy aside), while state-building becomes elusive given the marked incompatibility of time horizons, lower incentives to invest in institutions, and the implausibility of enacting politicas de estado. amid an ever-changing constellation of electoral vehicles. Because electoral vehicles cannot adequately mediate between state and society, governmental policies and enacted parliamentary legislation emanating from partyless environments are not reflective of citizen demands. Elections become instruments to fend off the most undesirable options on the electoral menu but accomplish little more. Newly elected governments enjoy very short honeymoons and, without the benefit afforded by (inexistent) a critical pool of partisans, recurrently see their political capital plummet to levels incompatible with effective leadership and governability. Electoral vehicles, as opposed to programmatic political parties, are more permeable to co-optation by illicit economic sectors with autonomous financial resources, whose overt or covert participation in politics aims to buy political protection and exercise influence, thus tainting the exercise of politics writ large. In turn, citizen trust in political parties and democratic institutions continues to slide or stagnate at abysmally low levels, which reinforces a vicious cycle of dysfunctional state–society relations. These dynamics are increasingly observed in more and more Latin American countries. The increasing feebleness of party systems lies at the heart of these pernicious undercurrents, which hollow out democratic governance. Insofar as more countries in Latin America continue along a road towards convergence with Peru’s political dystopia, the perusal of Peruvian politics becomes consequential. It yields insights into incipient dynamics already at work across much of the region, but perhaps not fully appreciated. These dynamics shall become more visible with time.

6

Book Objectives

This book seeks to make conceptual, empirical, and theoretical contributions to electoral behavior, party politics, and the Peruvian politics literatures. On the conceptual side, the notion of personal brands, largely

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confined to scholars of political marketing, is rescued for the study of partyless democracies. Personal brands’ incapacity for structuring democratic life is examined as well as the manifold deleterious consequences stemming from personalism—in contrast to party-based politics. Also on the terrain of concepts, the monograph proposes that of “negative legitimacy environments.” The empirical contribution rests on the perusal of Peruvian politics in the 2001 to 2021 era. The book seeks to uncover political patterns and outcomes that obtain in a political setting populated by vehicles that do not rise to the standard of political parties. Relatedly, it delves into an empirical examination of the internal life and evolution of Peru’s diminished-type political parties over time, both traditional “parties” as well as newer electoral vehicles. On the theoretical side, an integrated framework for understanding electoral dynamics in partyless settings is offered, which modifies standard accounts insofar as it gives pride of place to systematic determinants of electoral outcomes that scholars commonly overlook or underemphasize—namely the primacy of electoral supply, personal brands, and strategic voting. Another theoretical contribution rests on the emphasis on two endogenous factors underpinning the self-reproduction of “democracies without parties” that focus on the nature of its constituent units. The empirical analysis of Peruvian democratic governance (Chapter 6) provides confirmation of well-known precepts surrounding the centrality of political parties for democratic governance, while adding a couple of theoretical observations that partially defy extant theory—namely, the possibility of keeping radical populism at bay in such settings as well as the plausibility that a democratic regime may endure even when devoid of real political parties, in good measure by default—i.e., by way of depriving would-be elected autocrats of institutional sources of power. 6.1

Adequate Labeling of “Party” Species and Theoretical Implications

This book synthesizes and integrates most of the existing literature on Peru’s party universe, aiming to provide a more holistic picture than has hitherto been provided about the nature of the moving parts and the operational dynamics of a democracy without parties. The study of a paradigmatic case thus aims to offer theoretical coordinates inherent to environments without bona fide parties or a party system worthy of the name. (It is important to note that the absence of the latter two

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elements, which are analytically distinct, do not necessarily go together, though empirically they often do). Concurrently, it moves beyond many extant accounts insofar as it treats the status of diminished subtype status of Peruvian parties seriously. The book draws out the political consequences ensuing from a party universe populated by electoral vehicles (as opposed to bona fide parties) on four dependent variables: party evolution through time, voter-party linkage profiles, nationwide electoral dynamics, and democratic governance writ large. As a sizable and growing number of Latin American polities move toward deepening party system deinstitutionalization, the broader value of this exercise is to provide an analytical account of how a democracy dominated by personalistic electoral vehicles—or what Luna et al. (2021) call Independents—works in practice. Peru may well presage the future of several (perhaps a majority of) Latin American and developing country democracies should current deinstitutionalization trends continue. Even if such a dystopic future does not fully materialize, the individual electoral vehicle behaviors and electoral dynamics here uncovered already inform important aspects of many Latin American party universe workings in the contemporary era. While Latin Americanists acknowledge that personalism is an important component of political life in the region, the full political ramifications of this affirmation are all too often ignored, or otherwise insufficiently examined in most scholarly works. There is a continuing bias in the comparative politics field that impels scholars to treat political parties as central players in democratic settings and to assume that they are created with intention to fulfill representation and accountability functions or otherwise treat deviations from the ideal as aberrations—for a notable exception, see: Luna et al., forthcoming. As Levitsky (2018, 337) has observed, “a focus on national party labels overstates the strength of Peruvian parties,” and much the same could be said of electoral vehicles in other democracies. In some country settings, party labels are rather devoid of substantive content, societal links, structuring power, or political autonomy, and politics is best analyzed with coordinates and analytical tools and concepts other than those bequeathed by the study of party-centric democracies. The working assumption that electoral vehicles are created or nonetheless operate to mediate state–society relations, provide representation, aggregate interests, or serve as agents democratic accountability, must be altogether abandoned or seriously relaxed in some country settings. In some electoral democracies, few or no political formations may fulfill these functions, and in many cases, they have not been created to fulfill such

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roles. As French political scientist Jean Blondel (1999) has written, parties are tools: they can be used to foster democracy, but they can also be used to prevent democracy from being established. Some electoral vehicles have been created with the intention to provide state–society mediation, advance a programmatic platform, train cadres, or to represent societal constituencies, but many others have not. In the latter case, observers should expect diminished electoral vehicles to perform roles other than those foisted upon real political parties by canonical political theory. In other words, the study of some (but increasing number of) Latin American party universes and democracies can benefit by proceeding from a different theoretical benchmark: that of parties as purely electoralist entities. Moreover, insofar as there is heterogeneity in the nature of the constituent party units within a polity, different labels should be used to describe entities that are substantively different, as Giovanni Sartori, wearing his methodological hat, was fond of reminding scholars (Sartori 1970). It is imperative to make these distinctions explicit in the analysis of both democracy and party universe trends. This is important because taking the heterogeneity of electoral vehicles seriously widens the lens of research topics and shines light on cause-and-effect relationships that otherwise remain obscure. For example, there is some evidence that asymmetry in levels of institutionalization among units within a party universe have discernable effects on inter-party relations, power-accretion, and the quality democracy (Corrales 2008, 64–66; Sanchez-Sibony 2014). To put forth another example, electoral dynamics are, in important respects, different in nature, meaning and consequence when they involve a contest among diminished electoral vehicles—as opposed to a contest among full-fledged political parties, as Chapter 5 explains. In short, the failure to systematically distinguish between bona fide parties and diminished subtypes obscures our understanding of the political world. This explicit acknowledgment opens many future research avenues. 6.2

Political Personal Brands Versus Party Brands

The recognition that diminished subtypes of political parties are prominent in many political landscapes also has implications for existing scholarly literature. It necessarily limits the relevant spatial scope of some scholarly works as well as lays bare the scope limitations of existing conceptual tools in comparative politics. Some of the worthy conceptual innovations furnished in recent years have applicability to certain

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country settings only. For example, the notion of party brands (Lupu 2015) is highly valuable to understand party politics in some countries but is much less relevant and applicable in others, as Mainwaring 2018) has rightly noted. The blanket application of the party brand concept in settings such as Peru, Ecuador, Guatemala, and other countries, where personalism is dominant in voter-party interactions, is misguided and leads political analysis astray. In a setting where real political parties are scant or absent, and partisanship levels are low, voters focus on the personal traits of candidates (regional provenance, professional trajectory, gender, physical appearance and ethnicity, charisma, etc.). These personal traits configure a candidates’ personal brand, which can partially be molded via political agency and marketing. Personal brands provide valuable information to voters, via which they can make inferences about that candidates’ representational qualities (whom does the candidate represent?), ability to address valence-type issues (the economy, public security, corruption, etc.), and assess their degree of affinity vis-à-vis that candidate. Personal brands are even more vulnerable to dilution than party brands, which contributes to increasing electoral volatility writ large. A good number of countries are best studied by proceeding from the assumption that it is personal brands—i.e., the multidimensional public image political entrepreneurs are endowed with—that are central, not party brands, as this book will argue. In post-collapse party universes, such as those in Ecuador, Bolivia or Venezuela, personal brands are also predominant. These polities are best examined by deploying a mix of personal and party brands as analytical tools, but the latter are only of secondary importance. This book introduces the concept of personal brands and shows its ability to shape dynamics and outcomes in a country devoid political parties proper. Similarly, the concept of partisanship suffers from conceptual stretching when applied to country contexts where parties qua organizations are not sources of voter attachment. Instead, where parties are popularly derided and voters are instead guided by the personal brands they ascribe to political entrepreneurs, other, more ephemeral sources of party–voter linkage exist. 6.3

A New Concept: A Negative Legitimacy Environment

Recently, a still incipient but growing political science literature has focused on exploring the prevalence and repercussions of negative partisanship. It is a phenomenon of growing importance for electoral and

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political dynamics in developed and developing countries (see: Samuels and Zucco 2018, 209). Relatedly, granting analytical pride of place to negative political identities can help deepen our understanding of political life in a partyless setting. This book takes up the illuminating notion of negative political identities and draws out some of its implications for understanding the nature and pace of political life as well as for understanding the particularities of elite-citizen relationships in polities where such identities are prevalent. We offer here a new concept to succinctly capture political settings that stand as the polar opposite of those where political competition is predicated on high system support and positive partisanship. Whenever antipolitical attitudes are the norm amid a society, and citizens reject a priori all politicians, endowing them with negative political identities, we can expect negative legitimacy to be the dominant political currency, the key source of political capital. In these settings, politicians draw political capital from what they are not. They benefit from personal brands and appeals strategies that situate them far apart from “politics as usual.” In some countries, antipolitical attitudinal environments are not conjunctural, applicable to a particular election cycle; rather, they are a permanent feature of politics. We here propose the concept of negative letigimacy environments (NLEs), comprised of three elements: supermajorities of floating voters, a preference for newcomers, and the pervasiveness of negative political identities. These elite-citizen linkage attributes correlate with, and reinforce, one another. Together, these traits configure a political world that operates according to distinct dynamics. Our understanding is obfuscated when we analyze political systems that empirically comport with negative legitimacy environments by deploying standard analytical tools. In addition, such analyses produce large blind spots. Where electorates are free floating and reject all politicians, the very meaning of electoral outcomes and the nature of political capital differ; the substance and meaning of elections is not comparable to those that obtain in healthier, more solid elite-citizen settings. In NLEs contexts like Peru’s, legitimacy accruing to electoral winners is of a different nature, while electoral mandates are deprived of much of their theoretical substance—i.e., electoral victors do not enjoy “mandates” in the common understanding of the term. When negative legitimacy is the key currency of politics, some of the standard analytical tools we use to comprehend the political world lose much of their analytical and explanatory leverage.

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This book maintains that, amid NLEs, political instability is heightened, incumbency becomes a political curse, political uncertainty reaches enormous dimensions, and political time accelerates in ways inimical for democratic governance. If the consequences emanating from free-floating electorates permeated by negative political identities are so momentous, and if such electorates are becoming and shall become more common (or less uncommon), if behooves academics to succinctly identify these settings—“different things should have different names,” as Giovanni Sartori famously wrote—so that our standard lexicon does not drift away from the empirical world it is trying to describe. Political environments that are the antithesis of the strong party ideal can only be truly understood if we avail ourselves of new concepts and intellectual tools, because the existing ones were designed to analyze party politics in Europe and the United States. 6.4

Endogenous Factors in Party Non-Building

While comparativists have made important headway during the past decade in understanding party-building (see: Levitskty et al. 2016; Lupu 2015), much more can be done to elucidate the ways in which party nonbuilding can become a self-perpetuating political equilibrium. The standard way in which partyless environments are accounted for is to enumerate the most prominent historical, structural, institutional, and agency-type reasons why party-building is absent—as expounded in Chapter 2. Nonetheless, there exist powerful endogenous determinants of party destruction and non-building. We advance three endogenous causal factors that perpetuate the prevalence of partylessness. First, personalistic electoral vehicles, lacking solid sources of internal cohesion, are prone to suffer damaging internal scuffles, divisions, splits, and defections that prove electorally and organizationally damaging. Secondly, personalistic vehicles depend for success upon the political personal brands of their leaders or creators, which are more vulnerable to dilution than party brands (Sanchez-Sibony 2022, chap 3). The personal foibles, revealed corruption, informational incongruencies, and faux pas of leaders are common factors that fatally damage personal brands. Thirdly, diminished parties are more likely to make electoral and strategic mistakes than full-fledged ones, because internal decision-making is much more ad hoc, it does not rely on institutional processes, and

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is less informed by institutional memory. This is yet another endogenous factor that reproduces partylessness. Finally, the paucity of loyal voters renders mistakes more costly than for other party formations that can rely on partisans. While more institutionalized political parties endowed with social rootedness possess some electoral cushion against political headwinds, uprooted parties face self-inflicted or exogenous political storms nakedly, prompting their marginality or demise. In sum, diminished political parties are inherently vulnerable to decay because of their uprootedness, lack of horizontal coordination, lack of institutionally driven decision-making, and/or leader-dependent nature. Among electoral vehicle types, independents are the most affected by endogenous sources of self-destruction. 6.5

Determinants of Elections in “Democracies Without Parties”

Another of the book’s objectives is to further the understanding of electoral politics in partyless environments. This author concurs with Lupu et al. (2020, chap.1) in regards to the asseveration that the set of elements that determine vote choice is a function of the composition of the electorate. In particular, the greater the number of floating voters, the more campaigns or media and valence considerations will shape outcomes visà-vis policy positions and social group attachments. However, this book goes beyond canonical theories of voter behavior by adding and giving pride of place to four key elements and their interaction: a negative legitimacy environment, personal brands, the primacy of electoral supply, and strategic voting. These determinants of elections in partyless setting are often ignored or severely underemphasized, or otherwise treated in ad hoc fashion (i.e., applicable only in particular elections). We here maintain that the influence of these elements is systematic and operative across electoral cycles in electoral marketplaces comprised of a supermajority of floating voters and diminished-type electoral vehicles. This necessarily implies that the traditional analytical categories valid for institutionalized settings (parties, party brands, electoral demand, sincere voting) are misleading, misused, and/or overemphasized by analysts and scholars when used to peruse settings without bona fide parties or loyal voters. This book thus serves as a (partial) corrective against standard fare electoral analysis, insofar as it aims to give centrality to these factors, which carry much more analytical purchase to understand elections in severely under-institutionalized environments than has been acknowledged. Let

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us briefly delve into these three overlooked determinants of elections. Students of party politics are trained to consider party supply and party demand as codetermining party–voter interactions and electoral outcomes in equal measure. However, in democracies where voters do not have partisan attachments, effective party supply (i.e., the slate of personal brands on offer) is much more important than party demand in shaping campaigns, voting shifts, and outcomes. The nature of the supply of candidates on a given campaign shapes voter alignments, often forged in opposition to certain individual political entrepreneurs or seasoned politicians rather than in favor of any given one. Should supply change, alignments shift the demand side of the equation dramatically. In partyless environments, the supply of candidates varies much across electoral cycles as well as within the timespan of electoral campaigns, highly conditioning voter demand, which is shapeless a priori, until given shape by the supply of candidates on offer. The set of candidates on offer shall select the issues around which electoral campaigns are battled; however, it is their personal brands that carry greater weight in molding voting patterns. For these reasons, the study of supply should take causal primacy vis-à-vis the study of (supply-dependent) voter demand. This book also puts the accent on the importance of strategic voting to understand electoral outcomes in partyless environments. Only via the notion of strategic voting can recurrently observed very sudden and large-scale vote shifts be understood, changing the electoral fortune of candidates almost overnight. It stands to reason that in electoral marketplaces with supermajorities of floating voters, the potential space for large-scale strategic voting is enormous. Strategic voting is often treated as a phenomenon of secondary importance, or otherwise circumstantial, worthy of note and consideration only in specific elections. On the contrary, this book shows it to be of recurrent and central importance where a negative legitimacy environment of systemic societal distrust of parties and insider politicians obtains. The latter concept, as advanced in this book, alludes to an environment where floating voters comprise the bulk of the electoral marketplace, newcomers to politics are rewarded electorally, and negative identities are strong. These factors combined select for presidents that are deemed to be the “lesser evil,” and thus come into office with evanescent negative legitimacy. Concomitantly, these politicos enjoy very short-lived political honeymoons, in good measure because they are thrust onto high office riding a wave of an inordinate number of “borrowed” votes, not on the back of sincere-type voting. Insofar as

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a combination of affective polarization, distrust of parties, and floating electorates increasingly characterize a growing number of Latin American polities, the ideational framework here advanced can be presumed to have relevance for understanding electoral dynamics in more and more polities across the region. For example, to cite three recent cases, the ascendancy of Lopez Obrador in Mexico, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, or Bukele in El Salvador, can fruitfully be understood with this framework, as all three political figures benefited from negative identities, societal preference for outsiders or mavericks vis-à-vis traditional politicians, and the deinstitutionalization of traditional parties—thus benefiting as well from larger swaths of floating voters. The variables given centrality in this book to assess political dynamics in partyless or quasi-partyless environments, configure election outcomes characterized by irreducible uncertainty. It is all but impossible to make informed predictions at the beginning of a campaign season, given the strong role that supply volatility, contingency, campaign effects, and strategic voting play in a marketplace of floating voters and free agent politicians. While countless post-facto analyses of elections have elegantly put forth the reasons for why a final electoral outcome was likely to materialize, the causal framework provided in this book strongly cautions against retrospective determinism. While analysis can be retrofitted after an electoral outcome is known, the inherent irreducible unpredictability of outcomes amid party non-systems should warn against the overuse of analytical categories and independent variables that have been designed for party-based, partisanship-abundant political landscapes. All too often political scientists fall prey to conceptual and analytical overstretch in perusing elections in some developing countries, uncritically making use of standard analytical concepts, tools, and assumptions in settings where they are inadequate to the task. No extant work provides an integrated framework for understanding electoral dynamics and outcomes in Peru or similar partyless environments. Analyses are often rather ad hoc and centered on individual elections, collectively producing a bewildering range of incompatible or time-inconsistent explanations across electoral cycles. Chapter 6 seeks to provide an integrated framework, furnishing key organizing principles and independent variables that shape electoral outcomes across electoral cycles, and also seeks to provide some insight with respect to their interaction. To be sure, we make no claim that this framework is comprehensive; for example, the theme of campaign effects on elections has yet to be systematized for these settings (for a partial exception, see: Boas 2016), as is the role of other

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causal factors. The aim is to help bring some analytical order to our understanding of elections in partyless environments, to grant centrality to some neglected or underemphasized variables, and to furnish some new (or reworked) concepts that can aid the analytical task at hand. 6.6

Empirical Contributions: Peru’s Electoral Vehicles

An important final objective of this book is empirical, both to document some of the dynamics of Peruvian politics up to 2021, and the evolution of its main individual electoral vehicles across three key dimensions of party institutionalization: autonomy, coherence, and social rootedness. It seeks to provide an integrated study of the Peruvian party universe since it collapsed in the early 1990s. It relies on a rather abundant secondary literature authored by Peruvian and US and UKbased scholars, as well as on national newspapers and other assorted documents. Six of the most important electoral vehicles to have populated Peruvian politics during the past two decades are here examined: APRA, Partido Popular Cristiano, Accion Popular, Fujimorismo, Partido Nacionalista Peruano, and Frente Amplio. The objective in perusing the internal life of these electoral vehicles is to search for common patterns of behavior and decision-making, amid a turbulent political environment where political uncertainty is very high. In addition to providing realworld support for the theoretical contentions here advanced, the empirical sections can help furnish other scholars with usable information as they conduct political party and party system comparisons across countries. The finding that all of the Peruvian electoral vehicles here perused have succumbed to an advanced stage of political decay (and even legal disappearance) is not accidental, as Chapter 3 explains. Rather, it is the result of a deep-seated negative legitimacy environment as well as endogenous, self-destructive tendencies inherent to very inchoate electoral vehicles. In its empirical examination of a democracy without parties, this book furnishes a full-length case study of a concept I introduced in a 2009 article: party nonsystems (Sanchez 2009), that is, party universes without systemic parties characterized by constant turnover in the identity of the main electoral vehicles in competition across time, and thus devoid of a core that can inter-temporally structure the political arena. Peru’s party universe has comported with the notion of a party nonsystem since 1990. This book empirically fleshes out some of the moving parts

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and dynamics characteristic of party nonsystems outlined in more theoretical and abstract fashion in my 2009 article. With this purpose in mind, it delves into the internal life and trajectory of individual Peruvian electoral vehicles during the 2001 to 2021 period. The book also empirically examines the political workings and correlates of party nonsystems. In particular, it looks at electoral dynamics, state-society relations, political behavior, the rapport between politicians and electoral vehicles, mass-level attitudes, or the nature of political legitimacy amid such party universes, among various other themes. The powerlessness, uprootedness, vacuity, and transience typical of Peruvian electoral vehicles impinges upon every conceivable angle of politics, leaving no aspect of Peru’s wretched democracy untouched. 6.7

Relationship Between Electoral Vehicles and Democratic Governance

Finally, with the benefit of now abundant secondary literature, the book also delves into the impact of a partyless setting upon key dimensions of democratic governance. As a most likely case of democratic dysfunction, the empirical evidence is confirmative of theoretical expectations, showcasing how and why Peruvian electoral vehicles are incapable of providing responsiveness and horizontal accountability, as well as why such vehicles rob voters and civil society groups of the ability to exercise thick vertical accountability. The case of Peru serves as a warning for other democracies in the region in regards to the centrality of political parties for delivering both horizontal and vertical accountability. As Luna and Vergara (2016) have pointed out, the presence of overshadowing, popular leaders has obscured deep deficiencies in the vertical accountability dimension across several Latin American polities. With the exit of these political leaders from the scene, the parlous state of party systems across the region will render the enormous existing deficits in vertical accountability clearer to the naked eye. However, not all standard theoretical predictions are fully borne out in the empirical examination of Peru’s democratic workings. These deviations from expectations are more interesting in their theoretical implications. The Peruvian case shows that radical populism need not emerge in partyless polities. These polities may simply fall into a political vacuum—a void that nonparty actors (technocratic networks, organized business, or

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narcos, to cite three possible ones) are ready to fill to tend to their corporatist interests. The Peruvian partyless political ecosystem has only evinced low intensity populism (Ollanta Humala’s 2006 version and Pedro Castillo’s 2021 run excepted), defined as moderate anti-establishment rhetoric confined to electoral campaigns only, devoid of radical rhetoric or illiberal behaviors in the exercise of power. The Andean nation has thus avoided the risk of democratic backsliding that radical populists pose. Differentiating populism by intensity level or gradation appears relevant to gauge its consequences. The Peruvian case also highlights the mediating role that noninstitutional factors can play in the causal chain that goes from populism to authoritarianism, as theorized by scholars (Levitsky and Loxton 2013; Weyland 2018). That is, the relationship between populism and competitive or hegemonic authoritarianism is decidedly complex; contextual factors mediate the influence of populism on regime outcomes. Another preliminary insight that Peru offers is that democratic survival may be compatible with a polity populated by very underinstitutionalized electoral vehicles, if only by default; a partyless polity need not succumb to democratic breakdown, particularly when incumbents are systematically bereft of sustained mass-based social support and other systemic features of the political landscape also make incumbent takeovers extremely difficult to carry out. Moreover, party nonsystems need not be associated with strained and unworkable inter-branch relations—albeit for reasons that damage democracy in other ways, such as patronage tactics to buy congressional support from feckless political formations. With respect to executive–legislative relations, attaining governability in an environment of severe party universe under-intitutionalization may be less problematic than standard political science theory maintains. This is what the 2001 to 2016 period in Peru suggests. Nevertheless, executive–legislative relations have become strained and confrontational post 2016, as standard theory would predict, such that underhanded breaches of constitutional rule are becoming more frequent. The recurrence of “authoritarian situations,” to use Juan Linz’s terminology, may continue to weaken the country’s institutional infrastructure and constitutional governance. In tandem with a more fragmented and debilitated party universe the condition of minority chief executives without a significant party presence in the legislature has become more acute, paving the way for persistent inter-branch institutional brinkmanship—a latent problem only fully activated in recent years.

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7

Plan of the Book

Chapter 2 paints Peru’s broad-based sociopolitical landscape, encompassing the contextual and historical factors that militate against partybuilding in Peru. The legacy of the past weighs heavily on the party universe. Peru’s twentieth century has been ill-suited for the emergence of lasting political parties, not least because of its checkered and scant history of democracy, strong praetorian currents, as well as its status as a latecomer to the post-oligarchical age. The chapter then delves into the pernicious legacy of the 1980s and the economically disastrous administration of Alan Garcia (1985–1989), which demolished the social fabric, labor unions, and organized civil society, ending in the collapse of the party system. The decade-long Fujimorato (1990–2000) set Peru on a course of permanent divorce from party norms, for Alberto Fujimori used his popularity to besmirch and malign traditional politicians and party politics writ large, and utilized his manifold power resources to annihilate already weakened traditional parties. But the future of party politics in the post-2001 age has not been fully determined by nefarious legacies from the recent past and the longue durée. The chapter outlines the ways in which an absence of political agency geared toward party construction has perpetuated the country’s democracy without parties condition. Politicians have it within the purview to try to graft societal divisions into party politics. There exist socioeconomic and political cleavages in Peru that could have been utilized as raw materials to endow the political system with somewhat more structure. Indeed, party-building can occur from the supply side via the purposeful political agency of elites to introduce or reinforce political divisions. However, the short-termism and opportunism characteristic of electoral vehicles, which strive for survival rather than long-range project-crafting, eviscerates the likelihood that politicians will be consistent in recreating sociopolitical identities that can provide structuring coordinates for the political system. Finally, the impact of political entropy is analyzed. It is maintained that electoral vehicles are prone to self-destruction because of their genetic material at birth. The absence of internal mechanisms of conflict resolution amidst diminished-type electoral vehicles, as well as the lack of strong substantive filters and criteria for party recruitment, inevitably produce similar undesirable effects, shortening the lifespan and institution-building chances of such political formations. Because most electoral vehicles lack inherently

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valuable assets, free agents discard them often as soon as their instrumental purpose has been served. In sum, electoral vehicles, as victims of their genetic origins, are much more likely to disintegrate than to become institutionalized and transformed into a veritable political party. Chapter 3 aims to categorize Peru’s party universe, and also to explain the key linkage-type permeating party–voter relations. It is maintained that, in a strict sense, Peru does not exhibit a party system over the past thirty years—properly defined as a party universe with some degree of inter-temporal electoral stability and one that possesses systemic parties. Rather, it fits the definition of a party nonsystem, characterized by steadily very high levels of extra-systemic electoral volatility as well as overall volatility. Without systemic parties to structure it through time, Peruvian partisan politics is devoid of systemic qualities that we observe in bona fide party systems, such as a steady pattern of relations among parties or a given level of party system fragmentation or ideological divisions that are reasonably steady through time. This has been true ever since Peru’s proto-party system of the 1980s collapsed. The chapter proceeds to examine the level of partisanship (party loyalty among voters) in the Peruvian ecosystem finding it to be extremely low, which feeds continuously high levels of electoral volatility. It argues that party brands hold little value in Peru, advances the concept of personal brands as one that holds more analytical purchase to understand politics in setting without valuable party brands. Survey polls indicate that voters are guided by the personal qualities and trajectories of individual candidates. Personal brands can be enhanced and entrenched in the public imagery via purposeful political agency and, much like party brands, they become diluted. In fact, it is maintained that personal brands are significantly more vulnerable to rapid dilution. While a few party brands (Aprismo, Accion Popular) held some residual value in post-2000 era, by the late 2010s these brands had become empty of content and declined in value. A new concept is introduced in this chapter, that of negative legitimacy environments, characterized by three traits: an electorate of supermajorities of floating voters, politicians burdened with negative identities, and a public preference for newcomers. The chapter outlines some of the manifold deleterious consequences stemming from an environment in which negative legitimacy (political capital deriving from what an actor is not or stands against) constitutes the key political currency. These political environments augment the prevalence of strategic voting and render elected presidents very feeble in terms of their social power. A political world

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in which negative legitimacy is the key transaction currency is also more volatile and unpredictable. Political cycles are short-lived and succeed one another in rapid fashion, as the chapter expounds. The main traditional and newly created electoral vehicles populating the post-2000 era are examined in Chapter 4. This section of the book delves into political development of the APRA, Accion Popular, Partido Popular Cristiano after the authoritarian Fujimorato (1990– 2000); among the newer electoral vehicles, those scrutinized include the leftist outfit Frente Amplio, Keiko Fujimori’s Fuerza Social, and Ollanta Humala’s Partido Nacionalista Peruano. The chapter follows the evolution of the above electoral vehicles along three standard dimensions of partisan institutionalization: autonomy, coherence, and social rootedness. Traditional parties are found to have withered through time, such that they have come to resemble the newer political formations against which they compete in that their initially low levels of autonomy, coherence, and rootedness became further diluted. Both older and newer formations have suffered from the lack of investment, and often active disinvestment, in party-building on the part of their leaders—in addition to a forbidding sociopolitical landscape for this objective. For example, Alan Garcia has systematically used his clout within Aprismo to stifle the rise of possible successors, and rather consistently put his personal power ambitions above his party’s interests and future. The few (quasi-) party builders found in the personalist Peruvian political landscape, such as Accion Popular’s Valentin Paniagua or the Partido Popular Cristiano’s Lourdes Flores, have been stymied by internal partisan divisions amid their formations and the forces of personalism, as the chapter explains. Empirical support is provided for a notion advanced in Chapter 2, namely that electoral vehicles at the low end of the institutionalization continuum are inherently burdened by the logic of political entropy because of their initial constitutive traits. The reasonably steady performance and electoral prominence of Fujimorismo during part of the 2010s, gave rise to predictions that Fujimorismo could well become institutionalized. Ultimately, Fujimorismo became undone by the same endogenous factors that drive the deinstitutionalization of electoral vehicles at large, as the chapter explains. Frente Amplio, unlike most other formations, explicitly sought to engage in party-building, unify the left, and avoid the operating dynamics of other vehicles. However, it fell prey to internal caudillismo and a debilitating party split. All electoral vehicles, traditional and newer, have suffered from

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debilitating internal schisms, damaging defections, and short-sighted decisions that have cost them electorally and preempted any possibility of constructing partisanship and enhancing their social rootedness. Chapter 5 centers on the dynamics and independent variables accounting for electoral dynamics in Peru. It first examines the determinants of elections in Peru with a classic funnel approach, identifying factors in rank-order of importance that inverts the order found in democracies characterized by high levels of partisanship and programmatic linkages. The chapter highlights short-term influences—including valence considerations (economy, corruption, and crime), campaign effects, and personalistic linkages—as central. The chapter then gauges the extent to which elections in Peru can be understood with a programmatic framework, seeking to debunk the standard manner Peruvian electoral contests tend to be analyzed, almost by default, as a result of political scientists’ professional training. Inter-temporal programmatic structuration rests upon three priors: the adoption by parties of coherent stands on salient issues; meaningful policy differences among the major party competitors; and a reasonable degree of correspondence between the platforms and policy orientation of parties that reach office. None of these three prerequisites is found to exist in the Peruvian political scene, which renders programmatic-based politics through time unattainable—even if conjunctural, time-specific programmatic structuration can sometimes be detected. We here maintain that the central party–voter linkage is personalism, such that voters are guided by the personal traits and background of candidates, rather than party labels per se. Mass surveys of Peruvian voters confirms it. Placing personalism as a central feature of a political system, and drawing out the implications therefrom, alters the way elections and electoral processes are to be understood—away from classic party-based frameworks. Chapter 5 proceeds to examine the way in which electoral supply and demand interact, distinguishing between nominal and effective party supply. In a partyless environment, it is shown that candidatecentered electoral supply (and its frequent changes) takes precedence in the shaping of outcomes over voter demand, which is subsidiary of the former and highly variable. Finally, strategic voting is perused and held to be another central element to understand electoral dynamics in a democracy without parties. Strategic voting is shown to be not merely sporadic in occurrence; rather, it is necessarily a recurrent feature of an electoral marketplace comprised of floating voters and pervaded by a negative legitimacy environment. Unattached voters imbued with negative identities

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endlessly search for lesser evil candidates. The general elections of 1990, 2006, 2011, 2016, and 2021, as well as the 2010 Lima mayoralty elections, are analyzed to illustrate how and why electoral winners benefited from strategically induced large shifts of votes in the short time space of weeks and days. The empirical record shows the particularly unpredictable nature of elections in Peru, rendering forecasts a doomed exercise—even when undertaken by expert voices. Chapter 6 delves into the relationship between electoral vehicles and democratic outcomes in Peru. Departing from well-known roles that parties are called upon to provide, it interrogates what real-world consequences emanate from a partyless environment, in particular its impact on democracy. More concretely, it empirically examines Peruvian democracy through the lens of the functional roles that democracies are normatively called upon to supply: responsiveness, vertical and horizontal accountability, governability, and democratic consolidation. How many of the theoretical predictions the literature makes about the relationship between party institutionalization and democracy are vindicated by this most likely case of democracy malfunction? The chapter expounds that political science theory aligns very well with the democratic governance realities of Peru. Vertical accountability is found to be virtually nonexistent on account of systematic betrayals of mandate on the part of successive governments, both of a political and an economic nature. Horizontal accountability, as relates to that which Congress is tasked to provide, is extremely deficient. Peru’s Congress operates as a political bazaar in which particularistic favors are traded, but legislative caucuses lack the technical capacity or inclination to examine the suitability of legislation that they are tasked with scrutinizing. Governability in the arena of executive–legislative relations was less conflictual (or prone to gridlock) over the 2001–2016 period than party politics and presidentialism literature predicts, despite the recurrence of minority presidents in Peru. Since 2016, however, stalemate and constitutional brinkmanship has devolved Peru to the problems Juan Linz first identified as inherent to presidentialism. These quandaries were theorized by Scott Mainwaring and other scholars to be particularly acute in multiparty presidential democracies. The chapter advances three reasons for this newfound (post-2016) period of inter-branch tensions: more vulnerable executives with less clout in the legislature; the politicization of corruption across the political spectrum; and relatedly, the decay of some democracy-supporting informal institutions. Next, the chapter delves into the relationship between a partyless

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setting and the incidence of populism. While Peru is found to evince serial populism, conceived of as a political discourse and a strategy, it has evaded the radical variant of populism, characterized by permanent campaigning and plebiscitarian power-accretion from the perch of the presidency. Finally, the concept of democratic consolidation is applied to Peruvian political realities. While Peru has avoided a full-fledged democratic breakdown, Peruvian democracy is precarious and has become even more fragile. The absence of bona fide parties plays a prominent role in fomenting and perpetuating democratic vulnerabilities. It is argued that the absence of democratic breakdown has been obtained by default. Peruvian electoral vehicles are incapable of constraining executives bent on power accumulation and autocratization. However, chief executives are also rendered very weak by the lack of partisan-based institutional power or attendant social power, rooted in reliable and steady societal support. Peru has avoided democratic breakdown, but its post-2000 empirical record supports the notion that a partyless polity cannot aspire to a sustained improvement in the quality of democracy. High-quality or even medium-quality democracy is unattainable without institutionalized and programmatic political parties. While the Peruvian case on its own certainly cannot prove this assertion, it provides strong clues as to why this relationship holds in the real world. Representation, responsiveness, and accountability prove elusive in a partyless environment. The purpose of the last chapter is to elucidate why and how a democracy dominated by personalism, rather than political parties qua institutions, malfunctions. A shortened version of Chapter 6 can be found in academic article format in Sanchez-Sibony (2020).

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A Note on Terminology

The term “electoral vehicle” is used throughout the book to refer to diminished political parties that do not achieve vertical integration of groups (Unrooted party), cannot coordinate horizontally ambitious politicians (Uncoordinated party), or cannot carry out either function (Independents), as defined in Luna et al. (2021). “Electoral vehicle” is thus used here as a shorthand for political entities that are not bona fide political parties. The usage of the term “electoral vehicle” in this book slightly modifies that found in Luna et al. (2021), where it constitutes a master concept that includes full-fledged political parties and diminished subtypes as well. The purposeful avoidance in this book of

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the term “political party” to describe any and all electoral political organizations aims to align proper terminology with the empirical referent, and thus avoid conceptual stretching.

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CHAPTER 2

Structural Impediments to Party System Reconstruction in Peru

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Introduction

The causes fuelling party system collapse are not the same as those that perpetuate partylessness and preempt party system reconstruction. Similarly, the disappearance of the factors responsible for collapse does not resurrect a defunct party system. Whereas ruinous economic performance during both the Belaunde and Garcia presidencies seriously undermined the Peruvian party system, there was little reason to expect the advent of price and economic stability and high GDP growth to reconstruct the collapsed party system. Similarly, the Peruvian governments’ inability to handle the growing urban and rural violence perpetrated by the Shining Path had fatal repercussions on the public’s predisposition to retain their trust in the traditional political class and political parties, but the end of guerrilla violence did not rebuild those society–party linkages. This asymmetry of causation also applies to the region more generally. The Latin American historical record of the post-1978 Third Wave era shows that is easier for party–voter linkages to break down (Morgan 2011) than it is to sustainably rebuild them after they have been broken (Levitsky et al. 2016). Alongside other Latin American countries that suffered party system collapse or acute deinstitutionalization, the past decade in Peru has

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provided ample evidence in favor of the historical-structuralist theory of party system development (Gunther, Montero and Linz 2002; Mainwaring and Zoco 2007), supporting the informed predictions Levitsky and Cameron (2003) made in the immediate post-Fujimori era. This historico-structural perspective holds that, in the contemporary era, transformations in the social bases of politics as pertains to class structures, alongside transformational technological changes, render party reconstruction elusive. Neoliberal economic reforms and their effects contributed to a contraction of formal sector employment and a rise in informal self-employment and micro-entreprenerialism in Latin America (Portes and Hoffman 2003), spawning atomized societies. In few countries has this pernicious development been more pronounced than in Peru. This inauspicious landscape has since complicated enormously the task of encapsulating citizens into social blocs, and by extension, encapsulating citizens into political parties. As Cameron (1991) detected early on, the enormous growth of the informal sector in Peru posed challenges for all parties across the ideological spectrum. The political right evinced a “persistent inability to win support from the informal sector,” as well as contributing to the “electoral decline of the left despite its historical strong ties to the informal sector and the urban poor” (Cameron 1991, 76). With the benefit of hindsight, it can be ascertained that the growing informalization of the economy underpinned the move away from party-based and class-based political alignments in Peru. This chapter briefly delves into three historico-structural factors that impede party-building in Peru: the pernicious legacy of Peru’s political history; the socioeconomic landscape bequeathed by Alan Garcia’s first tenure in office (1985–1990); the anti-party inheritance bestowed by Alberto Fujimori’s government. In addition, the chapter also explores the role of political agency: Peruvian politicians’ abdication of any explicit conscious attempt to represent social divides or to delineate and structure political divisions. The final part of the chapter introduces a new additional factor not considered by scholars to explain the absence of party institutionalization accrual through time: the entropy-like, selfperpetuating endogenous dynamics inherent to electoral vehicles. It is here maintained that such vehicles contain within them the features that plant the seeds of their institutional decay and fatal fate (irrelevance or dissolution). In particular, four such sources of decay are highlighted: these vehicles are liable to debilitating internal divisions for lack of accepted and strong conflict resolution internal rules; their

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survival-first calculus renders them susceptible to short-term behaviors and decisions that undermine future institutionalization; their organizational deficits make them prone to using misguided heuristics leading to flawed decision-making; and finally, their personalist nature greatly enhances their vulnerability to (personal) brand dilution.

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The Longue Duree: Or the Weight of History

As important as the recent (post-1980) political past is to understand the nature of Peruvian party politics in the early twenty-first century, it is essential to take a longer historical view. The country’s political history—including its frequent regime changes, political instability, the late incorporation of the working class into politics, the long rule of oligarchies, and short-lived democratic experiments (Contreras and Cueto 2007; Klaren 2000)—has forged a particularly inconspicuous landscape for a party-centered democratic system to thrive. Peru does not enjoy a tradition of party-based government. The only period prior to the 1980s in which the polity displayed a proto-party system was the 1960s, when the APRA and Accion Popular parties competed against each other; however, their inability to agree on the rules of the game by which to compete doomed that brief experiment in political competition and ushered in the military government of Velasco Alvarado. Crucially, Peru’s political development has been characterized by the fact that the masses were politically integrated very late in comparison to other countries in the region, where the critical juncture of social “incorporation” into organized politics occurred much earlier in historical world time (Collier and Collier 2002). Politics in Peru remained a game that oligarchies played until very recently in historical terms. For the bulk of the Twentieth Century “Peru was governed by authoritarian, centralist, and often military regimes that resisted democratic participation…these had been interspersed by fleeting interludes of constitutional government, elected on a very narrow franchise and without a popular mandate (Crabtree 2006, 27).” Universal franchise came to Peru as late as 1979, with the Constitution enacted that year. The most important and first massbased party in XX century Peru, APRA, was outlawed and repressed for long periods. The Peruvian conservative elite, bereft of a durable political party of its own to safeguard its vital interests, firmly opposed the ambitions of APRA, a party aiming to represent the underprivileged,

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but also one endowed with movementism qualities (a claim to represent the whole nation, not a part of it, and thus intolerant of other parties and competitors), which by definition are inimical for democracy. Because of the radical nature of the main political actors in the scene (elites, military, populist parties), coupled with their profound distrust and enmity for one another, it was exceedingly difficult to develop an inclusive political system based on agreed-upon rules. Democracy thus became an “impossible game,” to rescue Guillermo O’Donnell’s famous metaphor. The main parties populating the Peruvian historical landscape (APRA, Accion Democratica, Partido Popular Cristiano) were dominated by caudillo figures, stifling internal party rules and institutional development. The first democratic general elections in Peru after military rule showcased political parties’ fragilities and foretold of the difficulties ahead in forging a consolidated party system. As Third Wave-era democracy came to Peru with the foundational general elections of 1980, great hopes emerged of charting a new party-based democratic future. But the structural, institutional, and cultural conditions that comport with rooted political parties were largely absent. In this new attempt at democratization, history bequeathed Peru a very poor legacy upon which to build a party-based democracy, let alone one built on programmatic linkages between parties and voters. Renowned Peruvian public intellectual Ivan Carlos Degregori wrote as follows in the aftermath of the 1980 elections: After the electoral euphoria and haven seen the contest results, it is time to formulate some broader questions. There are several problems on the table. The most organized party in Peru—APRA—has been patently defeated. The Partido Popular Cristiano (PPC), which appeared toward the end of the campaign as the most coherent party of the bourgeoisie, has also failed. The Left, which despite its division presents political projects of great historical vitality, has suffered a defeat as well. The organized party of society, then, has been defeated electorally. The political forces with a project, with ideology, and with organization, have lost the battle. Political amorphism and social inconsistency have won. The political structure of the country and its working logic have succumbed once again to destructuring and improvisation. Belaundismo [movement of candidate Fernando Belaunde], which incarnates the most nebulous element of society, has won. It appears as if parties are incapable of channeling the energy of great sectors of social masses, or otherwise these [masses] are reluctant to incorporate themselves into political blocs. This is not, by the way, the first time that amorphism

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wins out. Its history is the history of Peru. (Degregori 2015, 27; my translation)

This penetrating assessment underscores the key notion that the new democracy could not escape the burdensome weight of Peruvian history. The nascent democratic body politic would inexorably reflect historically conditioned failings, not the least of which was the general amorphism characterizing political society and the attendant uprootedness of political parties. Notwithstanding the fact that the results took many observers by surprise, the 1980 elections encoded much of Peruvian history. Taking the longue duree, a perspective that gives priority to long-term historical structures over short term developments, thus helps place the post-1990 partyless Peruvian landscape within required historical perspective. It sheds light on the continuities between present-day political amorphism and the longstanding legacies to which that amorphism traces its roots. While some accounts have portrayed the party system of the 1980s as one moving toward increasing institutionalization (see Tanaka 1998), others have disagreed with that assessment. What can be ascertained is that it was not well-grounded and rooted to begin with. Sociologist Julio Cotler’s (1995) writings denote skepticism that the party politics of the 1980s represented a departure from the past in signaling the development of a bona fide party system. As he put it: the adoption of a competitive political regime did not lead to changes in the long-standing political structures or in the patrimonial style characteristic of party leadership. The parties’ status continued to be based on the personal political power of their caudillos, measured by the capacity of each to impose his will and to grant favors through patronage…As a result of the social and political changes that Peru had undergone during the twelve years of military rule, the population had come to hope that democracy would bring “a new way of doing politics.” The popular illusion was that parties would channel long repressed demands, which would receive a response from the state. These hopes were quickly dashed. (Cotler 1995, 37–38)

Both in the dimensions of internal autonomy from leaders and social rootedness, the traditional political parties wasted the opportunity afforded by the democratization of the 1980s to create more robust and vibrant party institutions. The growing chasm between political society and civil society

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throughout the course of that decade, precluded the emergence of a party system with staying power.

3

The Legacy of Political Agency (I): Alan Garcia

A fruitful lens through which to analyze the (scant) prospects for party reconstruction in Peru is to assess the legacy bequeathed by the political agency (acts of commission and omission) of key political actors. Agential factors significantly worsened the structural landscape upon which parties operate in Peru, thus affecting the relative difficulties inherent to party-building. President Alan Garcia’s destructive tenure in office bequeathed an economic, social, and civil society landscape that continues to haunt Peru. Garcia came to office in 1985 intending to transform Peruvian capitalism via “a reactivation of the economy that would allow for the expansion of the internal market” (Parodi 2002, 195). His economic policies in office comport with what economists Dornbush and Edwards (1991) famously labeled “economic populism”: an approach to economics that emphasizes growth and redistribution while sidelining the risks of inflation, fiscal deficits and external restrictions. What motivated Garcia’s economic policies? The APRA party was infused with a structuralist economic paradigm that aimed to restructure the economy. Secondly, the partially neoliberal policies of the Belaunde government were economically unsuccessful, giving the incoming government an alibi to try alternative economic policies. Finally, Garcia was a political populist naturally inclined to support an economic project laden with political objectives. The APRA capitalized on the political discontent generated by the Belaunde government, which bequeathed an economic panorama of mega-inflation and growth stagnation. Garcia’s government aimed to reactivate the economy as well as redistribute income by increasing domestic aggregate demand and changing some of the basic prices of the economy (Lago 1992). The latter included a freezing of basic utilities’ prices, the exchange rate, and the nominal interest rate. The combination of frozen prices and salary increases across the board (a 50 percent increase in 1986), led to a private consumption boom that generated 10% GDP growth in 1986. But this came at the expense of a growing fiscal deficit, which was financed via monetary emissions from the Central Bank (Lago 1992). Garcia made another fateful choice to try to nationalize the banking industry, a decision he announced to the nation in

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July 1987. The public justification Garcia offered for this drastic decision was that Peru needed to “democratize access to credit” and state control of the banking sector was the only way to “overcome social, historical and geographic inequalities” that afflicted the country (Crabtree 1992, 190). The greatest economic impact of this radical attempt at wide-ranging nationalization was that the evaporation of trust between the government and the private sector. The latter became convinced that the banking measure was the first of many by which private property would be diminished and state property expanded with no end. The outcome of Garcia’s heterodox economic experiment was devastating: 1988 saw negative growth of 8% while inflation reached 1722%; whereas by 1989 the size of the economic contraction was even greater, reaching 12%, while inflation soared to 2776. Per capita income declined by 22% between 1987 and 1989, thereby falling to levels of income last seen in the early 1960s! (Crabtree 1992, 213). By 1990, no less than 70% of the workforce was either unemployed or underemployed. Levels of informality in the Peruvian economy skyrocketed (Perry et al. 2007). The changed socioeconomic landscape the Garcia administration bestowed, an extremely atomized society, has since seriously constrained the ability of political parties to represent the ensuing great mass of unorganized informal workers. In addition, mass migration from the interior to the cities also contributed to swelling the ranks of informal workers, such that Peru has displayed one of the highest levels of informality in Latin America since the late 1980s (Loayza and Serven 2009). Economic crises also helped spawn the growth of illicit economic sectors that also escaped the writ of the Peruvian state (Durand 2007, 88–118). Cameron (1991, 95) presciently noted how, in the aftermath of the Garcia administration, high levels of informality had severely eroded partisan linkages with society: the informal sector did not provide a stable coalition base for either of the parties that occupied the opposed poles of the ideological spectrum in Peru…That electorate was increasingly disconnected from formal economic or political arrangements… The class position of the informal sector is so ambiguous that it is impossible to predict behavioral outcomes on the basis of its class position…In the political arena, an independent electorate refused to accept the traditional party system…The growth of the Peruvian informal sector has given rise to… the virtual disappearance of the party system defined by the class cleavage.

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The past thirty years of Peruvian politics have given added weight to Cameron’s initial insights, insofar as the enormous swaths of informality have made elusive the structuring of party politics along the divisions of social class. Fast macroeconomic growth thereafter, among the very best economic performances in Latin America, did not reduce levels of informality nor alleviated the nation’s social and political scourges. The weakening of organized civil society that accompanied the economic recession and informalization of the economy, renders the encapsulation voters via mobilizing structures an elusive task for political parties to accomplish. If Peru today displays an electoral marketplace comprised of floating voters without political attachments, it is to a significant degree a reflection of socioeconomic determinants: a great mass of workers without formal employment and thus detached from state protections and benefits. Moreover, in the wake of the economic calamity the Garcia government engineered, “the political identity of many Peruvians was diluted because of the instability of their social identity” (Panfichi and Coronel 2009, 97). Garcia and his party failed to read adequately the historical times, characterized by the rise of markets and globalization. But this critique can be made extensive to other Peruvian political parties. As Grompone (2005) has noted, the state–society paradigm propounded by mass political parties in Peru was decontextualized, as parties sought to represent a social world as it existed in the post-World War II era. Peru’s political parties ostensibly aspired to give voice to interest groups and social movements, but these were increasingly less representative of the population at large, amid a much more fluid and atomized social landscape. Thus, the corporatist party–voter linkage type could not be effective at the task of broad-based representation. It is reasonable to conclude, alongside Tanaka and Morel (2018, 153), that “without Garcia’s leadership, an APRA government [1985–1990] would have been less voluntaristic and more prudent.” Alan Garcia’s excessive voluntarism spawned an economic cataclysm which paved the way to the collapse of the party system and the destruction of Peru’s precarious democracy. The longer-term damaging consequences on party politics are still conspicuously present.

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4 The Legacy of Political Agency (II): Alberto Fujimori Alberto Fujimori came to power in one of the most surprising electoral contests in Latin American history. Contrary to the predictions (hopes?) of some partisan rivals that an inexperienced outsider with little parliamentary support would be easy to manipulate politically, Fujimori refuted emerged as a skillful, masterful manipulator of a political system in flux. The lingering influence of his ideational worldview, political tactics, anti-organizational tendencies, socially demobilizing economic model, and modus operandi after he stepped down from the presidency two decades ago is unmistakable. The legacy of these ideational, economic, institutional, and political elements continue to affect the organizational (partyless) logic and operating dynamics that characterize Peruvian politics. A transition to democratic rule ensued after Fujimori ignominiously escaped to Japan shortly after the diffusion of the Vladivideos; however, with the benefit of hindsight, it can be averred Peru’s transition away from Fujimorismo qua political society did not materialize. That is to say, the inorganic nature of party actors, the anti-party-cum-anti-political culture and discourse, and the political modus operandi that Fujimorismo helped spawn, continue to dominate Peruvian political life. The persistent centrality of these elements, renders Cotler’s conceptualization of Peru as a sociedad post-fujimorista descriptively and analytically apt (La Republica 2012). By the early 1990s, the discrediting of the political establishment was so thorough that Alberto Fujimori’s closure of Congress (a self-coup) in 1992 enjoyed a remarkable 70 percent approval among the mass publics (Cameron 1998). Alberto Fujimori and his Vladimiro Montesinos understood all too well the influence of television as an instrument to accumulate and wield power. It is not coincidental that among all of the relevant actors who were corrupted by Montesinos as part of his elaborate, widespread web of political co-optation (judges, parliamentarians, journalists, generals, etc.), none received higher bribes than the CEOs of television outlets (McMillan and Zoido 2004); they were the most politically valuable, because via television an incumbent could win over “hearts and minds,” and thus prop up presidential approval ratings and domestic legitimacy. The Fujimori regime (1990–2000) successfully infiltrated or captured several key TV media outlets, which became instruments to socialize many Peruvians into the strident anti-political discourse of the

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President and his political spin doctors and associates. This well-crafted narrative was functional to the regime’s agenda of undermining the opposition and creating an ideational worldview whose influence has permeated the post-Fujimorato period. The process of co-optation or capture of existing TV outlets was complemented by the creation of a small empire of newspaper dailies (spearheaded by Fujimori’s right-hand man Vladimiro Montesinos) which served a steady diet of propaganda and fabricated stories that unfailingly portrayed establishment parties and politicians as feckless, corrupt, venal, and self-serving (Conaghan 2005, Chapter 7). During the Fujimorato, politics became more mediaoriented, in good measure because of the decimation of political parties but also due to political agency on the part of Fujimori’s regime, which actively used media outlets under its influence as mechanisms of political control and socialization (Fowks 2015). Today, the mass media “may have more capacity to influence politics than many political parties” (Melendez and Leon 2009), as two notable analysts of Peruvian politics have written. Indeed, major TV channels can set and define the outlines of the Peruvian political agenda—that is, the issues that are discussed as well as those that are willfully ignored—, such that electoral vehicles adjusting their agency and issue-positioning in reaction to that agenda. In a context in which four large business groups control over 90% of the mass media market (Tello, chap. 11), this poses troubling questions about how the political information that is relayed to Peruvian voters is mediated and distorted by the material interests and political preferences of such groups. All in all, the mass media in Peru tilts heavily toward the right and has engaged in virulent campaigns of character assassination to try to discredit candidates who have espoused income redistribution or are otherwise not aligned with the neoliberal economic paradigm that reigns supreme since the Fujimorato. In short, Peru’s tendentious private mass media—which, unlike political parties, is unaccountable to voters—plays an outsized and distortive role in Peruvian democracy, a phenomenon that partially finds its roots in the Fujimori regime. Some of the same mass media groups/owners that were complicit in that regime’s corruption and authoritarianism, continue to leverage their clout for objectives that deviate far from the defense of democratic values, journalistic equanimity, or political pluralism. The socializing influence that ten years of Fujimorista rhetoric and constructed narrative had on the public perception of parties and democracy, constitutes another pernicious legacy of the authoritarian era.

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Alberto Fujimori’s societal sentido comun, the political zeitgeist (spirit of the times) he crafted and foisted upon Peruvians, included the following: the privileging of results over process (end-justifies-the-means philosophy); the distrust toward political parties, Congress and the judiciary; the value of mano dura (hard hand approach to resolving security problems); a plebiscitarian conception of politics; an impatience with (and discrediting of) political deliberation; and the disparagement of elites, among other elements. The Fujimorista regime was popular for a good number of years, and that legitimacy was utilized to castigate political parties relentlessly, while it inculcated upon the government’s many supporters a results-oriented view of democracy, with little respect for its constitutive procedural and legal dimensions. Alberto Fujimori set the tone that would impregnate politics during the 1990s, a philosophy well-summarized in his following public remarks: Democracy should not include the participation of political parties. The people have learned a lot. They have said: enough of this kind of democracy. We want a democracy that is more efficient, that resolves our problems. Democracy is the will of the people—good administration, honesty, results. (quoted in: Conaghan 2005, 3)

Thus, Fujimori not only impugned existing parties (APRA, AP, Izquierda Unida), but the very concept of political parties as necessary for democracy. As he put it, parties were palabreria (all talk and no action). This viewpoint was, in turn, appropriated by a good number of political entrepreneurs at all levels of public office who wanted to thrive politically amid this new political zeitgeist. Free agents entering the political arena purposely avoided the term “party” when creating electoral vehicles, a practice that continues up to the present day. Because both the Accion Popular (1980–1985) and the APRA (1985–1990) governments presided over such catastrophic economic and security performance, the couching of democracy in terms of results found very fertile ground among the mass publics. That the Shining Path and hyperinflation were both defeated during the Alberto Fujimori government only buttressed the regime’s narrative and political capital enormously (Cotler and Grompone 2000). In short, the apparent congruence between Fujimori’s regime narrative and the public perception of a stellar record of governmental performance, put political parties on the defensive. The opposition’s rhetoric was further discredited in the eyes of many Peruvians who saw a

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political outsider tackling that which opposition parties had utterly failed to tackle. Traditional parties’ ability to influence the ideational environment of the 1990s was marginal, both because of restricted access to the media and because of the wide reach of the well-oiled machinery of Fujimorismo. Political parties’ real self-inflicted wounds—including the 1980s legal Left’s flirting with, and sometimes ambiguous stance toward, the Shining Path—made Fujimorismo’s party demolition task all too easy. The Fujimorato regime was perhaps most pernicious for the political fortunes of the legal Left. Alberto Fujimori was very effective in his portrayal of the legal Left as the civilian arm of the murderous Shining Path insurgency. Besides the damaging effect produced by the Peruvian legal left’s ambiguous stance towards the illegal left, leftism came to be associated with terrorism in no small measure because of the Alberto Fujimori’s regime manipulative narrative (Terrucos is a disparaging term that continues to be used to discredit leftists). The spy apparatus spearheaded by Vladimiro Montesinos within the SIN (Secret Intelligence Agency) included vigilance of regime opponents and telephone interception of conversations, which allowed the regime to use blackmail to advance its agenda (Bowen 2000). Upon the breakdown of the regime, the operators of these telephone and email interceptions became independent and sold their services to any customer, including interested party-based political masters. The petroaudio scandal that haunted the APRA during its 2006–2010 term in office was symptomatic of a broader phenomenon. It came to reveal the existence of a whole network of private firms dedicated to spying, filtration of information, and other illicit activities actively used by Peruvian high-level businessmen and politicians (Melendez and Leon 2009). The adoption of these Fujimorista-type corrupt practices by political party operatives lays bare yet another insidious legacy of the Fujimorato on the ensuing democratic era, with predictably negative effects on levels of public trust toward political parties and democratic institutions. Fujimori also engaged in purposeful institutional engineering intended to damage the political opposition and political parties writ large. Fujimori justified opening “spaces of direct and participatory democracy as alternatives to representative democracy based upon political parties, with the explicit aim of debilitating [the parties] (my emphasis, Tanaka 2005, 111).” Other changes that targeted political parties included law 26,452, promulgated in May of 1995, which elevated the number of signatures required to legally create new political parties to a threshold

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of 5 percent of registered voters in the national census (which amounted to more than half a million signatures) (Degregori 2001, 36). This high threshold posed a sizable challenge to party creation, particularly in a context in which political parties had become so discredited. Finally, Alberto Fujimori “could have made of Cambio 90 [his electoral vehicle for the 1990 election] a movement that canalized the concerns of citizens tired of traditional parties. That task did not interest him” (Degregori 2001, 39). Following the footsteps of most populists, wary of the constraining effect of parties on personalized power, Fujimori did not invest in party-building. Moreover, the lesson political entrepreneurs drew during the Fujimorato was that the time-consuming and arduous task of grassroots party-building was unnecessary for electoral success. Disparaging parties became the bread and butter common practice not only of Fujimori and his associates, but also of his political opponents. Alberto Fujimori’s success in the court of public opinion set the terms and style of political discourse and strategy for incumbents and opposition alike ever since, effectively ushering in a post-Fujimorista political society, to use sociologist Julio Cotler’s perceptive term. Even some politicians who later gained political capital from their allegedly principled anti-Fujimorismo stance, displayed a history of previous support for the Fujimorato.1 To come to terms with the sociopolitical milieu in which Peruvian parties operate in the new century, it is important to understand that Fujimori’s electoral authoritarian regime did not end as a result of a new, reinvigorated civil society—notwithstanding many romantic accounts to the contrary. Rather, the hybrid regime imploded from within. Consequently, the exit of the old regime bequeathed a terrain “without consolidated political and social actors” (Grompone 2005, 169). The presumed “re-emergence” of the traditional parties at the dawn of the 2000s can best be interpreted as a default outcome of the implosion of Fujimorismo and the conjunctural monopoly of the party supply by traditional parties (capable of fulfilling the legal requirements for fielding candidates), not a product of repaired programmatic or interest incorporation linkages between voters and parties. 1 Perhaps the most telling illustration comes from a political figure who later became known for his pro-democracy, anti-Fujimorista political battles: Alejandro Toledo. In his own words, Toledo publicly endeavored to “build the second floor of Fujimorismo” when he ran for president in 1995.

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In summation, the decision-making of a few key individual actors left Peru laden with a dismal landscape for party-building. The damaging political agency of another individual not covered in this chapter was decisive as well: Shining Path leader Abimael Guzman. Writing a decade after the recuperation of democracy, Sociologist Julio Cotler poignantly summarized the role political agency has played in Peru thus: What Abimael Guzman [leader of the Shining Path guerrilla] and Alan Garcia did during the 1980s—destroy the old society without reconstructing anything in its place—and after them, Montesinos and [Alberto] Fujimori, [which was] to totally corrupt society, has sealed Peru’s history for a long time. The price for [those acts of commission] is paid for in a timeframe of decades to come. The task of reconstructing the social and political order cannot be done in 24 hours.... Political parties in Peru are practically disappeared. (La Republica 2010)

5 Absence of Political Agency to Politicize Societal Cleavages Besides the nefarious legacy of a long authoritarian history as well as the turbulent recent past (1980–2000), prospects for party system reconstruction in Peru are very poor for several reasons. The problematique of building political parties must be approached both from the supply side (opportunities and incentives political entrepreneurs face to engage in party-building and brand-construction, as well as the incentives politicians face to remain loyal to parties, etc.) and the demand side (voters’ social identification and trust in state institutions, civil society’s organizational strength, voter inclinations to stay loyal to parties). Prospects for partybuilding from the demand side are dire. Because of far-reaching changes to Peru’s social structure since the 1980s (Plaza 2009)—in particular, the large increase in the share and number of the informal workers, the weakening of its civil society, or the newfound marginality and fragmentation of labor unions—there is little chance for the reconstruction of a party system on the basis of social blocs.2 There simply is not a sufficiently robust and dense organizational-cum-associational life (Portocarrero et al.

2 In addition, the Peruvian business community has demonstrated little interest developing organic links vis-a-vis the partisan arena or creating a political party to represent their corporate interests.

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2006; Burt 2007; Panfichi and Coronel 2009) to anchor a party system to the social fabric via mobilizing structures. From this perspective, Peru’s party nonsystem is unlikely to escape its current fate and transit to a party system via a bottom-up process of aggregation of associational life—atomized and feeble as it is. It is from the supply side that party-building could conceivably occur, if at all. Party systems can be shaped not only by deeply entrenched social cleavages but, alternatively, by shorter-lived “political divisions” (Kitschelt and Wilkinson 2007), without compromising their systemic qualities. Political elites can activate these divisions from above, quite independently from underlying social structures. Therefore, political agency can emerge as an independent causal factor shaping the contours of a party system. For instance, it certifiably played a significant role in shaping and building the partisan arena in Chile, as Mainwaring and Torcal (2006) document. The relative stability of party systems can be shaped not only by their cleavage structure or the institutional rules of the game, but can also emerge from a structure of competition in which “a particular conflict is prioritized by politicians and where any other potential alternative source of realignment is marginalized” (Ware 1996, 198). As an empirical phenomenon observed in developing democracies in Latin America and elsewhere, such divisions can arise as a by-product of the competitive dynamics of electoral competition itself, or emerge as the result of purposeful agency on the part of politicians. Politicians have it within their purview to recreate sociopolitical identities (Enyedi 2005; Torcal and Mainwaring 2003); they need not be passive interpreters of objective social divisions, as traditional political theory a la Rokkan and Stein posited. Thus, elites can purposefully choose to attempt to rationalize the political space and help endow it with some stability amid otherwise inimical structural conditions. But the inter-temporal prioritization of certain political conflicts requires inter-temporal discipline, as well as horizontal coordination. That such discipline and coordination can emerge amidst a party universe populated by free agents, is exceedingly difficult. In Peru’s volatile party universe, politicians are mainly guided by shortterm and tactical considerations, maneuvering for electoral gain. When uncertainty about future electoral outcomes or party universe configurations is very high, short-termism is a natural response, both on the part of individual politicians and party formations. Moreover, Peruvian elites do not display a principled commitment to values, ideas, or issues situated at either side of a fault-line (Taylor 2007); rather, political pragmatism

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stands as their supreme guiding north star. In sum, it is not clear that prospects for party reconstruction from the supply side are better than those from the demand side. The proto-party system Peru exhibited in the 1980s was, to a limited extent, shaped along programmatic lines. The Partido Popular Cristiano stood on the right, while Izquierda Unida was on the left. Accion Popular could be placed on the center-right, while the populist APRA could be situated on the center-left—although it had exhibited significant ideological flexibility throughout its history (Manrique 2009). All in all, however, neither the most institutionalized party of the 1980s (APRA), nor its competitors, engaged in a programmatic electoral contest akin to that observed in countries such as Chile, Uruguay, or even Argentina, Costa Rica, and Mexico (Kitschelt et al. 2010, 330–334). The casual factors that account for the collapse of the party system left Peru’s incipient programmatic structuration in tatters. Peru’s twentieth century renders it a poor candidate for programmatic party politics, insofar as it is bereft of long-term structural conditions that aid program-based structuration. Kitschelt et al. (2010) produced a landmark scholarly work on the structural factors that facilitate program-based party systems in the developing world. The theorized factors that provide the baseline conditions for the advent of programmatic politics include: economic development, the opportunities afforded by long periods of democratic governance, and the perception of “stakes” in the political battle between contending collective actors. Economic development diminishes the societal demand for “selective incentives” (clientelism), while concurrently increasing the demand for public good party offerings. On the supply side, economic prosperity dramatically increases the cost of clientelism as a political tool to gather political support, thus changing politicians’ incentives away from clientelist methods. Adaptive learning, however, requires an appropriate political opportunity environment for it to develop; in particular, it necessitates long periods in which civil liberties are procured, so as to allow for the development of interest associations such as unions and professional organizations, as well as political parties. Secondly, repeated rounds of electoral competition are necessary for citizens and politicians to coordinate around programmatic demands. Interruptions of competition can “arrest or even reverse capabilities for programmatic party competition (Kitschelt et al. 2010, 57).” Thus, countries with long democratic regime legacies are much better candidates for the development of programmatic party systems. A final and decisive factor for the possible emergence

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of such party systems lies in dynamic periods of “regime and institutional choice over fundamental distributive arrangements (“stakes”). These high stakes periods of political contention incentivize political action on the part of political entrepreneurs and citizens to pay the costs of social mobilization around distinct distributive programmatic offers. Polities with a history of programmatic partisan competition are also better equipped to devise new programmatic policy appeals than those polities devoid of this historical legacy. Based on these conditional parameters, Peru stands as a poor candidate for programmatic structuration. Its twentieth century democratic life has been short-lived and interrupted. The predominance of oligarchical dominance over the political system famously lasted longer than in other Latin American countries, rendering Peru a very latecomer to democratic governance. In addition, Peru’s key political party-movement, Aprismo, displayed more of a vocation for power than a focused programmatic agenda, as it forged opportunistic alliances with some of its foremost political enemies (Klaren 2000). APRA’s political preponderance as a catch-all populist movement incorporating the popular classes and the working class afforded limited room for the emergence of an organic, programmatic leftist political party, much like other populist movements in Latin America’s twentieth century. Therefore, the relative absence of this important precondition in Peru— long period of democratic competition–militates against the emergence of programmatic politics. As regards the second variable, Peru exhibited extremely poor economic performance in the quarter century prior to the Fujimorato (1990–2000). The rapidity with which economic liberalization was implemented did not allow for adaptation on the part of political entrepreneurs. What is more, Peru’s neoliberalism was implemented by individual presidential agency rather than an institutionalized right-wing political party (Roberts 1995; Gonzales de Olarte 1998). The macroeconomic policy success of the neoliberal model, the attendant burgeoning power accruing to the business sector, coupled with the rise of a technocratic elite that that has entrenched its control over economic policy, have had the effect of depoliticizing economic policy in the political sphere. These factors further undermined the structuration of the party universe along distinct distributive economic models. In addition, the low presence of the state in the economic life of Peruvians—for instance, as regards the country’s puny social programs—has had the injurious consequence of perpetuating a political dynamic that keeps distributive issues largely off

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the political agenda. Partly as a consequence, the supply side of the political game has generally revolved around valence issues and personalism. In sum, Kitschelt et al.’s (2010) facilitating condition for programmatic politics consisting of episodes of “high stakes” politics around economic models has not obtained in Peru over the past forty years. Both the reality that Peru evinces a small state in terms of public expenditure as a percentage of GDP, and the purposeful depoliticization of economic policy, which technocrats’ dominance has placed outside of the realm of electoral/political choice, dramatically lowered the stakes of democratic competition, helping to keep economic-themed programmatic politics at bay. While long-run determinants are very important, short-term political developments can contribute to some programmatic structure in a polity. That is, historical discontinuities can alter previous non-ideological party system patterns. The advent of the Left wave in Latin America polarized some countries such that their party systems gained some programmatic, economic-based content. In particular, some Andean countries where intense political mobilization occurred moved toward greater levels of programmatic/ideological content (Luna et al. 2012), as witnessed in Colombia, Bolivia, and Venezuela during the commodity boom period. When political leadership coordinates bottom-up collective action, polarizing politics is lasting, and redistributive stakes are at play, programmatic party politics can make inroads into a political system. Luna et al. (2012, 14) find two other factors that favored programmatic politics: bottom-up processes of mobilization (or polarization), such that interest groups mobilize and link up with parties around a shared programmatic platform; and secondly, mobilization by the leftist political actors. Peru faces structural limitations in both dimensions. The organic left is very weak organizationally and tainted by its past flirtations with the Shining Path guerilla (Cameron 2012; Munoz 2019), while there is an absence of significant mobilizing structures available for activation from the ground up, given civil society’s large degree of atomization. Unlike what happened in some of its Andean neighbors, in Peru elected leaders and parties did not pursue top-down mobilization, in no small part due to structural incapacities pertaining to Peruvian free agents and old-time politicos alike to galvanize masses and accrue lasting political support. The short-termism of Peruvian political life and evanescent nature of political power also militated against mobilization. While a nominally left-wing actor did win the presidency during the commodity boom, in the figure

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of Ollanta Humala, his powers of mass mobilization were very limited, the enemies of leftist or statist economic policies too powerful to ignore or confront (except at great political cost), and his command over the economic policymaking state apparatus was marginal. It is perhaps from this “entrenchment of political divisions” lens, that the best hopes for the rebuilding of Peru’s barren party landscape may be harbored. Thus, two relevant questions are elicited: what are the relevant political divisions to have emerged in post-2000 Peru? And is there evidence that any of them became increasingly reflected in partisan political dynamics? The most relevant political division in post-1930 Peru was that of Aprismo versus anti-aprismo. In post-2000 Peru, a few divides can be identified: democracy versus authoritarianism; Fujimorismo versus anti-Fujimorismo (which only partially overlaps with the previous one); and a geographic-cum-socioeconomic one that pits the urban/coastal versus rural /highlands regions. While these divisions shape electoral outcomes, they are not faithfully reflected in the party supply in any inter-temporally consistent manner. Electoral vehicles have not politically articulated and organized the political space in any consistent fashion along said lines. The first divide—democracy versus authoritarianism— is feeble at the level of the political elite. True and tested political liberals are scarce among establishment politicians, and even scarcer among political outsiders. There are practically no Peruvian longstanding politicos or newer political entrepreneurs who make of democratic credentials and actions a stern litmus test to separate political friends from enemies, or who otherwise make of the democracy/authoritarian distinction a clear identity marker. Only in electoral junctures where political rivals showcase authoritarian inclinations or legacies, do parties and candidates cynically and opportunistically stand as defenders of democratic values and institutions—for instance, Toledo when confronting Alberto Fujimori in the 2000 election, Alan Garcia when running against Humala in 2006 or Pedro Pablo Kuczynski when facing Keiko Fujimori in 2016. Scholar Alberto Vergara has reasonably estimated at 20 to 25 percent the proportion of the Peruvian electorate that consistently sides with (comparatively more) democracy-minded candidates. There is, therefore, an opportunity to credibly appeal to a considerable swath of the electorate via purposeful “democracy-first” party brand building. Nevertheless, no electoral vehicle or political figure has made this cleavage an explicit mainstay of their organizational or personal brand. Many political entrepreneurs and establishment politicians have prioritized the defense of the free market model

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over the defense of democratic values and institutions, alongside the country’s poderes facticos (business community, mass media, etc.). Besides the general absence of bona fide democrats in the national political fauna, the short-termism and uncertainties of Peruvian political life conspire against brand building in this direction. Finally, political agency does not take place in a vacuum. Cleavage articulation is conditioned by the social network structures within which new electoral vehicles emerge and older ones operate (Guisti Rodriguez 2018). For example, the pervasive presence of such network structures in Bolivia, allowed the Movimiento al Socialismo to articulate ethnic-based cleavages (Anria 2018). The relative absence of social network structures, by contrast, renders cleavage articulation much more difficult in Peru (Grompone 2005). The second divide—Fujimorismo versus anti-Fujimorismo—emerged as highly relevant in the 2010s. Indeed, it became the main political divide structuring the party universe. The last two presidents (Humala and PPK) owed their electoral victory to the anti-Fujimorista contingent of voters. However, anti-Fujimorismo did not find partisan expression. That is to say, anti-Fujimorismo citizens are not wedded to any electoral vehicle (Cyr and Melendez 2018); instead, they are best conceived of as floating voters who sought to prevent the electoral success of Fujimorista candidates. Little substantive content united these voters programmatically or ideologically. Figures as ideologically dissimilar as Mario Vargas Llosa, Javier Diez Canseco, Ollanta Humala, Alejandro Toledo, or Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, have helped galvanize the anti-Fujimori vote at different junctures. The coordination problem is acute in a political landscape dominated by free agents, with little by way of a substantive agenda, as opposed to instrumental interests. The first round of the 2011 presidential elections offered a revealing illustration of such dynamics: faced with the prospect of a Fujimori presidency, Kuczynski, Toledo, and Humala refused to coordinate efforts in the defense of democratic rule, despite calls from liberal quarters. Each opponent prioritized his or her individual political ambitions. In Chile, the opposition to Pinochet coordinated efforts to defeat the dictatorship and governed together as a Concertacion coalition for twenty years. In Nicaragua, a motley crew coalition of electoral vehicles and political parties also came together electorally to field one presidential candidate with the overarching objective of defeating the Sandinismo led competitive authoritarian regime in the critical 1990 general election. In Peru, no such effort took place among the opponents to the authoritarian Fujimorato regime of the 1990s. Instead, many of

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Alberto Fujimori’s electoral opponents sought to make political inroads separately while copying his platform, discourse, and strategy. The situation was not dissimilar during the post-2000 democratic era. Candidates across the political spectrum were at best part-time democrats, even as Fujimorismo’s electoral prospects improved dramatically, threatening to win the presidency. In fact, prominent politicians who have peddled themselves as democrats, have at times sided with Fujimorismo, including Pedro Pablo Kuczynski (in his 2011 support for Keiko), Alan Garcia (in a longstanding Apro-fujimorismo ghost alliance), Lourdes Flores, Alejandro Toledo (during part of the 1990s), and others. In short, the steadfast defense of democratic values and institutions has not constituted a true divide or defining structuring element informing the decisionmaking of Peruvian free agents and career politicians—rhetoric notwithstanding. Given the pervasiveness of “precarious democrats” in Peru (Dargent 2006), as well as the short-termism of political life (which places a premium on flexibility), inter-temporally consistent anti-Fujimorista politicians are scant. Partly informed by a very uncertain political landscape, and partly by an undemocratic political history and culture, most Peruvian free agents and politicians are, with few exceptions, opportunists without firm long-term commitment to values. This quality of the political supply on offer has militated against the crafting of an electoral vehicle that could help, however timidly, to structure the political space along a democratic/authoritarian cleavage. The last of the political divisions here considered, namely geographicalcum-socioeconomic divides, is the only one endowed with deep-seated structural roots. It is reflected in the exceedingly low level of nationalization of Peru’s party universe. The degree of incongruence between electoral results at the national level and those at the regional increased enormously in the 1980 to 2011 period, while the traditional parties showcased steadily lower levels of nationalization in vote patterns (Batlle and Cyr 2014). Regional elections conducted during the 2010s have only accentuated ongoing trends (Grompone 2016; McNulty 2017; Ponce de Leon and Garcia Ayala 2018), such that the degree of party system incongruence across levels of government is among the highest in Latin America. Traditional diminished parties have even become more Lima-centered, while regional movements and local-only electoral outfits have come to dominate most subnational elections. However, “even the [regional] movements and new parties that are most organized have low prospects of becoming institutionalized. Their dependence on

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the personal capital of a leader or administrative capital for their functioning renders them short-lived organizations (Zavaleta 2014, 138).” Thus, the structural disequilibrium between party supply and demand seen at the national level is reproduced at the subnational level. There is also an extremely low level of partisan articulation between both levels of government. Regional parties have steadily supplanted national parties at the level of subnational governments, and links between both sets of electoral vehicles, to the extent to which they exist, are inorganic, electoral, and opportunistic (Cotler 2009). Conversely, political entrepreneurs during the past two decades have evidenced a manifest disinterest in constructing political parties at the regional level as a steppingstone to scale up party-building efforts nationwide. All in all, by the dawn of the 2020s, the polity’s nominally national parties are utterly unable to garner support across the national territory, let alone garner it reasonably evenly. Peru truly evinces two very distinct party constellations: one for national elections and another one at the subnational level. The collective action challenge and other obstacles involved in aggregating narrow-based parties to configure new, national parties, is enormously daunting. In addition, political reforms ushered in a more difficult terrain for party nationalization. The process of decentralization spearheaded by the Alejandro Toledo administration proved damaging to the ability of electoral vehicles to articulate representation across space, or vertically across levels of administration (Vergara 2009). The Alianza para el Progreso (APP) is the rare subnational party that has adopted this route of territorial enlargement with some success, building on the patronage networks (university consortia) belonging to its leader Cesar Acuna (Barrenechea 2014). But it is the (partial) exception that proves the rule. This business magnate pursued a strategy based on the intensive investment of administrative capital, not a strategy easily replicable by other electoral vehicles bereft of autonomous financial resources.

6 Self-Perpetuating Dynamics in Democracies Without Parties Electoral competition in Peru for the past three decades has not yielded a more structured party universe, contradicting the expectation by scholars such as Converse (1969) and others about the rationalizing and structuring influence of time upon party–voter patterns of interaction. In fact, the passage of time has confirmed Peru’s status as a “democracy without

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parties,” as it was initially labeled by Levitsky and Cameron (2003). This term meant to convey the notion that, since the party system had collapsed, Peru was populated by political independents atop electoral vehicles, following the model of electoral organization spearheaded by Alberto Fujimori: the disposable “party” (ibid., 11). Bona fide political parties, characterized as entities capable of disciplining and training its cadres, capable of collective action, setting long-term objectives, or governed by internal rules, had ceased to dominate the polity. Levitsky and Cameron (2003) were intellectually agnostic about the future evolution of the Peruvian party universe, maintaining that “since 2000… prospects for party rebuilding have been mixed.” However, in the final analysis, they settled on a healthy skepticism about the prospects for party system revival in Peru, not least because of the incentives politicians faced given the political and structural environment in which they operated: newcomers faced few incentives to join discredited established parties, in the knowledge they could be successful in politics taking a page out of Fujimori’s organization-free playbook; political capital was accrued by creating “independent movements”; and finally, newcomers faced a structural landscape wherein party-building was exceedingly difficult. While surveying three different lenses through which to assess prospects for party system reconstruction—including the effects of authoritarian rule, and a permissive but changeable institutional framework—, the authors put the accent on the historical-structural obstacles. In particular the large growth of the informal sector, “geographically fragmented and extremely heterogenous in terms of their work, interests and identities (ibid., 24)” made the great mass of informal workers extremely difficult to organize and encapsulate (on this topic, see also: Cameron 1994). Secondly, the advent of a new communications technology environment rendered partisan territorial organization less necessary for electoral success. The two-decade long empirical record accumulated since Levitsky and Cameron’s scholarly article was published confirms that structural conditions are indeed essential to comprehend Peru’s partyless predicament. However, we wish to amend this diagnosis by shedding light on an additional causal factor fueling partylessness: the endogenous, self-perpetuating dynamics inherent to party non-systems. Levitsky and Cameron (2003, 25–26) hinted at two endogenous-type forces: the political system’s self-selection of nonparty politicians, and the likelihood that party-fortifying institutional reforms would be obviated by these same political entrepreneurs. While these elements are certainly important, and

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much evidence has accumulated to corroborate their relevance in Peru, a larger array of endogenous elements can be identified. The latter part of this chapter seeks to delineate a more complete set of endogenous causal factors perpetuating party nonbuilding. Party systems can be rendered unstable and unpredictable because of exogenous or endogenous causes, or a combination thereof. That is, the observed instability may stem from contextual factors (a world historical time that makes the encapsulation of voters elusive; a country history that bequeaths a legacy inimical for party-building; rampant economic volatility, etc.) or from dynamics inherent to the party universe itself. Scholars have offered various explanations for why developing countries exhibit more volatile patterns of inter-party competition than developed countries. Historical patterns of state and party formation differ in both sets of countries. Not only are political development sequences different, but the historical world time in which Third Wave parties appeared in Latin America (or reappeared after an authoritarian interlude) was inimical for party-building. In the contemporary era, new technologies (particularly television) that allowed parties to reach wide audiences blunted the need to construct parties from the ground up (Mainwaring and Zoco 2007). This amalgam of contextual (exogenous) factors makes successful party-building a particularly elusive enterprise: only 4 percent of new parties to have appeared in Latin America in the post-1978 period have become institutionalized (Levitsky et al. 2016). Moreover, exogenous factors have also undermined many long-established political parties in the region, those that predate the Third Wave era (Peronismo in Argentina, Aprismo, PPC and AP in Peru, COPEI and AD in Venezuela, PUSC and Liberals in Costa Rica, Partido Liberal in Paraguay, the traditional parties in Colombia and Uruguay, and a number of others). The debt crisis of the 1980s and assorted economic crises in the 1990s severely impacted the new democracies of Latin America. Incumbent chief executives, more often than not, felt compelled to follow the dictates of markets rather than follow through on the electoral mandates emanating from voters, thus incurring reversals of mandate that, in certain national cases, damaged some political parties and the credibility of the political system writ large. Sustained economic malperformance contributed to complete party system collapses, as was the case in Venezuela (Morgan 2011), or spawned partial collapses, as transpired in Argentina in the early 2000s (Gervasoni 2018). Lackluster performance in the security realm damaged the two traditional parties in Colombia. As is well known, Peru’s disastrous

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economic and security performance in the 1980s, as well as corruption, contributed to its party system collapse (Seawright 2012). More generally, economic, institutional, and regime uncertainty sets developing countries apart from developed ones (Lupu and Riedl 2013). This uncertainty stifles party-building in the developing world and shortens the temporal horizons of political players. Institutional arrangements (electoral laws) and their frequent change can also contribute to unstable party systems. The exogenous forces bearing upon the party universes of Latin American countries (economic volatility; recurrent institutional instability; world historical time, etc.) are powerful, and present formidable general obstacles to the emergence and sustainability of party-centered democracies. One way to gauge the relative explanatory leverage of exogenous forces is to ascertain whether (and to what degree) those forces are more prominent in some nations than in others. This line of inquiry brings forth the question of whether Peru is afflicted with greater levels of institutional instability or economic volatility than others in Latin America, such that its extraordinarily low level of party universe institutionalization could be (partially) explained by recourse to said causal factors. While Peru has indeed experimented with a number of different electoral laws (many intended to strengthen parties, but illdesigned for that purpose), it is not clear that such changes have been much more frequent than those observed in other countries in Latin America, a region where electoral reforms are commonplace, and instability in electoral law the norm. Negretto (2013: 25–29) shows that between 1978 and 2008 new democracies in the continent enacted 45 major electoral changes in formulas to elect presidents and congressional deputies, including changes in the average magnitude of districts and the size of legislatures. While there is little to suggest that instability in electoral laws stands as a fundamental obstacle to party system institutionalization in Latin America or Peru, such institutional instability has surely worked against party-building. Regular changes in party and electoral law have constituted a moving target that upstart electoral vehicles must overcome in creative, informal ways—for example, as they seek to fulfill requirements for legal registration. All in all, Peruvian elites’s wellintentioned institutional engineering has hitherto done little to contribute to party-building (Vergara 2009). Moreover, some institutional reforms have been counterproductive for promoting the building of institutionalized parties. Institutional choices are endogenous to the nature of parties, electoral vehicles, and party

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universes. Akin to the dictum that “it’s parties that choose electoral systems” (Colomer 2005), electoral vehicles choose all manner of formal institutions. The incongruities plaguing a polity’s formal institutional architecture cannot be apprehended without grasping the identity nature of its architects—as well the contextual environment in which they operate (Goodin and Tilly 2006). Pernicious institutional reforms are quite predictable as an endogenous outcome of a partyless environment: electoral vehicles without cadres and technical expertise in political science literature or knowledge of the relevant experience of other countries, shall be prone to egregious mistakes of commission. Institutional designs intended to fortify democracy or parties, but not grounded in scholarly and empirical evidence, can de facto produce the oppositive effect. Diminished electoral vehicles, aiming to foster their political survival, may also be more vulnerable to populist demands for (institution-weakening) anti-establishment political reforms. The enactment of the 2018 electoral reform in Peru prohibiting the reelection of congressmen provides a recent example containing these ingredients. The electoral reform responded to a climate of public opinion, namely the heightened popular rejection toward Congress. However, in proscribing the reelection of lawmakers, the law further incentivized short-term, personalistic, and corrupt behavior of the latter, according to standard political science literature. One-term congressmen are not permitted to develop a political career, nor does the non-reelection law incentivize investing in Congress qua institution, while it promotes pervasive party switching alongside the entry of amateurs who are learning on the job. Repeated change in the regulations governing party inscription and campaigns do not help stabilize the conduct and strategies of new and old parties around stable rules. But this factor is relatively minor in comparison to other elements undergirding partylessness: the deeply rooted disconnect between parties and voters, the absence of large-scale mobilizing structures upon which to build parties, or the willingness and/or ability of newcomers to engage in grassroots party-building, to name just three examples. There is increasing scholarly evidence that the relationship between party system institutionalization and electoral rules, while surely not irrelevant, is somewhat marginal. It is known that countries facing a similar set of contextual structural forces showcase important differences in their levels of party system institutionalization. While Peru stands apart from the region in traversing

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the authoritarian Fujimorato (1990–2000) during Latin America’s democratic era, focusing on this historical antecedent alone proves insufficient in accounting for the general absence of party-building. Rather, a more comprehensive account necessitates delving into the self-perpetuating dynamics that beset democracies without parties such as Peru’s. In these democracies, endogenous factors perpetuate a political universe comprised of floating voters and socially uprooted electoral vehicles. Floating voters and free agent politicians interact in mutually destructive ways, such that a partyless landscape is reproduced through time. Several mechanisms of self-reproduction can be identified: the rampant short-termism of political life, which makes survival a priority over more protracted strategies required for party-building; the large incentives to enter the political arena as an independent candidate (Carter 2020); a negative legitimacy environment that, ceteris paribus, favors newcomers and generates negative identities (see Chapter 3); the iterated logic of “incumbent disadvantage” that destroys the electoral viability of vehicles that hold public office; the strong incentives to mimic the party substitute strategies (Hale 2006) and technologies wielded by successful political entrepreneurs (Levitsky and Zavaletta 2019); the entrenchment of nonparty informal norms (party switching, scant loyalty, defections, personalistic modus operandi, etc.); and the self-destructive tendencies inherent to electoral vehicles, given their defective “genetic code” (i.e., institutional vacuity at birth in a variety of fronts). With respect to the prevailing informal institutions, Melendez (2019) explains that, in the wake of the collapse of the Lima political establishment brought about by the Oderbrecht scandal, regional politicos (such as Martin Vizcarra) took political center stage at the national level and brought with them the heightened nonparty informal institutions characterizing subnational politics. These factors surely do not exhaust the political dynamics and moving parts constitutive of a partyless landscape which working together perpetuate it through time; others may be cited. But they provide a good starting point to come to terms with the endogenous sources of extreme party system underinstitutionalization through time. Once a party universe reaches the state of decay that Peru fell into by the early 1990s, the forces that perpetuate a partyless environment are built into the political system and become entrenched. Entropy is often interpreted as the degree of disorder or randomness in a system or otherwise the process of a gradual decline into disorder. Many of the elements built into Peru’s party nonsystem—the enormous

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pool of floating voters, parties’ inorganic nature and internal incoherence, the public’s distrust of parties, the short-termism of political life, a negative legitimacy environment—work to perpetuate its random, disorderly character. Much like political equilibria can be self-sustaining, so can the disequilibria constitutive of party nonsystems. Absent purposeful, prolonged party-building, there are no impersonal forces that move a partyless electoral democracy into a party-based democracy; quite to the contrary, endogenous forces—i.e., associated with or inherent to the partyless polity itself—actively perpetuate and reproduce, election after election, a landscape devoid of political parties proper. Mair (1997, 8) explains that once an electorate has been totally mobilized and politically socialized and the institutions that govern the political game are consolidated, a “rough equilibrium” is established that accounts for the impressive continuity seen in some party systems. Writing two decades earlier, Giovanni Sartori (1969, 9) alluded to a similar notion when he wrote that, once an equilibrium is reached, the “laws of inertia take hold.” Partyless polities, not unlike the stable and institutionalized party systems of established democracies, also generate their own inertia—albeit of a different nature. What is self-sustaining in polities with very large domains of competition is constant change—as in Peru or Guatemala, where floating voters are the norm. For as long as several mutually reinforcing traits are present—the electorate is composed of floating voters, political entrepreneurs face incentives to run atop electoral vehicles, and the electoral arena remains wide open—, the party universe can be fully expected to generate its own momentum toward continued structural disequilibrium. Absent investments in durable state–society linkages (alongside a reconstitution of social organizations to make such linkages more plausible), there is no a priori reason to expect the birth of a bona fide party system—using the term properly to mean a universe structured by parties and reasonably stable party interactions. In the absence of incipient or longstanding political divisions that are faithfully and inter-temporally represented in the partisan arena, party system reconstruction shall prove elusive. However, the very constitutive traits and dynamics of a party non system render such purposeful political agency unlikely to emerge.

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The Genetic Code of Electoral Vehicles: Entropy and Decay

In addition to the many sources of economic, political and institutional uncertainty within which electoral vehicles in the developing world operate (Lupu and Riedl 2013), most have to contend with uncertainty emanating from their own institutional frailties. Electoral vehicles at the lower end of institutionalization contain within them the ingredients configuring their future entropy, decay, and self-destruction qua viable electoral entities and qua organizations. At least three qualities are prone to destroy the electoral viability of such vehicles: lack of durable sources of internal cohesiveness alongside the absence of strong institutions of internal conflict-resolution; their recurrent tendency to make very costly political mistakes on account of their organizational feebleness and social uprootedness; and finally, their short-termism in political behavior, which discounts the value of party-building and also produces counterproductive political decisions. A fourth self-destructive quality, developed in Chapter 3, centers on these vehicles’ excessive vulnerability to personal brand dilution. Electoral vehicles are, by definition, low on value infusion and routinization, both of which endogenously unleash dynamics that make future institutionalization highly unlikely. First, they are often comprised of free agents with little commitment to the organization. At the extreme, they are “coalitions of independents,” as Zavaleta (2014) has aptly labeled Peruvian electoral vehicles. Therefore, these vehicles are prone to be staffed by opportunistic party cadres, whose motivations to join the party may vary, but whose association with it is instrumental, not substantive. The fact that recruitment often obeys motivations other than loyalty and militancy inexorably contributes to their incoherence. These vehicles yearn for candidates who can contribute financial resources, enjoy their own clientelistic networks, or are otherwise endowed with popularity, all sources of political autonomy which compromise their future “partisan” loyalty. The more electoral vehicles recruit based on instrumental motives, the more they contribute to internal divisions and incongruencies and thus to near-term cadre defections. Electoral vehicles obtain temporary, superficial cohesiveness when the entity’s political prospects appear to be favorable, which often is a function of the electoral coattails of the party leader. The external appeal of the leader vis-à-vis voters incentivizes subleaders and down-ballot candidates to toe the line. It is,

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of course, possible for party leaders to be effective agents of internal cohesion even while concurrently evincing mediocre external appeal (i.e., electoral prowess) (Van Dyck 2018), but at lower levels of party institutionalization, a leader’s external appeal and his or her internal dominance are highly correlated. Cohesiveness that is dependent on electoral expectations and results, however, is inherently fragile, and yields diminishing returns. Inasmuch as the electoral prospects of the leader becomes more uncertain, his or her internal dominance, alongside workable relations among internal (often personalistic) factions, begin to suffer and erode. Subpar or downright mediocre electoral performances carry quite severe consequences for the unity of such vehicles. Prominent cadre defect, factions become loud in their disapproval, internal recriminations often come to the fore, and become public. Ambitious subleaders waiting for their turn at the top ranks, either defect or openly challenge the leadership. These internal foibles carry electoral penalties. It is well established that parties and vehicles perceived by voters to be divided pay a price at the ballot box. These vehicles, then, can be conceived as the polar opposite of niche parties (Wagner 2012; Greene 2016) wherein insiders remain loyal through electoral setbacks and long spells in the political wilderness. By contrast, amidst electoral vehicle—particularly inside Independent vehicles and uncoordinated parties—defections, internal revolts, new divisions, and entrenchment of existing factions, ensue at the first sign of political and electoral trouble. Because many electoral vehicles, particularly Independents, cannot draw upon prolonged political histories and past cohesion-building episodes, their ability to withstand political headwinds and electoral setbacks without major fractures and divisions is minimal. Even Fujimorismo, which cohered in the 2000s and built a sprit de corps in good part due to the perception among its members that there was an unfair legal onslaught against it (Urrutia 2011), saw its unity falter soon thereafter. Partisan organizations possess the potential to resolve internal ideological and power struggles (Hunter 2010; Levitsky 2003), but electoral vehicles are bereft of institutions with the adequate enforcement capacity to resolve these sources of fracture. In addition, rules of career advancement and discipline are weak or nonexistent amid such vehicles, which incentivizes defections and factionalism. Diminished-type parties and Independents are more prone to incur in self-inflicted political mistakes than bona fide political parties. Social uprootedness constitutes one first such source of mistakes. Unrooted parties and Independents’s low or virtually inexistent vertical linkages with

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society entails more decision-making room for maneuver because they are not constrained by relations of (vertical) accountability in-between elections. This strategic leeway can be potentially valuable, but it concurrently poses the ever-present potential danger that these vehicles make decision and pursue courses of action that alienate voters. Indeed, the danger is not just theoretical: the absence of party-voter feedback loops renders electoral vehicles more vulnerable to making decisions opposed by the bulk of the electorate, including their own voters. Leaders constrained by accountability mechanisms seek to explain and justify their decisions to avoid paying high political costs (Fearon 1999). Being constrained by social constituencies, partisan traditions, or party notables can prevent blunders that prove irreversible. Electoral vehicles bereft of organization, by contrast, grant leaders enormous decisionmaking latitude. A second feature of most electoral vehicles also renders them vulnerable to mistakes in decision-making, namely, organizational deficits that deprive subleaders of the ability to influence decisions. Political elites’ margin of action is delimited by strong organizations (Petrova 2020), and enlarged by weak ones. The de facto internal authoritarianism that prevails inside most electoral vehicles—due to the absence of effective checks and balances on leaders by way of rules and structures or the presence of powerful, autonomous notables (as opposed to sycophants who owe their job to the leader)—stands as a second source of (excessive) freedom of maneuver. Leaders who do not face internal constraints are more vulnerable to electorally costly strategic blunders that shorten the lifespan of their vehicles and thus prospects for partisan institutionalization. It stands to reason that in such organizations, decisions perceived to further personal political careers regularly trump party-wide interests, and that moreover, the quality of decision-making would be impaired. These and other deficiencies inherent to personalistic entities come at a measurable electoral cost, as demonstrated by empirical research that examines the relationship between internal partisan structures and performance. Using a large sample size, Wills-Otero (2016) shows that parties which have “hierarchical structures and are non-democratic [internally] suffer steeper electoral declines over time than parties with horizontal structures and high levels of democracy” (Wills-Otero 2016, 767). Relatedly, those electoral vehicles endowed with hierarchical structures are found to weather crises and challenging periods less well than those with higher levels of internal democracy. Personalistic vehicles, by definition, evince highly concentrated power in the hands of very few people—especially the

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party founder or leader. Regardless of the letter of (institutionally feeble) party statutes, the operative organigram of decision-making is highly hierarchical. In short, they are vertical organizations par excellence, and as such very maladroit at adaptation. The incapacity to adapt can be deemed particularly costly amid ever-changing non-party system environments. Internal organization matters in other decisive ways. Organizational structures “deeply affect the bounds of rationality [because] internal pluralism and deliberative procedures yield better information-processing and decision-making of higher quality” (Weyland 2014, 57). Candidatecentered electoral vehicles tend to lack both internal pluralism and deliberative procedures. They are thus prone to fall prey to the cognitive shortcuts or heuristics that psychologists have shown individuals regularly incur in. The reality that many vehicles are launched by political neophytes lacking political experience only exacerbates the vulnerability to strategic miscalculations and missteps. In institutionalized parties, would-be leaders prove themselves by escalating up the party hierarchy through the years. No such selection process occurs inside electoral vehicles. But even experienced politicians without constraints can make egregious mistakes when unchecked by internal rules or subleaders. For example, Alan Garcia moved APRA to the right by embracing neoliberalism tout court in his second term (2006–2011), and by neglecting to devote resources to social policy. Several party notables disagreed with this departure from party history but were helpless to counterbalance this move. Garcia’s policy orientation accelerated the dilution of APRA’s party brand, for its dwindling base of loyal voters considered such a vision at odds with party tradition. To put it simply, both the political experience of leaders as well as operative internal checks and balances reduce the propensity of political parties to incur in politically costly mistakes. Independents and other under-institutionalized electoral vehicles are hampered by inexperience and lack of internal constraints. Ceteris paribus, these traits accelerate their political decay and demise. There is yet another consequence stemming from the organizational vacuity and uprootedness of electoral vehicles that frequently proves quite fatal for their political viability as competitive political entities. It is their lack of reliable and legal sources of party finance—often in the context of rising campaign costs. Bereft of sufficient money to finance political campaigns, vehicles resort to illicit schemes to raise funds. The low level of public financing, the increasing cost of political campaigns, alongside the low capability of the Peruvian national electoral management body

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(ONPE) to monitor and scrutinize the under-the-table actions of electoral contenders, create irresistible incentives to search for and secure illegal financing (Solis Curi 2015). The discovery and publicizing of financerelated corrupt stratagems comes at a high cost for politicians’s personal brands and the reputation of their vehicles. It is difficult to find an electoral vehicle in Peru, new or traditional, that has not succumbed to the temptation of financing itself via illegal means, often by way of influence peddling. Fujimorismo, Aprismo, Partido Popular Cristiano, Peru Posible, Somos Peru, Partido Nacionalista Peruano, and other vehicles have been found to engage in this practice which, given its prevalence, can be labeled as systemic, an informal institution that pervades the body polity. The leaders of all these vehicles have been personally involved in developing illegal money-raising mechanisms. The judicial indictments of “party” leaders emanating from corruption tied to illicit financing redirects the time, personnel, and resources of electoral vehicles toward efforts to exonerate them, both judicially and in the court of public opinion. Inexorably, and especially in an era when electorates are less tolerant of corruption, these scandals have precipitated steep declines in politicians’ favorability ratings, further besmirching politics as a profession in the public imagery and thus contributing to greater levels of mistrust toward political “parties.” In sum, the genetic origin of vehicles as entities lacking finance-raising organizational assets predisposes them to electorally damaging corruption, inflicting serious (and potentially irreparable) damage to their future institutionalization prospects. The short time horizon electoral vehicles evince constitutes a third source of endogenous deinstitutionalization and decay. Because electoral vehicles often find themselves on the brink of institutional irrelevance or the threat thereof—for example, in their quest to surpass the threshold of entry into Congress—they are prone to discount the future and make decisions that are deemed to guarantee political survival or success today. Many of those choices tend to accelerate institutional and electoral decay. In general terms, strategic decisions made based on expediency run counter to the slow-moving exercise entailed by party brand construction and party-building writ large. The former requires consistency in discourse, actions, and programmatic offering, as well as distinct positioning among electoral choices (Lupu 2016); the latter requires on-the-ground building of organization and construction of organic linkages with social groups and constituencies (Levitsky et al. 2016). For example, pursuing catch-all party strategies to appeal to more voters

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(and alienate less) can yield short-term electoral rewards, but catchall appeals tend not to generate bonds of party–voter loyalty for the long term. Peruvian electoral vehicles, new and traditional alike, evince precisely a converging trend toward catch-all strategies (Puemape 2013), purposely obviating ideological content—with little evidence that catchallism yields electoral rewards. The absence of efforts to align party offerings along new and old political cleavages, or the purposeful construction of new ones, constitutes another example of how short-termism precludes party-building endeavors—which require steady political agency beyond single electoral cycles. The slow and continued nurturing of party cadres with political promise to propel an electoral vehicle into the future and promote routinization is yet another function parties are tasked with that is generally obviated, due both to short-termism and personalistic-driven motives. In sum, the prioritizing of immediate electoral success often relegates and sacrifices longer-term objectives necessary for partisan institutionalization. But most often, longer-term objectives for the electoral vehicle qua organization are simply lacking, for most political entrepreneurs atop these vehicles hold personal (power acquisition) objectives in mind, not organizational ones. While subleaders who hope to one day substitute the leader or acquire higher levels of organizational power may well possess longer-term horizons, their influence in strategic decision-making is usually negligible, given the personalistic and vertical patterns of authority inherent to such entities. A related supply-side observation is worth noting here: party non-systems self-select for low quality politicians and political entrepreneurs. A partyless polity characterized by a negative legitimacy environment (which by definition rewards newcomers and anti-political stances, as Chapter 3 explains) will select for a given type of political entrepreneur; namely, opportunistic free agents uninterested in party-building or institutional building writ large. In consequence, political agency channeled toward party-building efforts is likely to be scant within the political system writ large. The past twenty years of Peruvian politics provide support for this deductive assertion. There are very few Peruvian political entrepreneurs that escape this characterization. Interestingly, Keiko Fujimori became in the 2010s one of those exceptions, as she purposely labored to nationalize the territorial presence and rootedness of Fujimorismo while building relationships with local leaders and communities (Rejas 2016). Nevertheless, her organization fell prey to many of the endogenous self-destructive dynamics underscored in this section, and detailed in Chapter 4: internal

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divisions, short-termism, temporally inconsistent political stances, enormous errors of agency, and others. Political scientist Juan Linz more than once noted that the greatest problem democracies confronted was the low quality of politicians (El Pais 2002). A similar observation can be made about the problems besetting electoral vehicles, political parties, and party systems. Politicos who regularly debase political parties as mediating and representative entities, eschew institution and partybuilding, show no interest in party brand building, or regularly prioritize personal ambition over party, actively contribute to partisan decay and/or the forging of “democracies without parties.” Because negative legitimacy environments are inimical to party-building, render elusive the forging of a political career, debase the profession of politics, and tarnish virtually all participating politicians, citizens established in other professions, respectful of institutions, and evincing high-minded and publicregarding purposes, are undisposed to willingly join such a debased and socially despised political arena. Rather, party non-systems tend to attract politicos with more instrumental, short-term power ambitions (and not infrequently corrupt aims), who do not harbor qualms about entering such degraded territory. Political leaders displaying these attributes are also less likely to purposefully surround themselves with well-trained, democracy-minded, and institution-oriented politicians, inasmuch as their recruitment can reduce leaders’ internal dominance and lower intraorganizational political loyalty. Instead, sycophants are more likely to be prized and recruited. While a priori the concept of “high-quality politicians” can be slippery, it is possible to define and operationalize it in productive ways. Comparativists would gain additional analytical leverage on the evolution of decaying party systems as well as the self-reproduction of party non-systems if the “quality of politicians” as an object of study was explicitly incorporated into the analysis—both as a dependent and independent variable. The nature of the politicians (free agents, amateurs, transactional in orientation, and political party-averse) who populate the political heights of partyless democracies cannot help but impact the manner in which politics is carried out, its operative norms, behaviors, and practices (see: Alcantara 2007; Andrea and Merlo 2008). This points to the importance of studying the self-selection electoral supply effects that partyless settings engender.

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8

Conclusion

Peru does not exhibit a political history of party-based democratic governance; rather personalism, populism, and authoritarianism have reigned supreme. The democratic regime of the 1980s thus emerged burdened with nefarious regime legacies for the purpose of party-building, and evinced weakly rooted political parties. In addition, political agency on the part of two Peruvian presidents bequeathed a structural environment that make extremely difficult the construction of durable linkages between parties and voters. The economic populism of Alan Garcia devastated the economy, enhanced levels of informality, wreaked havoc on organized political society and civil society, deepened distrust toward political parties, and paved the way toward the election of a nondemocratic political outsider. Fujimori’s authoritarian regime actively fomented an anti-party political culture, entrenched nonparty norms, and undermined the already feeble partisan opposition via institutional and extrainstitutional means. Some of the antidemocratic instruments and modus operandi pervading his tenure (such as espionage on opponents) have carried over to the democratic period. Political entrepreneurs have done little to give partisan expression to political and structural societal divisions as a gateway to party-building, not least because they deem the costs thereof to be higher than the benefits. But perhaps more importantly, the past thirty years of “democracy without parties” has selected for nonparty politicians uninterested in the task, free agents uncommitted to partybuilding for the long haul. The absence of party building partly reflects an environment pervaded by very high degrees of uncertainty and shorttermism, such that political entrepreneurs discount the medium term. In addition, the level of the unit is important to understand the dynamics of self-reproduction of a democracy without parties. Herein is the argument introduced in this chapter: electoral vehicles are prone to decay and entropy because of their “political DNA,” that is, their constitutive traits at birth. This is true of diminished parties, whether unrooted parties, uncoordinated parties or Independents. While we acknowledge that there is variation in the nature and scope of Peruvian electoral vehicles’s institutional deficits, the variation is small and the political environment in which they operate is the same, such that their inter-temporal evolution (towards entropy and decay) has been convergent. Their starting points as incoherent, personalistic entities bereft of organizational structures renders them ripe for enormous mistakes of agency, short-term horizons that

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inhibit brand building, as well as internal divisions and defections that weaken them. The genetic origin of these vehicles as personalistic also predisposes them to personal brand dilution. Chapter 4 empirically illustrates these inter-temporal tendencies found across traditional and newer electoral vehicles alike. All Peruvian electoral vehicles began the post2001 period endowed with low levels of institutionalization (Frente Amplio constitutes a partial exception), and evolved toward a state of greater uprootedness, wrecked by internal fractures, political entropy, and electoral marginalization. (Fujimorismo traveled a more circuitous route, but appears to have met a similar fate as its opponents). This explanatory framework to account for party nonbuilding in Peru is incomplete without recognizing that the country’s party nonsystem contains many endogenous self-perpetuating features found at the level of state– society relations and political society, including an enormous domain of floating voters and a structural disequilibrium between “party” supply and (voter) demand.

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CHAPTER 3

Party Non-systems, Personal Brands, and Negative Legitimacy Environments

1

Introduction

Our ability to comprehend political dynamics in some countries is constrained by the intellectual legacy handed down by the study of partybased democracies. Paradigms, Albert Hirschman famously wrote, can be a hindrance to understanding. Following what may be called a party-based paradigm, imported from the study of Europe, political scientists have deemed nominal “political parties” to be central players in Latin American democracies, entities that structure the political game throughout the region. Similarly, party systems are deemed to exist wherever electoral vehicles are found, and often considered to be more robust and influential than is empirically true. This importation from Europe, coupled with the absence of sufficient analytical differentiation among electoral vehicles or among party universes, has arguably led political scientists to overstate the real world relevance of “political parties” as regulators of social and political life in some country settings. The vestiges of that legacy of uncritical importation and attendant conceptual stretching, remain. The party-based paradigm’s point of departure—encoded in the very terminology used (for a welcome corrective, see Luna et al. 2021)— implicitly assumes that electoral vehicles are able to achieve a functional level of horizontal coordination and interest aggregation, that these entities structure political society, that party norms guide the behavior of politicians, that they enjoy sufficient autonomy from their creators, or © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 O. Sanchez-Sibony, Democracy without Parties in Peru, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-87579-4_3

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that citizens have issue-based or ideological linkages to them, among other implicit assumptions. The party-based paradigm, in other words, relies on commonly held understandings of political parties as representative, norm-based, and mediating institutions. But empirical research about electoral vehicles in developing democracies is increasingly invalidating, altering, or contextualizing these and other implicit assumptions (see: Randall and Svasand 2002; Randall 2006; Hagopian 2007; Carlin, Singer and Zeichmeister 2015; Lupu 2018, 132–135). The party-based paradigm to study politics hinders the understanding of operative political dynamics in national contexts where leader-centered electoral vehicles and floating voter electorates prevail. It also distorts analysis in democracies undergoing party system deinstitutionalization, or otherwise situated in an interregnum between party democracy and partyless democracy. Whenever this party-based paradigm is indiscriminately deployed, conceptual stretching can lead analysis astray and important blind spots emerge, such that we fail to grasp essential traits and recurrent dynamics of the political world we aim to dissect and understand. Some readers may well counter that since the 1990s the political science profession counts with Mainwaring and Scully’s (1995) landmark conceptual innovation differentiating party systems according to levels of institutionalization, and thus is well equipped conceptually and analytically to avoid the pitfalls of conceptual stretching. We would submit that, in practice, all too often the party-based paradigm remains the conceptual and analytical point of departure for the analysis of democratic politics—in good measure by inertia and default. Relatedly, the workings and intricacies of partyless settings cannot be understood only in terms of the paucity of elite-citizen linkages, electoral regularities, or norms, that beset these settings. Attempting to convey the nature and dynamics of partyless settings by enumerating what is found to be lacking falls short of political scientists’ descriptive and analytical aspirations. It is important to describe and analyze what are the de facto operative linkages, informal practices, behavioral patterns, and norms discernable in partyless polities. These political environments are inherently more intricate, chaotic, shifting, and difficult to comprehend than party-based settings. Political scientists have not yet developed anything approaching a wholistic understanding of the dynamics and forces that underpin them. It stands to reason that the profession needs to avail itself of new and underused conceptual tools for settings where political parties are absent or marginal. This chapter can be read as a contribution to this looming

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scholarly task. If Latin America continues to move away from partybased regimes, students of the region’s politics will need to devise new analytical tools and concepts that can elucidate the nature and workings of complex political environments—characterized by dizzying political change, very compressed political time, outcomes that obtain amid irreducible uncertainty, and contingent interactions between free agents and citizens without partisan attachments. The use of standard partybased institutionalist frameworks to understand dynamics where politics is fundamentally unstructured, individuals the central players, and “political parties” epiphenomenal, is tantamount to scholarly obfuscation. To use the proverbial metaphor, scholars may be looking for lost keys in a vast dark space only where existing lampposts (appear to) provide some light. Instead, the profession needs to devise new searchlights to scour and investigate the vast dark space. While more political scientists recognize that there exist “democracies without parties,” the analytical implications and challenges posed by that recognition have yet to be addressed with the due scholarly focus and attention it deserves (for notable exceptions see: Hale 2005; Rose and Munro 2003; Zavaleta 2014; Marinova 2016; Levitsky 2018; Melendez 2019; Luna et al. 2021). A vast research agenda therefore remains in store for political scientists in the increasingly relevant subfield of what may be termed “partyless politics.” This chapter is organized as follows. It begins by categorizing the Peruvian partisan universe as a party non-system on account of its persistently high level of extra-systemic volatility and the attendant absence of systemic political parties. It then explores the (scant) level of partisanship as well as the scarcity of party brands (one source of partisanship). Personalism is the keystone element characterizing Peru’s elite-citizen linkage profile. Amid a political universe where personalism is the central elitecitizen linkage type, “personal brands” constitute an analytical category with more significance, influence, and greater applicability in scope, than party brands (albeit not to the wholesale exclusion of the latter, for both can coexist). The concept of personal brands, originating in the political marketing literature, is here unpacked into three proposed component elements, the lenses through which citizens evaluate politicians: ascriptive traits, socialization experiences, and personality brand. Personal brands are explained to be more ephemeral than party brands. The chapter proposes four common causal factors behind personal brand dilution and provides examples of dilution extracted from the Peruvian context. In addition, we

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maintain that politics in Peru transpires within what this chapter conceptualizes to be a “negative legitimacy environment,” comprised of three traits: the prevalence of negative identities over positive ones, an electorate overwhelmingly comprised of non-partisans, and citizens’ a priori preference for political newcomers. This negative legitimacy environment helps produce and perpetuate dynamics that damage the workings of democracy, including: irreducible political uncertainty, persistent political instability, incumbency disadvantage, and political time compression.

2

Defining a Party Non-system

The concept of a “party system” has been beset by conceptual stretching when applied to the developing world. Not all constellations of electoral vehicles constitute party systems. As political scientist Michael Coppedge wrote more than two decades ago, “not all Latin American democracies have party systems.” This assertion gains more currency today, in the early 2020s, for two reasons. The first, expounded on in the introduction of this book, is that most Latin American democracies have experienced party system deinstitutionalization over the past two decades, in many cases in quite a pronounced fashion. The second reason is that the empirical record of the past two decades shows that the condition of partylessness need not be a temporary phenomenon—as witnessed and Peru, Guatemala, or Ecuador. In fact, there are empirical and theoretical reasons to think that it is a self-perpetuating phenomenon. That is, endogenously originating causes reproduce partylessness. In practice, party non-systems also arise and become entrenched in very inauspicious environments for party-building, because of historical legacies, state–society relations (ingrained public distrust toward institutions), and structural socioeconomic conditions (such as very large informal sectors). Both Peru and Guatemala have seen the perpetuation of their party nonsystems for thirty years, Ecuador has suffered a similar predicament for the past fifteen years, while countries such as Bolivia display a hegemonic party system evincing one central bona fide party surrounded by a constellation of feckless electoral vehicles. A standard definition of a party system (Mainwaring and Torcal 2006, 205) delineates three criteria: a constellation with at least two political parties; some regularity in the distribution of electoral support, provided that some parties will rise or decline over time; and finally, inter-temporal continuity in identity of the main party units comprising

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that constellation. In the real world, some constellations do not display the second and/or third criteria. In polities where the identity of the main units is regularly changing, I have proposed that a party non-system obtains (Sanchez 2009). This concept aims to achieve analytical differentiation, allowing scholars to describe party universes at the extreme end of under-institutionalization. Party non-systems showcase continuously high levels of extra-systemic volatility (vote-shifts away from large electoral vehicles toward new and small vehicles) such that systemic political parties do not arise (Sanchez 2009, 489–90). A systemic party is endowed with two characteristics: it is large in terms of voting support, and it retains the allegiance of voters through time, allowing it to structure the party universe inter-temporally. Operationalizations of what constitutes a systemic party can, of course, vary according to research purposes, but size and permanence in time are two key criteria. It follows from these considerations that, strictly speaking, the categorization of a party universes can only be made retrospectively, after some time has elapsed. Mainwaring writes that where “there is some continuity of the main parties from one election to the next… interaction between parties is far from random,” and parties “exhibit some ideological continuity,” a party system exists, however inchoate it may be (Mainwaring 2018, 18). If we follow this minimalist conceptualization, party systems can be said to exist throughout Latin America. Contra Mainwaring, it is here maintained that some party constellations do not rise to the standard of a party system, properly defined. Our disagreement with Mainwaring lies in the realm of operationalization; it is not definitional. The newer conceptualization Mainwaring (2018, Chapter 1) advances in regards to the constitutive elements that comprise an institutionalized party system (PSI) marks a conceptual and analytical improvement over the previous one. Notwithstanding the recognized fact that the old version of PSI (see: Mainwaring and Scully 1995, Chapter 1) entailed a groundbreaking conceptualization of a new essential dimension along which to classify party systems, it was reasonably contested in some quarters on both definitional and operational grounds (for a thorough critique, see: Luna 2014). In Mainwaring’s reworked formula, continuity in the membership of the key party units in the system is placed as central to the definition of PSI. The new definition thus focuses on systemness (continuity in the membership of the key party units and continuity in the nature of the linkage profile of the party universe) expunging from the new definition traits pertaining to the nature of constituent parties, so as not to mix levels of

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analysis. However, the operationalization of systemness is exceedingly lax. Continuity is said to obtain if some of the main parties remain significant across one electoral cycle only. This entails an exceedingly low threshold for establishing inter-temporal continuity. Party constellations that become unrecognizable from what they were two elections ago are thus (wrongly) endowed with systemic qualities and considered “party systems.” This is tantamount to devaluing the very meaning of what the term “system” is meant to convey: structured interactions between politicians and parties, boundaries to the range of possible electoral outcomes (i.e. party system closure) (Casal Bértoa and Enyedi 2016), some degree of predictability for political market participants, reiterated interactions between key parties over time, a recognizable electoral supply for voters, and analogous traits. We here maintain that a constellation of electoral vehicles that exhibits little continuity across more than two electoral cycles cannot be said to constitute a party system. In practice, the “party system” concept suffers from conceptual stretching, as it is wantonly applied by analysts and political scientists to all polities where political parties are found. A party constellation beset by fundamental instability in the identity of its main parties is bereft of structuring forces that rationalize and order the political world. Electoral vehicle constellations without systemic parties are bereft of stable qualities along which party systems are traditionally classified—such as level of fragmentation, the level of polarization, etc. For example, a party constellation that witnesses high polarization between two key electoral vehicles that become marginal after one or two electoral cycles should not be named a “polarized party system,” for this polarization feature is shortlived and circumstantial—and perhaps vacuous, a product of personality clashes, acrimony between leaders, or strategic calculations, rather than rooted in bona fide ideological commitments, which tend to be muted in constellations comprised of diminished-type electoral vehicles. Similarly, the level of fragmentation can vary significantly across one or two electoral cycles, making the characterization of these constellations in terms of traditional classifications an elusive and misleading enterprise. It thus stands to reason that said constellations fall short of representing party systems, for they lack the minimum constituent traits we commonly attribute to party systems. For these reasons, in contrast to Mainwaring, this book adopts a non-minimalist definition of a party system (see also: Sanchez 2009; Golosov 2014). Much like the term “political party” has suffered from conceptual stretching (Luna et al. 2021)—such that

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all electoral vehicles are routinely called “parties” even when they lack the basic functional attributes we ascribe to parties—so has the term “party system.” In practice, political scientists label every constellation comprised of two or more electoral vehicles a “party system,” regularly eliding definitional traits needed for the proper use of that category. This indiscriminate use of the term reflects the absence of lexicon sufficiently diversified to describe other party universe species. As a result, the term “party system” becomes de facto a default category. Herein lies the analytical usefulness of the term “party non-system” to describe universes with persistently high levels of extra-system volatility and the concomitant absence of a core of main units that ensure a minimal level of inter-temporal systemness—or the degree to which parties in a polity have a structured interaction. The scholarly and descriptive cost derived from the wanton application of the “party systems” concept has been the lack of adequate analytical differentiation. The non-system label can allow scholars to rapidly identify some elements that distinguish truly chaotic and ever-changing constellation such as those of Peru and Guatemala, from those that are merely inchoate party systems displaying an identifiable core of units that limits change. Inchoate systems display high levels of intra-systemic volatility (vote shifts among main parties or vehicles) but not sustained high levels of extra-systemic volatility, whereby small or new parties become large overnight and vice-versa. The non-system label allows analysis to gain rapid purchase of some key political dynamics operating in some selected polities, as well as those inching toward non-system status. The definition of a party system here adopted is therefore situated between Mainwaring’s minimalist conception and Giovanni Sartori’s (1976) high threshold. Sartori judged countries such as Brazil or Colombia not to possess party systems, on the basis of a Euro-centric high standard of demarcation. Gradations of party institutionalization are compatible with categorization schemes (i.e. over-institutionalized, institutionalized, or inchoate party systems). In practice scholars use both concurrently. The non-system category is compatible with gradation approaches to measure institutionalization and open to alternate operationalizations—if the central notion of constant change in the identity of the main units, that is, at the heart of the constellation of vehicles, is retained. The more party systems move toward ever-greater levels of decay and deinstitutionalization (Sanchez 2008; Wills-Otero 2020; Seawright 2020), the greater the need to differentiate among party

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constellations labeled as simply as “inchoate,” notwithstanding significant variations among them. These variations are consequential in their impact upon electoral supply, levels of political uncertainty, time horizons, or relations between politicians and electoral vehicles, to name only some relevant political dynamics. Because these variations are important, the imperative to capture these differences succinctly (i.e. inchoate party systems versus party non-systems) can best be achieved via adequate conceptual differentiation. Mainwaring (2018, 18) has spelled out the makings of party universes at one extreme end of the continuum thus: In cases of extreme personalism, where parties have little control over who gains access to elected public offices, and or where most politicians are not affiliated to parties, or if those affiliations are largely irrelevant, it is debatable whether a party system exists. In such cases, competition revolves around individuals more than parties. The key actors are politicians, and the important interactions take place among them rather than the parties. The latter are irrelevant for most voters and politicians. Under such circumstances, patterned interactions are less likely.

While the above traits are not used as a demarcation point to define party non-systems, these characteristics and dynamics are good effective descriptors of party non-systems. The use of the non-system concept allows us to therefore capture important features of such polities—dominant personalism, general absence of patterned interactions, a feckless form of political competition, low predictability of the future, etc.—without the need to laboriously spell out their inner workings. Therein partly lies the usefulness of the concept. Mainwaring’s reworked and simplified (2018, chap. 1) definition of party system institutionalization (PSI) is commendable, insofar as it focuses on the appropriate level of analysis—systemness—rather than mixing party and party system levels of analyses. The concept centers on stability in the identity of the main units comprising the party universe as well as inter-temporal consistency in its ideological profile. This reworked definition shares with the “party non-systems” concept I proposed a focus on the inter-temporality of the identity of the main party units in a polity. In short, the reworked 2018 PSI definition and the non-system concepts share epistemological foundations. Both conceptual schemes are compatible with one another. As an ideal-type category, non-systems are the most under-institutionalized

3

Table 1

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Party Universe Institutionalization Continuum

Highest Over-institutionalized Characteristics: 1. main parties penetrate all aspects of society 2. low electoral volatility 3. interparty collusion to limit competition

Institutionalized

Inchoate

Characteristics: 1. parties with strong roots in society 2. low to medium overall electoral volatility

Characteristics: 1. parties or vehicles with weak roots in society; 2. high to very high overall volatility 3. low to medium extra-systemic volatility

Lowest Non-system Characteristics: 1. electoral vehicles with virtually no societal roots; 2. extremely high overall volatility 3. persistently high extra-systemic volatility; no systemic parties

party universes conceivable, and thus lie at one extreme end of the institutionalization continuum (see Table 1). The non-system concept adds a layer of analytical differentiation to discriminate among party universes, something that will likely become more necessary over time, due to ongoing cross-country convergence in deinstitutionalization trends. Party non-systems, because of their ever-changing nature along standard dimensions by which party systems are characterized (fragmentation, ideological polarization, etc.), do not lend themselves to prearranged categories; their very essence renders standard labels quickly obsolete and thus rather meaningless as descriptors. However, beyond their amorphous, unstable characteristics, these party universes do share some traits. Party non-systems are largely comprised of electoral vehicles that do not rise to the standard of a political party, with little claim to societal representation or rootedness. They are thus beset by a yawning chasm between state and society. This has implications for how these party universes are shaped through time, and what forces give them some (momentary) shape. In democracies with somewhat institutionalized party systems, there is an ongoing mutual interaction between elites and mass publics that ultimately determines the level of ideological polarization or the issues that are prioritized in the game of politics, to name just two elements. Non-systems are overwhelmingly shaped from above by elites or political entrepreneurs, divorced from societal dynamics. Otherwise stated, because political elites are unencumbered by politicized cleavages, they enjoy enormous freedom to choose what issue-areas they put front and center—the mix of which, in practice, is often incongruous. Ceteris

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paribus, the absence of societal rootedness or a party history to uphold, are yet additional factors that grant political entrepreneurs atop diminished vehicles enormous de facto latitude in the policies and actions they choose. Nevertheless, it concurrently deprives them of important sources of institutional and social power. For this reason, Independents’ ability to shape political outcomes is very circumscribed—save in exceptional circumstances, such as state crises that provide windows of opportunity for bold agency (for example, Alberto Fujimori in the early 1990s). Party non-systems display enormous levels of overall electoral volatility, a result of both high supply and demand-side volatility. Everchanging “party” supply forces voters to choose among a different offering of candidates and electoral vehicles at virtually every election; however, because a large portion of the electorate is floating, bereft of party loyalty, demand-side sources of electoral volatility are prominent as well. These delineated traits of party non-systems are arrived at deductively: party universes that are bereft of a core of main units that structure politics through time arise, and self-reproduce, because neither politicians nor voters display fealty to electoral vehicles. Politicians split from existing formations with regularity because ephemeral electoral vehicles are poor stores of political value and survival. The only way to try to prolong a political career in such settings is by regularly jumping from one political formation to another. Moreover, an endless succession of political entrepreneurs are incentivized to enter the political fray because party non-systems offer the possibility of instant political success (including the presidential office), to an extent that no other party universe does. The upshot is that non-systems are populated by many political neophytes and party-disloyal politicians. Party norms (of loyalty, discipline, respect for internal rules, respect for other party contenders, etc.) that obtain in other more institutionalized settings are generally absent in party non-systems, given that most of its players are not socialized into party-centered rules of conduct nor are there professional or political incentives to abide by party norms. Party non-systems do not display anything resembling a patterned interaction among party units. Incongruous party alliances form, dissolve and reconfigure themselves again according to free agents’s short-term calculations or whims. Inchoate party systems display high levels of intrasystemic volatility, that is, vote transfers among the main parties in the polity; however, they exhibit moderate levels of transfers of votes away from main parties altogether. Non-systems, by contrast, are defined by

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PARTY NON-SYSTEMS, PERSONAL BRANDS …

Table 2 Difference between inchoate party systems and non-systems Inchoate party systems Party non-systems

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Intra-Systemic Volatility

Extra-Systemic Volatility

High

Low-medium

High

Persistently high

continuously high levels of extra-systemic volatility, that is, vote transfers from the main party formations toward new and small formations, thus pre-empting the emergence of systemic parties (Table 2). Extra-systemic electoral volatility is much more malign than its intrasystemic cousin. When it is sustained, extra-systemic volatility produces highly deleterious effects: national politics is unanchored and coalitional politics virtually unattainable; uncertainty of outcomes is excessive; interparty competition has a spurious quality; accountability, representation, and responsiveness are all fatally damaged; and policy stability proves elusive—unless the policymaking apparatus is captured by nonparty actors. Relevant differences can be witnessed in levels of electoral volatility among party universes generally grouped simply as “inchoate.” Moreover, important inter-temporal changes in (core) “party” continuity are detected within polities, which often go undetected or unappreciated because scholars are bereft of a ready-made category to succinctly label this transition through time. This means that a transition to medium to high extra-systemic volatility may occur, changing operating dynamics of a party universe along with the attendant implications on democratic governance, without an adequate analytical tool to account for it. Our current conceptual lexicon is inadequate to the task of identifying such relevant transitions in a party universe. The “non-systems” category corrects this analytical blind spot (Fig. 1).

3

Does Peru Qualify as a Party Non-System?

The collapse of Peru’s party system can be traced to a massive failure of governing performance (i.e. the hyperinflation and growing mayhem created by the Shining Path guerrilla), more than it can be attributed to a failure of democratic representation—though the latter has always been an Achilles heel of the Peruvian partisan arena. In addition to security and economic malperformance, leading parties carved their own

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Fig. 1 Systemic versus extra-systemic volatility

graves by way of internal party disputes and disarray (Tanaka 1998; Dietz and Myers 2007) coupled with their inability to adjust to new socioeconomic circumstances. In the wake of party system collapse or wide-ranging transformation, scholars are usually prone to assert that a new party system has emerged. However, as party politics scholar Peter Mair rightly noted, “the very notion of a newly emerging party system may well be a contradiction in terms, in that to speak of a system of parties is to ascribe some degree of stability and predictability to the interactions between the parties concerned” (1997, 175). Whether a genuine new party system has emerged to replace the old can only be assessed empirically, not assumed as axiomatic simply because the old party system has disintegrated beyond recognition; and it can only be, strictly speaking, ascertained with the passage of time—at the very least three electoral cycles. This is so because some of the party constellations the emerge from collapse or from far-reaching cumulative deinstitutionalization may not constitute party systems at all. Peru stands as precisely a case of party system collapse that spawned what we have conceptualized as a “party non-system,” that is, a constellation of electoral vehicles

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without systemic parties, and thus, without a core that structures the party universe through time. While the criteria necessary for such categorization are rather strict, party non-systems are not as empirically rare as it may be presupposed. In the context of Latin America, Guatemala, Peru, and Ecuador qualify as party non-systems at the present time, whether they exhibit perfect or imperfect variants of non-systems. As Peru moved out of the Fujimorato (1990–2000), its democracy was critically hampered by the absence of veritable political parties endowed with societal roots. For the past thirty years, polls reveal extremely high levels of citizen alienation toward these nominally intermediary institutions. Ten years after the return to democracy, only 13 percent of Peruvia professed trust in political parties, the lowest percentage in Latin America (Latinobarometro 2010). This was mirrored in Peruvians’ manifest lack of confidence in their political institutions writ large (the legislature, the executive, the judicial branch). From a comparative perspective, Peruvians’ trust in these institutions was the very lowest in the Latin America region at that time, according to the Latinobarometro poll. In a 2005 survey, barely over one-third of citizens (36 percent) could name any national party (PNUD 2005). No less than 70 percent of Peruvians did not sympathize with any national party, while as many as 80 percent did not profess sympathy towards any regional party. While about 30 percent of respondents expressed a positive predisposition towards a given political party, only one in six among them was affiliated with a party (PNUD 2005). This means that only a minute 0.41% of the population eligible to vote participated or militated in a political party or electoral vehicle! (Panfichi 2007). During the ensuing years, voter dealignment from political parties and electoral vehicles grew. By the year 2019, the percentage of party non-sympathizers (floating voters), had reached an astonishing level: close to 90 percent of the Peruvian electorate (Carrion et al. 2019) Peru, therefore, approximates a textbook example of an electorate composed purely of floating voters (i.e. voters without partisan attachments). This translates into a very high level of party universe fragmentation, because existing electoral vehicles are congenitally unable to aggregate interests and close off space in the political marketplace. There is minimal party system closure. In national contexts where a significant part of the electorate is loyal to political parties, there is relatively scant space for other political alternatives to flourish. In such circumstances, the “domain of competition,” to use Angelo Panebianco’s (1988) turn of phrase, is limited. Because free-floating independent voters

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comprise most of the Peruvian electorate, there is plenty of space for outsiders and mavericks atop diminished type electoral vehicles to make significant electoral inroads. In fact, there is enough unoccupied space for two or three or more outsiders to attain electoral success concurrently. In free floating electorates, the domain of competition is almost as large as can be imagined. During the 2010s Fujimorismo somewhat reduced the domain of competition (to about 65 or 70 percent of the electorate), but it remained very large, such that the party universe continued to be very open. By the time of the 2020 parliamentary elections, the domain of competition had returned to previous sky-high levels (in the 85 to 90 percent range). Large domains of competition in a polity are bound to generate high volatility in voting patterns, including the more pernicious extrasystemic variant—that is vote-switching away from the large, systemic political parties toward small and new ones. Before the collapse of its party system, Peru exhibited very high electoral volatility rates. For illustration, aggregate vote shifts were a staggering 38.5 and 50.4 percent between the 1980 and 1985 presidential and congressional elections, respectively. Certainly, these extremely high rates reflected an inchoate party system with low societal rootedness (Cotler 1995), such that Peru exhibited the very lowest levels of stability in interparty competition among democracies in Latin America. Nonetheless, most of this electoral volatility was intra-systemic, that is, vote-switching took place among the systemic parties (AP, PPC, APRA, IU) of the period, wherein one systemic party’s vote loss was another’s gain. This form of party-switching did not erode the mainstay of a party system, however inchoate: the presence of systemic political formations. Since 1990, patterns of interaction between party supply and party demand have catapulted Peru to the status of Latin America’s leader in terms of electoral instability (Jones 2010; Mainwaring 2018, 37–54), alongside Guatemala (Sanchez 2008; Jones 2011; Mainwaring 2018, 37–54). Yet, overall volatility per se does not indicate whether a party universe qualifies as simply an inchoate party system, or rather, fits the less institutionalized category of a party non-system (Sanchez 2009). For purposes of classification, the locus of volatility is essential, because only the continuous hemorrhaging of votes away from large parties repeatedly changes the composition of the main party units in the polity, thus preventing a bona fide party system from emerging. In other words, it is high and persistently high levels of extra-systemic volatility (i.e. the flow of votes of large parties toward small and new

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parties) that place a party universe into the category of a party nonsystem, chaotic universes lacking systemic parties and thus a core (see Table 3). Extra-systemic volatility provides information about a crucial aspect of the partisan arena not necessarily provided by Pedersen’s standard volatility index. That is, extra-systemic volatility reveals essential information regarding the “level of dissatisfaction with all the political parties in the polity” (Mainwaring et al. 2017). Extra-systemic volatility is an indicator of changing membership in the composition of main electoral vehicles/political parties in a polity, underscoring the significance of distinguishing between types of volatility (see Tucker and Powell 2014). But in some cases, perusing inter-temporal extra-systemic volatility furnishes an additional source of information. Namely, when very high extra-systemic volatility is sustained through time, it is important to recognize that there are no systemic parties to speak of. In such cases, to use the term “party system” is to stretch the term beyond its core meaning—with attendant analytical costs. The perusal of legislative elections in the post-Fujimorato period reveals very large variations in inter-temporal electoral support for electoral vehicles (see Tables 4 and 5). Alejandro Toledo’s Peru Posible captured a plurality of the parliamentary vote in the 2001 election only to become a marginal player in the next legislature. APRA’s parliamentary vote tally hovered around 20 percent for the 2001 and 2006 elections, only to drop by over two-thirds in the 2011 congressional contest. By contrast, Fujimorismo languished as a marginal player in the 2001–2006 Congress but rocketed upward in the 2011 election to become the second largest partisan caucus, propelled by Keiko Fujimori’s leadership coattails and personal brand (Table 4). In Peru, extremely high inter-temporal electoral volatility besets the political system, revealing a structural disequilibrium between electoral Table 3 Difference between inchoate party systems and party non-systems

Inchoate party systems Peru in the 1980s Party non-systems Peru post-1990

Intra-systemic volatility

Extra-systemic volatility

High

Low-medium

High

Persistently high

4.1% 4,1%

4.8%

Peru Posible (without Toledo) Restauracion Nacional Alianza por el Progreso FIM

13.8% 11.0%

UN FIM

Cambio 90 (Fujimorismo) UPP AP

19.7%

APRA

5.8%

UPP (Humala) APRA (Garcia) UN AF (Fujimorismo) Frente Centro

26.3%

Peru Posible

Somos Peru

Elections 2006

4.0% 2.3% 1.4%

4.1%

7.0%

15.3% 13.1%

20.5%

21.1%

Vote in congressional elections (Peru), 2001–2021

Elections 2001

Table 4

Partido Nacionalista (Humala) Fuerza 2011 (Fujimorismo) Peru Posible Alianza Cambio (PPK) Solidaridad Nacional (Castaneda) APRA (without Garcia) Cambio Radical Fonavistas

Elections 2011

2.7% 1.3%

6.4%

10.2%

14.8% 14.4%

22.9%

25.2%

Frente Esperanza Peru Posible

Alianza Popular (Garcia) Democracia Directa

Frente Amplio Accion Popular

PPK

Fujimorismo

Elections 2016

1.3% 1.3%

4.0%

5.8%

18.8% 6.7%

20.9%

39.8%

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Table 5 Parliamentary election results, 2020 and 2021

PARTY NON-SYSTEMS, PERSONAL BRANDS …

Elections 2020

145

Elections 2021

Accion Popular Podemos Peru FREPAP Alianza por el Progreso Partido Morado

10.2% 8.3% 8.3% 7.9%

Peru Libre Fuerza Popular Renovacion Popular Accion Popular

13.7% 11.2% 9.2% 9.1%

7.4%

7.5%

Fuerza Popular Union por el Peru Frente Amplio Somos Peru

7.3% 6.7%

Alianza para el Progreso Avanza Pais Juntos por el Peru

7.4% 6.6%

6.1% 6.0%

Somos Peru Podemos Peru

6.1% 5.7%

Source Oficina Nacional de Procesos Electorales, ONPE. https:// www.onpe.gob.pe/

Table 6 Extra-systemic volatility for congressional elections in Peru 2001–2021 (percentages, 0–100)

TOP 3 vote-getters 2001–2006 2006–2011 2011–2016 2016–2020 2020–2021

36.8 35.8 21.8 69.6 100

TOP 4

TOP 5

56.0 15.5 15.3 76.3 83.8

40.0 28.9 25.5 82.1 60.6

Note Extra-systemic volatility, as operationalized here, measures the percentage difference between the collective share of votes gathered by the top (three, four, or five) electoral vehicles at a given election and their collective share at the previous election. A score of 100% indicates that there has been a complete renovation in the identity of the main (most voted) electoral vehicles with respect to the previous election, such that different vehicles become the top votegetters. A score of 0 indicates no change in the vote share of the main electoral vehicles across one electoral cycle Source Oficina Nacional de Procesos Electorales, ONPE. https:// www.onpe.gob.pe/

supply and demand. Calculations of extra-systemic volatility for congressional elections in the post-2001 democratic era reveal levels inconsistent with party universe streamlining. Using the top three vote-getter parties as a yardstick (of the main parties), extra-systemic volatility stood at 36.8 percent and 35.8 percent for the 2001–2006 and 2006–2011 electoral dyads, respectively; if the top five parties are taken as a barometer, the

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vote-switching away from large parties was 40 percent and 28.9 percent, respectively (see Table 6). When the top four vote-getters are used as a standard to gauge the hemorrhaging of votes away from large parties, a lower extra-systemic volatility level obtains in the 2006–2011 period (15.5%) and the 2011–16 period with respect to the past. This lower level of extra-systemic volatility stems from the relatively good performance of the Partido Nacionalista across two elections—the 2006 and 2011 contests—together with the relatively stable electoral performance of Fujimorismo (Tanaka 2011; Levitsky 2011; Sanchez-Sibony 2012; Dargent and Munoz 2016). However, this lower extra-systemic volatility was conjunctural rather than structural or solidly rooted: on close inspection, it can be ascertained that both parties relied on nondurable forms of linkage with voters. Consequently, these vehicles’ future electoral viability was questionable. Moreover, when extra-systemic volatility is measured using the top three or top five vote-getters, Peru posted rather high levels in the 2006–2011 dyad (22 and 28 percent, respectively). A close perusal of elite-citizen links does not reveal the Partido Nacionalista as a party that had built social rootedness, as explained in Chapter 4. Ollanta Humala attained significant support in 2006 and 2011, but the latter result was hardly preordained, given his vehicle’s uprootedness and the preponderance of short-term factors in shaping Peruvian electoral dynamics (see Chapter 5). The Partido Nacionalista electoral vehicle did not field candidates for the 2016 general election, while Humala’s 2021 electoral foray proved predictably disastrous—on account of his diluted personal brand. Fujimorismo remains a family political enterprise; it enjoyed an incipient “party” brand, but one that has been badly damaged since 2016. Similarly, Peruanos por el Kambio (PPK), a purely personalistic formation, showed a rather fortuitously similar electoral performance in 2011 and 2016, helping to lower that period’s recorded level of extra-systemic volatility. Pedro Pablo Kuczynski’s preference volatility was high during the course of both presidential campaigns, an unmistakable sign that he did not enjoy a loyal base of voters—rather, he accrued conjunctural negative legitimacy and benefited from strategic voting. The electoral vehicle Peruanos por el Kambio soon floundered and disintegrated alongside the legal troubles of its founder, Pedro Pablo Kucysnski. Predictably, then, the somewhat lower extra-volatility numbers Peru exhibited during the 2006–2016 period proved to be short-lived, for they were not based upon the growing institutionalization of individual political parties. The salient but only (temporary) exception was

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Fujimorismo, which under Keiko’s leadership built some territorial organization and enjoyed a sociocultural “party” brand. Taking the measure of the entire twenty-year period of electoral politics since 2001, we can conclude that Peru’s extra-systemic volatility has been continuously high and at times extraordinarily high. Peru’s party universe thus qualifies as a party non-system in the post-2001 era. Can we speak of systemic electoral vehicles in post-2001 Peru? Building on the footsteps of Levitsky et al.’s (2016) operationalization of party success—according to which a party needs to attain at least 10 percent of the vote across five consecutive elections—we here define a systemic party as one that garners at least 15 percent of the vote across five elections. A systemic political party must be prominent enough in size to help provide structure to a party universe on account of its electoral and parliamentary relevance. And it must be a bona fide political party endowed with solid social and institutional power, measured by its capacity to aggregate societal groups vertically and to achieve horizontal coordination among its party members. As shown in Chapter 4, Fujimorismo qualifies as an Independent outfit, the most under-institutionalized of all electoral vehicles (see: Vergara and Augusto 2022). It also fails to meet the 15 percent threshold across five elections, though it had a relevant presence in Congress for over a decade and it was voted into the second round of presidential elections across three consecutive contests. The 2021 general elections results suggest that Fujimorismo retains a core of hard voters (around 10 percent of the electorate) who have remained loyal despite enormous failures of political performance (see chapter 4). However, its electoral decline has been profound enough that Keiko Fujimori’s vehicle has lost its former political centrality, and its political future looks cloudy. In sum, therefore, Peru has lacked systemic political parties both because competing entities do not qualify as bona fide parties per the Luna et al. (2021) conceptualization (Frente Amplio was an exception, but only temporarily) and because these electoral vehicles suffer from excessive electoral volatility across election cycles—and generally see a secular descent to irrelevance. The results of the extraordinary (out of constitutional schedule) 2020 legislative elections, summoned by President Martin Vizcarra, appeared to herald greater levels of electoral volatility going forward amid a more unstructured party universe. The remarkable punishment voters meted out to Fujimorismo for its corruption and institutional abuse of congressional power, meant the loss of its quasi-systemic electoral vehicle status. Its electoral decline was colossal. Fujimorismo was reduced to

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a mere 7.3 percent of the vote and 15 seats. The new 2020–2021 Congress showcased an extreme level of fragmentation, with no single party commanding a sizable plurality of seats. The most voted electoral vehicle, Accion Popular, barely surpassed 10 percent of votes. The decline of some known electoral vehicles became the electoral windfall, or unexpected good fortune, of newcomers. New political outfits made very significant inroads, such that extra-systemic volatility recorded stratospheric numbers for the 2016–2020 period (see Table 5). With only a week left before the 2020 parliamentary Election Day, an Ipsos-Apoyo poll showed that as many as 46 percent of voters had not decided whom to cast their vote for, while almost two-thirds (64 percent) were predisposed to cast a ballot for “someone who is new to politics” (El Pais 2020). These numbers highlight the nature of a floating voter electorate par excellence, underscoring the absence of pillars able to anchor Peruvian electoral politics. Electoral campaigns are enveloped by a negative legitimacy environment where political capital is ephemeral. The general elections of 2021 loomed as highly uncertain in every respect, even as regards the identity of the main political forces in contention, in line with what is observed in party universes without systemic party units. In the event, the 2021 parliamentary contest delivered a major defeat for Frente Amplio, a decline for Julio Guzman’s Partido Morado, and the inability of the populist FREPAP to enter parliament merely a year after it had surprised analysts with its 2020 irruption into the chamber. Fujimorismo slightly improved upon its 2020 dreadful electoral performance, while Cesar Acuna’s Alianza para el Progreso held steady in support levels aided by its regional clientelistic networks. Thus, the 2021 congressional election confirmed a new ephemeral balance of power among electoral vehicles, and presaged irreducible political uncertainty going forward. The 2021–2026 congressional composition of electoral forces amounted to the most fragmented legislature of the democratic period, resulting from an enlarged free-floating electorate. The three most voted electoral vehicles in 2021 had not placed among the top 3 votegetters only a year earlier, thus yielding an extra-systemic volatility score of 100 percent. Moreover, two of the three largest legislative caucuses (Rafael Lopez Aliaga’s Renovacion Nacional and Pedro Castillo’s Peru Libre) were entirely new to the legislature, never having enjoyed representation in the chamber before. Extra-volatility scores using the top four and five electoral vehicles as a benchmark were also extremely high, recording levels surpassing 83 and 60 percent, respectively. These dramatic changes

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in the composition of Peru’s main congressional electoral vehicles in a timespan measured by months, manifested the acceleration of political time. It was the widening of the state–society chasm and the attendant growth in the percentage of nonpartisans in the electorate that undergirded this higher level of extra-systemic volatility alongside greater political time compression. The hyper-fragmented distribution of seats in the 2021–2026 parliamentary session ensured that the next President of the Republic would be represented in Congress by a small minority caucus, presaging further executive–legislative governability problems. Thirty years after the collapse of Peru’s 1980s party system, political elites and mass publics alike remain unfaithful to political parties, thus preempting the onset of a more organizationally structured democracy. Absent successful party-building during the 2020s, an unlikely prospect, the decade ahead shall return Peru to a pure party nonsystem—in comparison to the arguably imperfect party non-system of the 2010s. Indeed, the central elements are in place: an electoral marketplace comprised of a higher percentage of floating voters than at any time in the past two decades, a larger chasm between state and society, and finally, a more acute negative legitimacy environment propitious for personalist populism—in the wake of a string of corruption scandals and executive–legislative brinkmanship. Moreover, there is not an electoral vehicle in sight with the potential to become an institutionalized, systemic party. It is well to note that the three conscious efforts at partybuilding during the 2010s failed: Fujimorismo, the leftist Frente Amplio, and Guzman’s Partido Morado. Ominously, the mass public attitudinal landscape is less congenial to successful party-building at the onset of the 2020s than at any time since the turn of the century. In Peru, none of the traditional parties of the 1980s has been able to recuperate its former status as an entity that structures political life through time. The APRA has been divorced from its historical social base as it failed to adapt to Peru’s new socioeconomic realities. Its hard vote was estimated in the early 2010s to be merely around 5 percent nationwide (Fundación Fiedrich Ebert 2012). Regaining the presidency in 2006 did not signify its return to systemic status, as its dreadful results in 2011 Congressional elections dramatically confirmed. Accion Popular (AP) saw its political capital and electoral performance seriously erode after the failed presidency of its party patriarch (Fernando Belaunde), and has since been entangled in a struggle for political survival. The Christian Popular Party (PPC) suffered from the generalized opprobrium thrust

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upon traditional parties during the Fujimori era. Its utter failure to adapt to new demographic and political environs has meant that it has steadily lost the social bases it once had beyond the geographical confines of Lima. The PPC accordingly scaled down its former presidential ambitions to the mayoralty of the capital city, failing even to win that prize. Izquierda Unida (United Left) disappeared and fragmented into marginal party components that barely register on the Peruvian political radar screen. All the traditional parties have seen their voter support virtually reduced to Lima, as their appeal in the rest of the country ranges from small to negligible. Even limenos (Lima residents), better incorporated into state and nation and thus more oriented toward status quo vehicles and candidates than other Peruvians, have been enticed by newer political formations in ever-larger numbers. Alberto Fujimori’s abrupt irruption signified a turning point that manifested just how under-institutionalized and vulnerable to exogenous disruption Peru’s party system truly was. Henceforth, traditional parties’ linkages with voters have been permanently damaged. No true party system reconstruction has ensued, however. None of the electoral vehicles created since 1990 moved toward higher levels of institutionalization. The vehicles that emerged at different junctures as important players in post-2000 Peru—Peru Posible, APRA, Somos Peru, Partido Nacionalista Peruano, and Frente Amplio—failed to consolidate into inter-temporal systemic players, given their evanescent and geographically delimited electoral prowess (Panfichi 2011; Melendez 2011). Only Fujimorismo somewhat escaped that verdict, but its recent electoral losses, lessened popular support and institutional clout, and Keiko Fujimori’s legal troubles put the electoral vehicle in a precarious political predicament, converging with the fate of other Peruvian vehicles, for reasons that are not dissimilar (see Chapter 4). As Angelo Panebianco (1988) expounds in his classic Political Parties: Organization and Power, the circumstances of origin of a political party hold essential clues to its future evolution. The short political lifespans typical of many Peruvian formations stem in good measure from their organizational origins as inorganic, diminished type political parties, a birthmark that militates against future party institutionalization.

3

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151

Partisanship in Peru: A Rara Avis

Levels of partisanship differ significantly across Latin America (Lupu 2015). Countries such as Uruguay, Paraguay, and Nicaragua showcase levels of party identification around or above 50 percent, while others such as Peru, Ecuador, Chile, or Guatemala display levels below 20 percent during the 2005 to 2019 period (LAPOP, various years). Peru exhibits one of the very lowest levels of partisanship in the region, a level that has been trending downward. The Americas Barometer registered a level of party identification of 15 percent in Peru for 2012, down from 30 percent in 2006. In its Peru 2019 Report, the Americas Barometer finds that only 10.2 percent of Peruvians sympathized with a given political party, while a remarkably high 89.8 percent did not express sympathy for any! (LAPOP 2019). In the region of Latin America, Peru ranks among those countries exhibiting the very lowest levels of partisanship, alongside Guatemala, Chile, and Ecuador. The exceedingly low level of partisanship in Peru makes for a political ecosystem largely comprised of floating voters (those without political attachments), ranging from 70 to 90 percent of the electorate during the post-2001 era. Political scientists consider mass partisanship to be desirable for democratic governance because it institutionalizes party systems, stabilizes electoral outcomes, and helps consolidate new democracies (Converse 1969; Mainwaring and Torcal 2006). If partisanship extends among citizens through time, the menu of party options becomes more predictable and voter demand does as well, which fosters more stable patterns of interparty competition. Moreover, party supply stability helps political accountability, as voters are given greater opportunities to punish or reward partisan performance, while reducing the scope for the sudden entry of political outsiders with little political experience (and, in many cases, suspect commitment to democratic governance). Ceteris paribus, the incidence of betrayal of mandates should also be less frequent in contexts of stable party competition, because voters can have somewhat greater confidence that political parties in office will be responsive to the policy mandate granted on election day. The importance of partisanship for the functionality of democracy is thus well established. While high levels of partisanship are no guarantee of robust vertical accountability, responsiveness, or democratic consolidation, the absence of partisanship does certifiably impede the attainment of these desirable outputs. The

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absence of partisan attachments in Peru is manifested in another recurrent phenomenon: the empirical inability of governing parties to gain reelection to office. Ruling parties aiming for reelection cannot count on a floor of voter support independent of their performance in office. To their chagrin, Peru Posible, APRA, and Partido Nacionalista proceeded from negligible societal support (a bit more in the case of APRA, about 5 percent of hard-core voters) when new candidates led the party ticket in the quest for reelection, for lack of true partisans amid the citizenry. To be sure, other factors also account for persistent incumbent reelection failure, but perhaps no other is as central. The absence of partisan support often compels incumbent electoral vehicles finishing their constitutional terms in office to eschew fielding candidates (for the presidency or for lower levels of government), forsaking the ultimate raison d’etre of a political party. Social context and the characteristics of party systems constitute important country-level correlates of partisanship in both developed and developing countries. Lupu (2015) finds that party systems with high institutionalization, low fragmentation, and high polarization are empirically more likely to form party attachments in Latin America. Peru’s party universe is devoid of these systemic traits: it exhibits high fragmentation, medium–low polarization, and inordinately low institutionalization. The exceedingly meager levels of partisanship in Peru must therefore be understood not only at the “party”-unit level of analysis. Rather, the difficulties encountered in successfully forging bonds of loyalty between vehicles and voters also stem from broad party universe traits: perhaps most notably, the very high informational demands placed on voters by both enormous electoral volatility and a hyper-fragmented electoral supply. In Peru, anti-party sentiments rank among the most deeply felt and well-entrenched in Latin America. Electoral vehicles are the most distrusted among all relevant institutions in Peru, most of which are accorded very low societal trust. While Latin American citizens deride political parties, what sets Peru apart is the sheer magnitude of societal alienation from electoral vehicles and diminished parties. Trust in “political parties,” already low in 2006 when it stood at 32.3 percent, underwent a secular decline, reaching an all-time low of 21.2 percent in 2019, as measured by LAPOP (2019). One correlate of this widespread anti-party sentiment is found in the low levels of Churchillian support

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of democracy as a regime type. In 2019, only 49.2 percent of Peruvian considered democracy to be the best form of government when compared to alternative regimes, the lowest level in the democratic post2001 era (LAPOP 2019). Only 28 percent of respondents in 2019 were satisfied with the way Peruvian democracy was working, also the lowest level in the post-Fujimorato period. These figures highlight the reality that Peru is not only afflicted with very large majority of “disenchanted democrats,” but more worryingly, a high percentage of Peruvian citizens are willing to countenance nondemocratic forms of government. Furthermore, no less than 70.9 percent of Peruvians professed that they had little or no interest in politics, a manifestation of widespread societal alienation (LAPOP 2019). These characteristics of Peruvian political culture and attitudinal landscape contribute to rendering party-building very difficult.

5

Institutional and Behavioral Personalism in Peru

Personalization refers to a “process in which the political weight of the individual actors in the political system increases over time, while the centrality of the political group (i.e. political party) declines” (Rahat and Sheafer 2007, 65). The empirical evidence for the “personalization of politics” as a generalized phenomenon across different arenas of politics is mixed in established democracies (for a review of the state of the art see: Adam and Maier 2010). The evidence pointing toward personalization of party organizations (institutional personalization) is stronger in presidential regimes, and evidence of such a tendency is strong in Latin America’s presidential systems (Samuels and Shugartt 2010). It is more mixed across parliamentary regimes (Pasarelli 2015). However, evidence of personalization in the electorate, however, is clearer and more global in nature (Garzia 2019; Bittner 2011; Lobo and Curtice 2014). That is, citizens across democracies are increasingly factoring in the personal traits and perceptions of individual candidates in their voting decision-making calculus. Three fields in which personalism can be manifested are institutional, mass media, and political behavior arenas (Rahat and Sheafer 2007). In this section we shall focus on the behavioral and institutional arenas to illustrate how personalism is manifested in Peru’s post-2001 democratic era. The claim here is that person-centered modes of behavior pervade Peruvian political activity, not necessarily that personalism has increased

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in scope and intensity over the past twenty years—although it is all too probable that personalization has indeed transpired in tandem with the decay of Peru’s traditional parties and the increased prevalence of free agents in Peruvian political life. Institutional personalization can occur within government institutions (cabinets, parliaments) as well as nongovernmental institutions such as political parties. Evidence of institutional personalism within electoral vehicles and proto-parties in Peru is abundant. Consider, for instance, one of the essential responsibilities of a political formation: to postulate candidates throughout the national territory at all levels of public office. In Peru, national-level parties have even failed to postulate candidates for the presidency when the electoral vehicle creator or party caudillo could not run in the election (witness APRA in 2011; or Peru Posible in 2006). Peruvian vehicles regularly fail to actively promote, and even abandon, their own candidates in the electoral quest to conquer important political offices, such as the mayoralty of Lima. In another manifestation of institutional personalization, prominent party cadres are routinely used and abused to fend off public charges of corruption, violations of the law, and other reprehensible behavior on the part of vehicle leaders. In Peruvian parlance, these hapless cadres tasked with damage limitation are evocatively labeled escuderos (human shields). The misuse of electoral vehicles’ human resources is particularly visible whenever credible corruption accusations have emerged against Alan Garcia, Alejandro Toledo, Ollanta Humala and Nadine Heredia, Pedro Pablo Kuczysnki, Keiko Fujimori, and many other electoral vehicle leaders. In the process, such cadres are politically damaged by association, and their future careers as potential successor leaders or as individual political entrepreneurs, are damaged. By extension, institutional personalism mortgages the future political viability of the electoral vehicle beyond the political life of its creator or leader. The pervasive unwillingness of vehicle insiders to criticize or question leaders in public amounts to another manifestation of institutional personalism, laying bare how the political fate of subleaders is perceived to be tied up with the leader’s fate. Indeed, “it is too risky to criticize the leader: ‘if he or she falls, we all fall.’ Even that species in extinction, the ideological militant, is functional to this [shield-man] dynamic: more than ideologues, they are translators of the leader’s message” (La Republica 2015). In turn, institutional personalization creates incentives for political actors to focus political “debate” on personalized accusations with the intent to publicly debase personal

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brands, because to successfully discredit a political leader is the most effective way to damage or destroy his or her political formation. Institutional personalism is also pervasive as regards candidate selection. Personalism guides how political entrepreneurs and electoral vehicles relate to one another, to the detriment of programs, teamwork, or electoral vehicle cohesion. The Peruvian democratic game is one that involves the interaction of “politicians without parties and parties without politicians,” to rescue Taylor’s (2007) apt formulation. At each electoral cycle there is a rush to match electoral vehicles’ demand for a priori electorally viable political entrepreneurs with the limited supply of such candidates. To be sure, making accurate assessments about a candidate’s electoral appeal is inherently complicated amid a floating voter electorate; however, there is no more critical aspect to a Peruvian political formation’s success than the personal brand of the candidate heading its ticket. Operating in a political world where there are few ideological or other substantive commitments, in this interaction of supply and demand between candidates and vehicles, each actor seeks to maximize (electoral) utility. Electoral vehicles that have earned a legal registration granted by the Jurado Nacional de Elecciones (JNE, the national electoral agency) are more valuable to political entrepreneurs than those vehicles that do not have it or for which the pending registration process outcome is uncertain. Levitsky and Zavaleta (2019) rightly point out that official registration has become “the most priced commodity” in the Peruvian marketplace where free agents and electoral vehicles interact. Candidates who are confident of the allure and prowess of their political personal brands seek out small electoral vehicle outfits other than the traditional parties or electoral vehicles which have held the national executive, because both kinds of entities carry the burden of deeply imprinted negative identities. The past visibility of these vehicles in parliament and in the political scene writ large constitutes a burdensome liability amid an electorate that rewards novelty and relentlessly punishes incumbency. The criteria electoral vehicles employ in their recruitment efforts to fill the slates of their parliamentary caucuses deepens institutional personalism. Most Peruvian electoral vehicles prioritize recruiting free agents who can contribute money or votes over and above candidates who have “partisan” ties. This practice underpins the cyclical rotation of “coalitions of independents”: for one electoral cycle independents join together under one ticket and then dissolve their coalition of convenience (Zavaleta 2014). Independent free agents are bound to enjoy a

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great deal of operational and political autonomy once elected to a seat in Congress. For the same reasons, they are unlikely to remain loyal to the label under which they are elected or to display “party” discipline. These dynamics thus foment the personalization of representation, in that “political participation is motivated and mobilized by individuals rather than political groups” (Pedersen and Rahat 2019, 214). In sum, the manner in which electoral vehicles carry out one of their key tasks—recruitment of candidates for office—comports with institutional personalism; and this practice, in turn, foments behavioral personalism on the part of voters as well as elected representatives. The social disrepute of traditional party labels increasingly means that entities such as APRA, PPC, or AP find it difficult to convince promising electoral candidates to lead the party ticket, or otherwise to convince them to join their organizations with the implicit promise of future leadership roles. The ability of traditional parties to offer assets that would make them attractive for prospective high-value brand candidates has declined alongside their (diminished) social rootedness. New political entrepreneurs have also increasingly been attracted to smaller electoral outfits because this feature grants them more political freedom of maneuver and control inside the organization, the ability to sit atop it without constraints emanating from internal structures, rules or “party” notables. Choosing small outfits also allows promising political entrepreneurs to negotiate their incorporation into the organization on their own terms. For those same reasons, the most desirable route for viable candidates to enter the political arena is to create their own vehicle. However, the hurdles to legal registration have become more onerous due to changes in party registration legislation aimed at party-building. Some political entrepreneurs do not start the process of fulfilling the registration requirements in time, or their application is rejected by the national electoral management body. The upshot is that, at every electoral cycle, a good number of viable candidates scramble to merge their unregistered vehicle with one that possesses electoral registration. Negotiations between free agent candidates and electoral vehicle “owners” are seldom centered upon programmatic issues. This general picture does not entirely apply to the modus operandi of some nominally leftist outfits, wherein inter-vehicle mergers or the “hiring” of a prospective candidate have often involved programmatic discussions, because a few of these outfits aim to develop a long-term ideas-based identity that supersedes personal brands. However, they are (partial) exceptions in a political landscape

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where interactions are transactional and pragmatic, and pure electoralist pursuits trump other considerations. Let us now turn to behavioral personalism among voters and politicians. Behavioral personalism is manifested whenever politicians, old and new, display an individualist modus operandi rather than team player or organizational-oriented behavior. To elaborate, in this arena of personalization, perceptions of politics and political actions “are oriented towards independent political individuals rather than collective institutions” (Pedersen and Rahat 2019, 214). To assess the degree of personalism among politicos, we would want to inquire whether they regularly prioritize personal political interests to the detriment of their electoral vehicles or political parties. One way to do so is to interrogate the motivations of electoral vehicle creators, as revealed in their observable conduct throughout the life of those vehicles. It bears reiterating that most of the electoral vehicles contending for the presidency to have appeared in Peru since 1990 have been created inorganically by individuals; they have not emanated from below as the offspring of civil society organizations or social movements or group identities. Nor have most vehicle creators endeavored to integrate or build linkages with mobilizing structures to provide some of these electoral vehicles’ building blocks and cadres. This behavior reveals a lack of concern for the representative qualities or the institutionalization prospects of precarious electoral vehicles. Additionally, electoral vehicle creators have consistently obviated the need to nurture party cadres and successors who can lead a “party-inconstruction” into the future. Rather, across the political spectrum, the commitment to party organization (including the development of institutional autonomy and internal rules) has been subordinated to the political interests of one individual or two (see Chapter 4). It is difficult to identify a leading national figure of the post-2000 period who has exhibited sustained efforts aimed at building an electoral vehicle into an institutionalized political party. The most promient political figures of this democratic period, including Alejandro Toledo, Alan Garcia, Luis Castaneda, Ollanta Humala, Cesar Acuna, or Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, among others, certainly have not shown evidence of such intent. A second group of figures, firmly in the camp of free agents, have traded jackets and jumped onto new existing vehicles as a route to power, influence, or impunity, entrenching and partaking in the informal nonparty norms of the Peruvian political game. They include individuals spanning a broad range of ideological inclinations, including Susana Villaran, Alfredo Barnechea,

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Martin Vizcarra, and many other free agents. A third group of political entrepreneurs spawned seemingly genuine party-building projects that were betrayed and undone by dint of their own caudillo-type and inconsistent political behavior, such as Keiko Fujimori or Frente Amplio’s Marco Arana, and to a lesser extent, Lourdes Flores (see Chapter 4). This general picture of party-eschewing norms has been consolidated by the conduct of seasoned politicians who have actively turned bona fide political parties into personal projects. The most prominent such politician is Alan Garcia, who bequeathed a damaging legacy for the APRA party’s future institutionalization prospects. Several assorted political figures have damaged their vehicles by embarking on self-promoting adventures, most recently Accion Popular’s Manuel Merino when he successfully maneuvered to oust President Vizcarra wielding dubious congressional procedures, damaging his diminished party’s fading republican and democratic brand. Without exception, all of the mentioned political leaders (among many others) have prioritized personal power ambitions to other considerations (i.e. teamwork, institution-building, nurturing successors), often with counterproductive electoral consequences. In short, behavioral personalism pervades the supply side of Peruvian electoral politics as much as it guides the demand side. Another manifestation of behavioral personalism among politicians can be found in regularized patterns of party-switching (transfuguismo in Spanish). The pervasive transfugismo witnessed in Peruvian politics is not merely a reflection of a political universe made up of free agents without genuine partisan loyalties; changing electoral vehicle affiliations is a necessity for free agents who strive to survive politically amid a context of high party death rates and swift changes in vehicles’ electoral fortunes (Tanaka and Barrenechea 2011; Campos 2017). Lawmakers regularly prioritize their personal political ambitions over and above the collective needs of the electoral vehicle they presumably represent. While transfugismo is sometimes depicted as a function of political culture, once an institutional setup that governs legislative behavior is held constant (permissive or restrictive rules), it is important to factor into the equation the nonparty norms that fuel systemic party-switching. Such behaviorconditioning norms are dismissive of loyalty to congressional caucuses or collective action. These norms constitute informal institutions channeling behavior, distinct from political culture per se. Personalism in the electorate is an important component of the behavioral variant of personalism. It can be defined as a process whereby

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citizens focus on politicians to the detriment of political parties, institutions, or issues when conceptualizing politics as well as in regards to their voting decision-making framework. This elite-citizen linkage type can be defined as a form of representation whereby the candidate encompasses all aspects of politics such that, instead of representing a project (programmatic or otherwise), the candidate constitutes the project itself. While other forms of elite-citizen linkage can be discerned in Peru, the country’s linkage profile is dominated by personalism. Observed electoral phenomena in Peru clearly comport with personalistic linkage dynamics. Let me highlight two such manifestations of personalism in the electorate here. The first one relates to the dynamics of coalition building for electoral vehicle survival. A nationwide 5 percent vote threshold of entry is legally required for congressional representation. Political outfits concerned about reaching the legally required vote threshold have often resorted to joining forces with other electoral vehicles with the expectation that the coalition’s vote total will be the sum of its parts. Individual electoral vehicles often join such coalitions with the purpose of averting their political extinction when they are on the brink of legal or legislative disappearance. To the chagrin of coalition architects, the electoral outcome often falls far short of expectations. Usually the coalition’s final vote tally is substantially lower than the sum of the individual vehicle units comprising the electoral coalition—as measured by polls at the time that the alliance is forged. For example, in the 2016 presidential campaign two traditional parties, PPC and APRA, alongside the regional movement Vamos Peru, decided to join forces and formalize an electoral alliance (El Comercio 2015). It was to be led by Alan Garcia, with Lourdes Flores in a prominent position in the joint list. The alliance, which integrated the PPC and APRA party logos in the campaign propaganda, obtained a meager 5.8 percent of the vote in the 2016 parliamentary elections. It was the third worst showing for APRA in its history, while the PPC was not able to place a single congressional candidate in the newly elected Congress (El Comercio 2016a). The lackluster electoral outcome largely reflected the much diluted and tarnished personal brand of Alan Garcia, not the sum of voting preferences (as revealed by polls) for each of the three parties comprising the ill-fated alliance. In a party non-system where party brands count for much less than the individuals running under them—i.e. where voting is personalistic—this is a predictable result. (Yet, this logic seems lost on politicians and free agents who continue to forge inter-vehicle alliances with the misplaced expectation of achieving better

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results than by running alone and ensuring legal and political survival). By Flores’ own admission, the coalition failed because “our [PPC] voters [migrated] in part to Kuczysnki and in part to Fujimorismo” (Peru 21, 2016). Otherwise stated, “PPC voters” were motivated by personcentered considerations and could not countenance casting their ballot for the tarnished Alan Garcia personal brand, who was also a historical enemy of the PPC. A second phenomenon that illustrates the primacy of personalistic linkages in Peru relates to the electoral endorsement of electoral vehicles by other electoral vehicles. The empirical evidence shows that campaign endorsements count for little because electoral vehicles and the politicians leading them do not enjoy a loyal social base of voters. The personal appeal and perceived qualities of a particular candidate are nontransferrable to other candidates. Thus, making predictions based on tallying up the polling prowess of candidates who endorse others is a futile exercise. The second round of the 2011 presidential elections shall suffice to illustrate this phenomenon. Keiko Fujimori received the endorsements of PPK and Castaneda (who, put together enjoyed over 28 percent of the first-round vote) while Humala received the endorsement of Toledo (16 percent of the presidential first-round). In the event, Keiko’s large advantage on the endorsement count did not translate into significant public opinion polling leads in the second round, nor to final victory on the day of the election. Voters simply reassessed their options and voted strategically, disregarding the public endorsement made by their first-choice candidate. In the context of free-floating electorates, votes are largely not transferable, either from person to party, or from person to person. This is another manifestation of the feeble, ephemeral bonds of loyalty inherent to personalistic linkages. Additionally, it reflects the high obstacles inherent to transferring political capital when the main currency in an electoral market is negative legitimacy. In other words, when politicians are simply perceived as the “lesser evil” by most of their prospective voters, they lack the capacity to shape and redirect the electoral preferences of such citizens. There is micro-level evidence that Peruvian voters prioritize personalistic considerations when casting their vote. Mass surveys constitute a key evidentiary source pointing to the centrality of personalism in the elitecitizen linkage profile. Consider a 2011 survey of Peruvian voters carried out by the Catholic University of Peru (see Table 7).

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Table 7 Question: In general, what is the factor that most influences your decision in voting for a candidate for President of the Republic?

Personal qualities and trajectory His/her party Policy platform Promise of concrete benefits A new politician Other Does not know Total

Total

A/B

C

D/E

25.8 4.1 35.3 16.5 12.3 2.7 3.0 100

41.9 1.7 36.9 8.1 4.7 4.7 2.1 100

29.0 2.9 40.1 14.1 9.5 2.9 1.6 100

20.9 5.3 32.4 19.6 15.6 2.4 3.9 100

Figures in Percentages, arranged by social class (A to E represent income quintiles) Source Rural–urban national survey, Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Peru, 2012. Size: 1800 interviewees. Survey conducted between the 21st and 23rd of May, 2011

Table 8 Question: What factor is most influential in defining your vote for a candidate for President of the Republic? Reasons defining vote Candidate Proposals Trajectory and Experience of the candidate Qualities and Values of the Candidate The promise of Concrete Benefits for me or my community A new politician The political party to which the candidate belongs Other No answer

Percentage 31 21 21 12 11 1 1 1

Source Ipsos-Apoyo, March 2016. Total of interviewees: 1202

As many as 38 percent of voters polled reported that they cast their ballot guided by personalistic criteria (“personal qualities” or “new politician”), while 16 percent were driven by clientelistic considerations. A meager 4 percent of the sample declared that they voted based on party brand considerations. A more recent 2016 poll, conducted by the polling firm Ipsos-Apoyo (see Table 8) provides further confirming evidence pointing to the preponderance of the personalistic linkage.

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No less than 53 percent of Peruvian interviewees responded that what defined their vote were the qualities of the candidate (the sum total of: “trajectory and experience of the candidate”; “qualities and values of the candidate”; and “the candidate is new”). The invisibility of party labels is confirmed by the meager 1 percent of respondents who said they were guided by the identity of the party to which a candidate pertains. A sizable percentage in both polls (35 percent in the 2011 survey and 31 percent in the 2016 survey) professed that what determined their vote were the proposals of candidates. However, the same Ipsos Apoyo survey reveals that a large majority of voters were unaware of the policy proposals of candidates. In the 2016 presidential elections: only 31 percent of voters reported being aware of Keiko Fujimori’s policy offerings; a meager 25 percent professed knowledge of Kuczynski’s proposals; only 16 percent were familiar with Alfredo Barnechea’s campaign program; a mere 14 percent had knowledge of Veronika Mendoza’s programmatic agenda; and a scant 14 percent had heard Alan Garcia’s campaign proposals. These very low percentages reveal in stark fashion the degree to which the Peruvian electorate is populated by information misers— a widespread phenomenon in young democracies but also in established ones (Carpini and Keeter 1996; Kitchelt and Wilkinson, chap. 1). To be sure, this generalized unawareness of programmatic agendas can concurrently reflect the paucity of programmatic campaign content. Relatedly, these numbers also suggest that policy proposals are less important in shaping the actual voting behavior of Peruvian voters than their selfreporting indicates, plainly because few voters report that they are aware of candidates’ campaign proposals. It is quite possible that voters, when asked by pollsters, are over-reporting the importance of programmatic agendas in their actual voting decisions due to standard social desirability bias (that is, respondents anywhere are prone to answer surveys influenced by what is deemed to be socially acceptable, thereby affecting the accuracy of polls as a faithful reflection of voter motivations). Only onefourth of respondents manifest an interest in politics, according to the same Ipsos survey (ibid.). Nonetheless, it is important to note that many personal brands carry some implied policy content in the eyes of voters, however nebulous or imprecise. The background, geographic provenance, and family origins of candidates can convey a preference for a certain general policy agenda. All in all, individual-based survey data confirms that personalistic linkages and personal brands are of paramount importance in coming to grips with Peruvian electoral politics. Unfortunately,

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no systematic data across Latin America on personalistic voting (as defined here) is currently available that would allow us to situate Peru in the regional context. However, given the extremely low level of partisanship and low programmatic orientation of voters in Peru vis-à-vis the rest of the region, it is safe to presume that the Andean nation displays one of the very highest levels of personalistic voting in Latin America. While the evidence here provided relies on direct polling of voters, there are other ways to measure personalism in the electorate. One common way to gauge the scope of the phenomenon is to average the percentage of votes political outsiders win across electoral cycles (Mainwaring and Torcal 2006, 217; Carreras 2012). The 2001 to 2021 period has seen the victory of political outsiders such as Toledo, Humala, Kuczynski (while part of the economic establishment, he was not a party politician) and Castillo. Moreover, many political outsiders have made deep electoral inroads in national-level elections—Julio Guzman, Cesar Acuna, George Forsyth, and many others. Outsiders have generally been more competitive electorally than politicians rooted in the 1980s party system. The traditional electoral vehicles (APRA, PPC, AP) have not yet chosen outsiders to head the ticket in presidential elections (Mercedes Araoz’s 2011 APRA botched nomination excepted), given the stranglehold of old-time patriarchs and leaders on party apparatuses. But in the absence of old timers or “natural candidates,” and because of the onset of an even more acute negative legitimacy environment, these political formations may well field outsiders in the 2020s—provided that APRA and PPC are able to recuperate their lost legal registration as political parties. An important trait of Peruvian personalism bears underlining. It is essentially non-programmatic in nature. In principle, personalistic voting can be sophisticated if voters’ decision-making calculus is made on the basis of the programmatic and ideological content gleaned from individual candidates (King 2002). This difference matters because leadership evaluations voters make not based on programmatic issues or ideological positioning criteria constitute a decidedly inferior form of democratic representation. Additionally, non-programmatic personalistic voting is not amenable to electoral accountability except on the valence dimension. Analyses and accounts of Peruvian elections often infer programmatic personalistic voting on the basis of electoral outcomes, or campaign platforms. The victory of a putative leftist candidate is interpreted as a vote for leftist ideas, or the electoral triumph of a centrist platform

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is read as a mandate for programmatic moderation, etc. That is, voters are imputed with ideological motivations based on the relative performance of individual candidates and their presumed ideological identity. Programmatic personalistic voting is assumed to be dominant—perhaps reflecting the professional biases of political scientists and other analysts. However, more fine-grained analysis and available empirics on voting micro-foundations show otherwise. First, polls reveal that only a minority of Peruvian voters can place themselves on the classic left–right ideological spectrum. As many as 66 percent of respondents were unaware of the political concepts “left” and “right,” a number that had increased to 69 percent by January 2021 (Encuesta El-Comercio-Ipsos Apoyo 2021a). (This increase may well reflect higher levels of political alienation among Peruvians over time as well as the fact that Peruvian party universe has become ever-more unstructured). Only 24 percent of citizens professed that they were cognizant of the left–right political terminology in 2021, down from 29 percent in 2016. Most citizens evaluate politics and filter their evaluation of personal brands through other lenses. To be sure, the fact that large majorities of citizens are unaware of left–right distinctions does not preclude the possibility that they hold views on the role of the state, on social issues, or on immigration, that comport with left-wing or right-wing ideologies (for recent data on Peruvian voters’ issue-positioning, see: Torres 2020, 139–148). However, there is little evidence that, in the aggregate, these preferences guide voting criteria— not least because the supply side (i.e. the panoply of Peruvian electoral vehicles) does not provide clear or consistent guidance. The issue-based elite-citizen linkages that do exist are very tenuous, as explained in Chapter 5. Large majorities of voters are unaware of the platform content of electoral candidates, as the surveys we have referenced above pointedly underscore. It bears recalling that when political supply is endlessly fragmented and changing and provides few ideological or programmatic cues, most citizens are not bound to assess politics via ideological frameworks, a finding that standard political science research repeatedly corroborates. Third, extant statistical work points to no ideological/programmatic match between the ideological self-placement of Peruvian voters and their evaluation of candidates, as Mainwaring and Torcal (2006, 119– 21) show in their Pearson correlations. In other words, Peruvian voters are no more likely to positively evaluate a candidate who comports with their ideological preferences than other candidates who do not align with such preferences. Once these considerations are factored in, it stands to

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reason that personalistic voting in Peru is largely non-ideological and non-programmatic. This, of course, does not preclude ideological voting entirely. Candidates who are exceptional in terms of the intensity and scope of the ideological cues they provide voters (for example Veronika Mendoza or Pedro Castillo on the left, or Rafael Lopez Aliaga or Keiko Fujimori on the political right) will witness patterns of voter support that are somewhat more ideologically/programmatically driven. Nonetheless, these exceptions do not alter the general picture of non-programmatic personalism here delineated. Again, public polling provides evidence that Peruvian voters, in the aggregate, do not accord most candidates with clear ideological profiles (see: Encuesta El Comercio-Ipsos 2021a)—except for a few individual cases. When asked to assess the ideological position of candidates, voter responses tellingly place each candidate across the whole kaleidoscope of right–left positions, from extreme left to extreme right, without any clear pattern emerging. While in the aggregate most candidates could be scored as centrist as a statistical artifact, this artificial average hides enormous variation in voter assessments. These seemingly bewildering results reflect Peruvian society’s tendency to view politics through lenses other than ideology—one of the legacies of collapse of the 1980s party system and the advent of a sociedad postfujimorista, to recall Cotler’s term. This non-ideological outlook is also a manifestation of Peru’s low information, highly complex political environment—to be discussed next. 5.1

Complex Political Environments and Personalism

Party non-systems are burdened with enormous informational complexity for citizens to cope with, because of ongoing party universe instability, the opacity of contender vehicles, the newness of many electoral options (high “party” birth rates), and the unreliability of person-based heuristics, among many other factors. In these settings, the electoral vehicles that populate the democratic system approximate “black boxes” in the sense that they provide little content—let alone reliable content—to citizens. The recurrent and fast-paced turnover in the composition of electoral supply means that voters are confronted with a dizzying new array of options at every electoral cycle. Most electoral vehicles evince little past political trajectory to draw upon and fade from public view in-between elections, such that to take the measure of electoral supply requires an abundant quantity of “insider” information about a plethora

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of contenders. Peruvian electoral vehicles, many of which qualify as Independents in Luna et al.’s (2020) classificatory scheme, generally provide scant information as regards their public policy issue positions, for they often lack a policy platform to begin with, and usually lack the technical cadres that can fashion issue platforms from scratch. Negative legitimacy environments, in addition, incentivize free agents to pursue an appeals strategy based on the wholesale negation of past political practice and past public policy, not to structure political competition around an explicit contrast of programs. When political entrepreneurs purposely define themselves only in opposition to the status quo, they gain electoral traction, but fail to stake out a programmatic agenda or a discernible political vision—to be sure, status quo politicians can also, and often do, contribute to making Peruvian politics unclear and unintelligible. In other words, negative legitimacy environments effectively perpetuate obfuscation and low information flows to citizens—as well as low-quality or unreliable political content. At their best, political parties in more institutionalized environments facilitate voter information seeking and decisionmaking (Sniderman 2000). By contrast, partyless polities subsume citizens in a political world of informational scarcity. Moreover, in unstructured electoral spaces, what content electoral vehicles and free agents relay to the public is highly time-sensitive and variable, both because political time is very compressed in such environments and because vehicles and free agents are generally unconstrained by organizations, party notables, past trajectory, or ideological commitments. The upshot is that the little information that such vehicles do provide or convey is much more unreliable. Citizens are thus operating in a devilishly complex political world, not irreducibly indecipherable, but in practice too complex for many voters, who do not have the inclination, interest, time, and/or access to high-quality information to break through the obscurity. Peru’s juxtaposition of a complex political environment and widespread citizen apathy, augurs ill for prospects of (incrementally) aligning political supply and demand on the basis of issue-based content through time. Relying on standard findings in cognitive psychology, Marinova (2016) advances the notion that citizens cope with complex environments through a series of passive and active adaptation strategies. “Facing higher costs of information, voters will remain passively uninformed rather than actively seek to overcome information barriers (ibid., 8).” The implication of these findings is that societal political ignorance is fueled and aided de facto by dint of the sheer complexity of politico-electoral supply.

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The inter-temporal reproduction of information-miser electorates obeys conditions endogenous to the political system. Politically knowledgeable citizens, as comparativist scholars have demonstrated, display political behavior that differs from that of less informed citizens (Delli Carpini and Keeter 1996; Lau and Redlawsk 2001). Nonetheless, both sophisticated and unsophisticated voters—using these terms as per political science literature—are conditioned in their decision-making by the level of political complexity of the national arena they inhabit. There are factors extraneous to politics which increase society-wide political information, including levels of industrialization and urbanization, such that communications, technology, and mobility enhance information flows accessible to citizens (Lipset 1959; Castells 1996). High trust societies, armed with a sizable stock of social capital and civic engagement, augment the degree of political information diffusion. The level of democracy is another factor empirically ascertained to positively affect the level of citizens’ political knowledge (Pereira 2020), insofar as it enhances access of information and promotes political association networks. Research shows, furthermore, that some features of party universes increase the de facto complexity and legibility of the political system, thus muddling citizens’ political knowledge foundations. One of those features is the effective number of parties in parliament, which demonstrably decreases political knowledge among citizens (Sniderman and Levendusky 2007; Fraile 2013). Relatedly, the number of parties correlates negatively with citizens’ propensity to place themselves on a standard left–right ideological spectrum across Latin America, as Zeichmesister and Corral (2013) show. That is, high electoral fragmentation complicates decision-making, particularly when many options on the menu are not easily distinguishable. In addition, it stands to reason that permanent electoral volatility prominently adds to the complexity and legibility of political systems, fomenting “information overload,” in the parlance of political psychology. When the supply of electoral options changes repeatedly across electoral cycles, the informational demands on voters are simply enormous. For example, constant changes in electoral supply deprive voters of the opportunity to vote retrospectively and “politics becomes a game without repetitions that does not provide enough information to choose on the basis of past governmental performance” (Zavaleta 2014, 148). The vacuous nature of most electoral vehicles, as regards programmatic or other politically relevant content, constitutes yet another factor

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enhancing political complexity. Voters’ ability to parse out the substantive content of the political options on offer becomes an intricate task. An ecosystem comprised of many electoral vehicles that provide little reliable content about their policy orientation, worldview, and ideological leanings, and which showcase little or no political trajectory for voters to evaluate, similarly augments the informational demands on the electorate. The recognition that the above-mentioned factors configure a politically complex environment yields a straightforward conclusion about Peru’s political landscape: it qualifies as an exceedingly complex one. Indeed, it is about as intricately complex as can be conceived. There are powerful reasons why voters in complex, low-information environments are guided by personalism. In a highly complex political environment, characterized by ever-present change in the composition of electoral vehicles, the opacity of such vehicles, and the sheer number of political options on offer, the informational demands on citizens are overwhelming. One simple way to cut through that complexity is to employ inferential strategies of person perception that are employed in everyday life (Kinder 1986; Rahn et al. 1990). Such inferential strategies rely partly on visual imagery and nonverbal cues. Personality evaluations thus take on central importance for citizens in complex environments, particularly if there is a dearth of other sources of relevant political information commonly available in institutionalized party systems. Thus, in complex, low-information political environments, personalism becomes the central feature of elite-citizen linkage profiles in no small measure by default. Information other than that which is person-focused is opaque and not readily accessible. The active strategies citizens use to adapt to political complexity are naturally ones that are cognitively and informationally undemanding and simple to undertake. One such strategy is to engage in directional-intensity voting, that is, to assess the direction in which political options want to move the status quo and the intensity with which they advocate change (Marinova 2016, 62–65). Thus, candidates who make deliberate and extreme left or right-wing ideological appeals or radical populist appeals centered on thorough going transformation of the status quo can be successful in carving out a distinctive profile and get traction with some voters. This amid an otherwise devilishly complicated terrain for voters to parse out or decipher. Another common strategy to cope with complex environments is to rely on “leader heuristics” (ibid., 65– 67), that is, to make evaluations of personal brands. Case study research outside Latin America suggests that many new electoral vehicles bereft

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of social roots or linkages based on group solidarity or value orientations, compensate for their lack of linkages with citizens by promoting the personalities of their leaders, as occurs in Lithuania (Ramonaite 2007). A suggestive case study of Estonian elite-citizen linkage ties, for instance, finds an association between the rate of formation of new parties and personalistic-focused campaign strategies (Grofman et al. 2000). There are reasons to think that this association should travel across regions. This implies that the greater the level of extra-systemic volatility in a democracy, the more supply-side personalistic appeals will prevail—thus conditioning or socializing citizens into a person-focused prism to evaluate political choices. All in all, political complexity appears to promote the supply and consumption of leadership heuristics (that is, personal brands) and foments the forging of instrumental relationships among citizens, electoral vehicles, and political entrepreneurs. It is important to note that politically complex settings necessarily muddle decision-making, for both free agents and voters. Complexity also renders political learning more elusive for citizens and politicians alike, because almost every electoral conjuncture brings up a whole new array of factors to assess—including abrupt changes in electoral supply—and because the political landscape is less legible, less amenable to comprehension, and more unpredictable. Political complexity comprises a supply-side condition from which no democratic participant can escape. Sophisticated voters—per political science terminology, those with more political knowledge and information—are hardly immune to the vexing and steep informational demands inherent to complex political environments. Political learning in these settings is challenging at best, elusive at worst, because drawing analogies to recent or past political episodes or electoral cycles can be a particularly inexact science, insofar as comparisons are more riddled with confounding factors than is the case in simpler political environments. What is more, complex political environments render inter-temporal consistency in the application of voting criteria—whether ideological, value based, issue-based, regime cleavage type, etc.—difficult for all citizens, even highly educated ones guided by set, defined political parameters. In the Peruvian context, the case of two of the country’s foremost public intellectuals provide a telling example that illustrates the point. These intellectuals are novelist Mario Vargas Llosa and his son Alvaro Vargas Llosa. Both figures have been, for the past thirty years, staunch detractors of Fujimorismo, relentlessly reminding their countrymen in countless newspaper columns and

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interviews about the authoritarian and corrupt track record of the Alberto Fujimori regime (A. Vargas Llosa 1994) and tirelessly pointing out the many dangers that lurk for Peruvian democracy should Fujimorismo come back to power. In both the 2011 and 2016 presidential contests, Mario Vargas Llosa ardently urged support for Keiko Fujimori’s rivals. Over the years, the famous writer forged a verifiable written and oral track record that lends support to his assertion: “I have combatted Fujimorismo in a systematic way” (M. Vargas Llosa 2021). But that invariant political stance, which consolidated his anti-partisanship (anti-Fujimorista) bona fides, came to an end. In the second round of the 2021 presidential elections, both liberal intellectuals underwent a puzzling about-face, publicly asking Peruvian voters to cast their ballot for Keiko Fujimori. The key reason offered for this electoral choice and public endorsement was that “Keiko represents the lesser evil, and with her in power, there is a greater chance of keeping our democracy, whereas should the winner be Pedro Castillo I don’t see any such chance” (M. Vargas Llosa 2021). There were powerful reasons to believe that Castillo would be a “paper tiger” or weak chief executive if voted into the presidency, notwithstanding his numerous undemocratic statements, dismissive view of check-andbalance institutions, uncompromising zero-sum view of politics, threats to close Congress if it did not accommodate executive branch initiatives, and the worrying radical language enshrined in Peru Libre’s detailed campaign program. Among the reasons to doubt the alleged threat that a Castillo presidency posed for Peruvian democracy were his scant overall level of political support (19 percent in the first round), Peru Libre’s minority status in the legislature, its precarious linkages with society, and the powerful opponents (poderes facticos ) Castillo would face once in office (mass media, organized business associations, and the broader Lima establishment). Standard political science analysis reveals that many of the pieces were in place for the birthing of a weak government, even weaker than recent ones in Peru’s post-2001 democratic era. However, political science analyses aside, voters were confronted with more immediate, vexing questions inherent to complex political environments. The reasonable uncertainties surrounding the prospects of a Pedro Castillo presidency surely muddled the electoral decision-making calculus of many voters, sophisticated or not: questions about whether Castillo truly was an antiestablishment leftist radical (Albertus 2021), uncertainties enveloping the potential influence of Peru Libre owner Vladimir Cerron upon Castillo (Gestion 2021), the relative importance of Peru

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Libre’s Marxist official campaign program (see: Peru Libre 2021), queries surrounding the veracity and nature of the alleged links between Peru Libre congressmen and MOVADEF (the Shining Path’s political outfit), and many others. Once more in the troubled trajectory of Peru’s post2001 democracy, the absence of partisan institutionalization, the unexpected irruption of a little-known personal brand (Pedro Castillo) and electoral vehicle (i.e. Peru Libre), and the absence of clear political track record to draw upon, obfuscated the nature of the electoral supply on offer, rendering it more inscrutable, even in the simplified scenario of a second round. In short, complex environments make it devilishly difficult for voters to be inter-temporally consistent in the application of political criteria, standards, and benchmarks through time. Even staunch antipartisans, like the Vargas Llosas, can renege on their negative partisanship overnight, contravening their previous voting behavioral pattern. Mario Vargas Llosa and his intellectual son are surely not alone in their intertemporal behavioral inconsistency. Evidently, millions of Peruvian citizens have inevitably faced similarly vexing electoral decision-making dilemmas because of Peru’s complex political environment.

6

Party Brands Versus Personal Brands in Peru

Party brands have been defined as a set of learned associations voters make of a political formation, including that party’s prototype voter, or otherwise, the typical voter that the party’s policies are intended to benefit (Lupu 2016). Party brands are usually conceived of in ideological terms. However, brands can alternatively be based upon social and cultural content. For example, Peronism is a party-movement with an ideologically ambiguous profile but with a clear sociocultural brand (Ostiguy 1997). The stronger (i.e. more identifiable) party brands are in a political society, the greater the level of partisanship that can be expected to obtain. Because party brands afford voters an idea of the type of citizen a particular party represents, brands act as useful informational shortcuts for voters to develop loyalty toward a political party. Przeworski and Sprague (1988) note that “parties appeal to the middle classes, women, or ecologists by presenting themselves as representatives of their interests and values, by evoking appropriate symbols, and by offering specific policy proposals (82).” Voters use cognitive shortcuts (party rhetoric, the actions of party elites, etc.) to determine what kind of voter a party represents.

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But brands are not static. Voter perceptions of party brands develop and evolve over time, based on the discourse and behavior of political parties. Party brands have been in very short supply in post-1990 Peru. Among Peruvian electoral vehicles, only Fujimorismo has been able to build something of a brand from scratch since the party system collapsed. The Partido Popular Cristiano (PPC), traditionally espousing a conservative social agenda and economic liberalism, has suffered brand dilution, one source of its narrowing external appeal (now concentrated in wealthy districts of Lima). It continues to be viewed as a party that represents high and upper-middle classes, as well as (more diffusely) republican values. The APRA brand—partly programmatic and partly sociocultural— has been almost completely diluted because of public evidence of party corruption (Cateriano 2017) and because of the bait-and-switch conservative public policy orientation carried out during the second Garcia presidency (2006–2011), among other factors. APRA’s de facto collaboration with Fujimorismo has also contributed to party dilution. Accion Popular has traditionally been endowed with an image that projects democratic values, republicanism, and ideological centrism. But it is unclear that, as of the early 2020s, those elements of its brand carry much weight in the votes the political formation garners. None of the remaining political formations contesting elections at the national level has proved willing or able to build a party brand, despite the obvious long-term benefits that accrue to entities that successfully accomplish that task. A partial exception is the Frente Amplio, which has sought to incarnate a progressive programmatic agenda infused with post-materialist causes (environment, identity issues, women’s rights, etc.). However, its success in consolidating a party brand was quite limited (see Chapter 4). What explains the generalized absence of “party” brand-building in Peru? One important factor lies in the exceedingly short-term horizon of Peruvian politicians. Indeed, “[Peruvian parties] are contingent associations without any vocation for political continuity. It is explicitly known by political agents that contracts are short term and highly prone to being restructured with a different configuration come the next election,” writes Zavaleta (2015, 4). The heavy discounting of the future on the part of virtually all leaders means that little consideration is given to the slow and steady construction of party branding. In a context of widespread public distrust of parties and high party death rates, Peruvian political entrepreneurs and career politicians alike are focused on shortterm survival. An equally important and related factor is the electoralist

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orientation of Peruvian political outfits, newer and older, which sacrifice branding considerations on the altar of immediate electoral performance. Political leaders are all too willing to switch their policy stances on short notice, as well as willing to forge incongruous alliances with strange party bedfellows, in an elusive quest to enhance their electoral results. Finally, the overwhelming dominance of electoral vehicle creators/leaders in the setting of policy stances and the making of other momentous electoral decisions, renders subleaders, who presumably have a larger stake in the future of the electoral vehicle, unable to counteract decisions that can destroy incipient party brands, or otherwise unable to defend postures that help brand-building. On the demand side, Peruvians’ political apathy and deep-seated public distrust toward parties in general, renders brandbuilding an inherently difficult enterprise. It is not coincidental that the only party that (unwittingly) built a brand, namely Fujimorismo, is one endowed with a trait that other party start-ups cannot replicate: the legacy of delivering the country from an epoch-making economic and security crisis. Strictly speaking, Keiko Fujimori’s Fuerza Social did not need to invest in brand-building: it was bequeathed the brand by the Fujimorato regime (1990–2000). No other rival can sell itself as an antiestablishment “party” formation that successfully tackled some of Peru’s most pressing problems, in stark contrast to a purportedly ineffectual and feckless political class. As the late Peruvian anthropologist Ivan Degregori penned in the mid-1990s, “by dint of exhibiting concrete results, [Fujimori] evaded the ‘vertiginous political consumption’…associated with the collapse of the party system and of state institutions (Degregori 2015, 336).” The legacy of those “concrete results” helped Fujimorimo establish the credibility of its narrative and political agenda vis-à-vis its social base, as well as helped it build voter–party linkages. No other political party has enjoyed that form of political capital in the post-2001 democratic era: an element of ex ante credibility in the eyes of a sizable segment of the Peruvian electorate. Moreover, no other party has been able to polarize the electorate like Fujimorismo has done, not least because of its damaging and divisive baggage (regarding authoritarian governance, corruption, and human rights violations) and because it purposely ruled the country in highly polarizing fashion. It also exercised parliamentary power under Keiko Fujimori in a high-handed and abusive manner. Polarization can contribute to building party brands (LeBas 2018). The same polarization it engendered while in office (1990–2000) and during the decade of

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the 2000s effectively aided Keiko-led Fujimorismo in personal and incipient organizational brand-construction, helping it to develop the voter partisan attachment other electoral vehicles lack. Since the surprise election of outsider Ricardo Belmont to the mayoralty of Lima in 1989, on account of his apolitical image (personal brand), personalistic voting has taken center stage in Peruvian politics, spanning democratic and competitive authoritarian periods alike. Kostadinova and Levitt (2014), define personalistic parties as those that evince “a dominant leader and weakly structured organization.” Not only do personalities dominate the internal affairs and decision-making of electoral vehicles in Peru, but also the relationship vis-à-vis voters. In a context in which electoral vehicles lack identities, ideological or otherwise, voters rely on the personal traits and trajectories of candidates as their chief informational source. To be successful in settings largely devoid of partisanship, it becomes essential that politicians sell an idea about themselves to voters: in effect, they must project a personal brand. In the absence of other sources of partisan loyalty, the role of individual candidates becomes central in galvanizing the vote and fostering some loyalty (however transient) among voters. But the support candidates elicit is not issue-based. We here coincide with the assessment made by the most prominent expert of Peruvian public opinion, Alfredo Torres (2010, 177), when he writes that in Peru “the vote does not depend so much upon the proposals of candidates, but rather upon the image that the candidate radiates.” Because Peruvian electoral vehicles provide scant informational content, voters rely, by default, on their assessment of the relative suitability and traits of candidates. Electoral vehicles often contribute to this personcentric approach, including the adoption of candidates’ first or last names as the logos—for instance, “K” as the marker of Fujimorimo under Keiko or “PPK” as the vehicle of Pedro Pablo Kuczynski. The personalization of politics translates into “less emphasis on a party’s policies than in the past, and more emphasis on the personalities of the leaders who will have to implement those policies” (Macallister 2007, 583). The personalization in the electorate documented in European democracies has also proceeded apace in Latin America, as delineated in the introductory chapter of this book. The widespread nature of the personalization phenomenon (Rahat and Kenig 2018) strongly suggests that at least some of the causal factors that drive it forward are universal in nature—not least, technological developments or the loss of societal trust in political institutions. Peru showcases, like few other democracies, what the end-state of this process

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of personalization entails. It is a democracy where the framing of the political game revolves overwhelmingly around personalities and personal traits. As Levitksy and Zavaleta (2019) rightly note, “Peruvian politics has been reduced to the most basic unit: the individual.” Television qua medium of information itself creates a “false intimacy” between politicians and viewers (Hart 1999), and peels off the conceptual, abstract content of politics, as political scientist Giovanni Sartori warned in his prescient book Homo Videns (Sartori 1998). Moreover, the mass media frames political discussions around candidates’ private and public lives, personal trajectories, and utterances, over an issuebased presentation of political options. Such framing deepens voters’ personalist-centered cognitive political map. Even the occasional new political formations that explicitly (or purportedly) seek to escape personcentric politics and focus on programmatic issues, such as Frente Amplio or Partido Morado, are subjected to the media vortex of personalism. The tendency of electoral vehicles to move toward political entropy and institutional involution are, of course, objective dynamics that fuel and perpetuate personalismo. Peruvian citizens are primed to analyze politics in a person-centric fashion, because of reasons of commission (the person-centric way the electoral vehicles and the mass media alike frame politics) and omission (the general absence of party brands and alternative informational shortcuts for voters). There is increasing evidence from country studies that personal traits are important in shaping elections in much of Latin America, even if candidate-centered factors have not been studied in a systematic fashion with standardized surveys that would permit cross-country comparisons. The case studies that do exist show, for instance, that personal charisma helped Hugo Chavez ride out politically serious deficits in governmental performance (Merolla and Zeichmeister 2011). To provide another example, Lula da Silva’s personal brand (i.e. Lulismo) has been found to be a stronger predictor of voting patterns for or against the PT (Worker’s Party) than the nature of the political party’s policies themselves (Samuels 2004). Ascriptive traits of candidates exert an important independent effect on the vote. For instance, research on Brazilian electoral behavior demonstrates a bias in favor of female candidates (Aguilar, Cunov and Desposato 2015), that may perhaps be extensive to some other countries. As research proceeds, other ascriptive traits shall be shown to be of import. It stands to reason that how national electorates assess candidate traits is bound to differ across countries,

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reflective of historical factors, average level of education, societal cleavages, patterns of socialization (for example, degree of class consciousness, social biases, racism), and other factors. Otherwise stated, candidates are evaluated through the bent or refracted lens of deep-seated key societal divisions and historical legacies. Ceteris paribus, the more pronounced the social, economic, ideological divides, and historical traumas that beset a nation, the greater the affective and ideological polarization that will surround individual politicos, and the more intense will be the negative identities that (divided) society bestows upon them. 6.1

Conceptualizing Political Personal Brands

Because of the acute scarcity of party brands and the marginal political influence of those (diminished) party brands that remain, the analytical value of this construct is limited for explaining Peruvian politics. A concept endowed with much more analytical prowess to understand the country’s electoral and political dynamics is what the political marketing literature labels “personal brands” (Needham 2005, 2006; Nielsen 2016, 2017; Kaneva and Klemmer 2016; Guzman and Sierra 2009; Guzman and Naswan 2015). In much the same manner that party brands offer voters an idea of the type of citizen a party represents (Lupu 2016), individual personal brands can also project an idea of the type of citizen they represent. Most Peruvian voters are guided by perceptions of candidate prototypes rather than party prototypes. Political personal brands encode representational qualities: they can situate candidates as moderate or radical with respect to the political and economic status quo; transmit ideologically leftist, centrist, or right-leaning content; convey whether they represent urban or rural dwellers or straddle both; or signal to voters whether they embody the demands of low, middle, or upper classes, among other important informational codes. Citizens rely on personal brands as a key heuristic to extract important information surrounding ideological, regional, regime, class cleavages, and other considerations. In addition, personal brands convey (subjective) information about the traits an individual brings in the exercise of public office, qualities such as leadership skills, competence, empathy, and others. Political science research has shown that the nature of candidate evaluations differs according to the level of sophistication of voters (Pierce 1993). But notwithstanding individual-level differences in political sophistication, amid complex political environments where electoral vehicles

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provide few usable informational shortcuts, personal brands constitute the prime heuristic shaping voters’ decision-making calculus. We here conceptualize a political personal brand as configured by three sets of characteristics: ascriptive traits, which are conferred at birth and impossible to change, such as gender, ethnicity, religion, age, and geographic provenance; secondly, socializing experiences, which include the professional trajectory of the candidate, occupation, level of education, social class, and political experience, among others; and thirdly, what has been termed brand personalities, which include factors such as leadership traits, competence, charisma, empathy, openness, agreeableness, or handsomeness, all subjective perceptions in the eye of voters (Aaker 1997; Caprara et al. 2011)–see Table 9. Among other things, voters infer what regions of the country a candidate will prioritize on the basis of his or her ascriptive traits. The ethnic and regional provenance of the candidate are key inferential shortcuts for this purpose. For example, in the Peruvian context, whether a political entrepreneur is limeno/a (hails from Lima), or rather, exhibits provincial origins, plays a large role in shaping his or her “natural” electorate—reflecting the country’s geographic political divisions. The personal trajectory of a candidate acts as another important source of politically relevant information. Not unlike academic political scientists or historians do in their professional work (Kremaric et al. 2020, 135–140), voters infer future behavior in office from the socializing experiences of politicians. From a perceptual point of view, the biography of an individual can provide important clues about his or her values, interests, worldviews, and real priorities in more authentic fashion than political or campaign rhetoric. Thus, voter use the professional background of a candidate as an effective cognitive shortcut to indicate for what issue-areas a candidate shall prioritize in office. Occupation can also be taken as an Table 9 Components of a political personal brand

Ascriptive traits

Socializing experiences

Brand personality traits

Gender Ethnicity Religion Age Geographic provenance

Occupation Social class Education Political experience Newness

Competence Empathy Agreeableness Openness Sincerity

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indicator of competence—for example, it is well known that businessmen are often credited with knowledge of economic matters and deemed particularly adept at generating economic growth and opportunity. Along the same lines, the social class provenance of an individual is widely interpreted as a signal of what social groups an individual will represent in office. Incidentally, these pervasive forms of inference-making are hardly irrational. Much empirical evidence supports the notion that ascriptive and socializing experiences influence political behavior. For example, there is evidence from democracies worldwide that leaders favor their coethnics and coracials, or that the occupational or wealth composition of a legislature affect political outputs in systematic ways. What the specialized literature calls “brand personality”—that is, subjective personal attributes—has also been empirically found to have a bearing on voting decision-making. The list of personal attributes that may influence vote decisions is long, including traits such as likeability, honesty, good-humored nature, fair-minded, caring, bold, and many others. King (2002) emphasizes four such traits: physical appearance, native intelligence, character or temperament, and political style. It is relevant to note is that most of these traits are “to some extent manipulable” (King 2002, 8). A candidate’s presentation of self, or persona, is open to manipulation, and so is a modus operandi in the political world. Thus, while ascriptive traits are fixed, some socializing experiences can be molded and framed in self-serving ways by candidates to suit their perceived particular electoral needs of the moment. The third dimension of a political personal brand is arguably the one most open to candidate construction and manipulation. Many brand personality traits can be, within bounds, molded to configure a deliberately planned and constructed political personal profile—sometimes a rather contrived profile in its fake origin. Gauging the degree to which each of these three sets of factors shape voter preferences and which of the three is more determinative of the voting preferences constitutes, of course, an empirical question. Empirical studies aimed at probing the intricacies of personal brands’ influence on elections are scant as of yet, but deserve attention. After examining 58 selected traits used by brand personality and candidate personality frameworks, Guzman and Sierra (2009, 215) find, for example, that in the Mexican political context, “presidential candidates are primarily evaluated according to how capable they seem to be, and that this capability is inferred by the level of perceived competence—political, managerial and

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leadership—and energy of the candidate.” Other criteria Mexican voters demonstrably prioritize to evaluate politicians, as Guzman and Sierra’s empirical results show, include empathy, physical appearance, and kindness. The degree to which electorates across countries coincide or differ in terms of which personality traits are judged to be most important in choosing politicians is something that future research will need to elucidate. Future empirical studies will need to determine which ascriptive traits, brand personality traits or socializing experiences are most influential in shaping Peruvian voter decisions. Personal brands in Peru elicit greater levels of public rejection than public approval—much like the partisan brands of Aprismo or Fujimorismo. For reasons that can be partially traced to the country’s recent history, seasoned politicians and newer political entrepreneurs alike are generally distrusted and even detested. Peruvian mass attitudes are decidedly anti-political. In consequence, the electoral challenge Peruvian political entrepreneurs face is to try to construct and shape their personal brand in such a way that lowers the distrust and rejection they elicit, more than to attempt to widen their (puny) political base of core voters. In a political environment suffused with negative identities, the way to accrue negative legitimacy—the central national political currency—is to amplify the percentage of voters who would, under certain circumstances, be open to support them—i.e. to lower their antivoto or rate of rejection. This quest is inherently difficult, and often proves to be elusive, not least because negative identities are rooted in deep societal divisions, and rooted in a generalized anti-political attitude. The exceedingly low appeal each Peruvian politician is not simply a reflection of how the mass public evaluates his or her personal brand individually. Encoded in that evaluation is also the generalized public distrust accorded to the political profession and political activity writ large. The abysmal political, security, and economic malperformance of the 1980s has weighed heavily on Peruvian mass political attitudes. The antiestablishment and anti-party sentiment fueled by the mass propaganda machinery of the Fujimorato decade helped entrench those attitudes (see Chapter 2; also, see Fowks). Furthermore, the democratic era has not attenuated anti-political sentiment. The political performance of governments during the 2001 era has been poor. Most incumbents have failed at, and largely neglected to make strides toward, nationwide social and economic integration, perpetuating regional divisions; and all have been tarnished by corruption scandals. Thus, performance deficits continue to

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provide fertile terrain for antiestablishment politics. Worsened economic performance since the end of the commodity boom (post-2013) has predictably amplified anti-political attitudes and boosted the political entrepreneurs that most faithfully embody these attitudes in their personal brands. In addition, personal brands are refracted through the deep social, economic, cultural, and center–periphery divisions that characterize Peru. Deeply divided societies necessarily split public opinion on political questions (Reilly 2001), including societal perceptions of political figures. Only when we combine these attitudinal and structural factors, though certainly not an exhaustive list, can we begin to grasp why virtually all personal brands in Peru should be negative—i.e. eliciting significantly more public rejection than approval. The electoral rise of many populist Peruvian political entrepreneurs has been propelled forward by the politics of anti-politics, against the backdrop of widespread deep-seated alienation toward “establishment” candidates. Again, negative legitimacy fuels (short-lived) political careers to a greater extent than candidates’ (low) intrinsic public appeal. In consequence, few electoral winners can claim genuine, autonomous, nontransferable political support. And none can claim positive legitimacy-originating support on a sizable scale. Political scientist Carlos Melendez has coined the evocative label anti-candidatos (anti-candidates) to describe the low popular appeal, unenthusiastic following, and scant authority or influence of Peruvian political figures. In democracies where party systems are well established, political parties can “own” particular issues (Petrocik 1996), such that voters view certain parties as better positioned to tackle those issues. In turn, personal brands are refracted or viewed through the lens of partisan issue appropriation. Party politicians thus “own traits associated with those issues” (Hayes 2005, 908). For example, in the US context, Republican politicians are known to be viewed by the public as strong and competent on security issues, while Democratic politicians are perceived to be endowed with more compassion and empathy (Hayes 2005). In these settings, candidates have incentives to “invade” the issue ownership of rival political parties in order to augment the scope of their appeal to voters. Thus the logic behind George Bush’s slogan “compassionate conservatism,” an attempt to cross into enemy territory and widen the appeal of his personal brand beyond the strictures bestowed by the Republican party image. By contrast, in partyless settings where party brands are absent, individual political entrepreneurs neither benefit by the subjective partisan transmission of traits nor are they constrained

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by the subjective trait deficiencies bequeathed by party issue ownership. The upshot is that, in party non-system settings, candidates enjoy comparatively greater leeway to construct and fashion the issue-based content of their candidacies. This freedom of maneuver and room for agency for purposes of personal brand construction, however, is bounded by the ascriptive and socialization experiences components of a personal brand, which follow from the “accident of birth” and the biography of individuals—by definition. These components of personal brands are, of course, unchangeable, although politicians certainly aggrandize and embellish their biographies and socializing experiences. In party nonsystems, where electoral supply is continuously populated with new political faces, there is greater room for, and prevalence of, purposeful embellishment and aggrandizement of personal brands than in more institutionalized party systems. Political entrepreneurships encounter greater incentives to distinguish themselves from their rivals by emphasizing the newness quality of their political identity. A recent 2021 poll confirms the continuing centrality of personalism in informing Peruvian voting decision-making. The poll is also instructive in that it provides some notion of the relative weight personal brands carry in driving the vote, as well as the relative weight represented by each of the three components of personal brands here delineated (ascriptive, socializing experiences, and personality brands). When Peruvian citizens were asked, during the second round of the 2021 presidential campaign, why they preferred Pedro Castillo or Keiko Fujimori, they prioritized considerations relating to candidates’ personal brands (El Comercio-Ipsos Apoyo 2021b). Over half of Castillo supporters (57%) favoured him because “he is new or represents change.” In other words, the perception that Castillo was a political outsider was the single most important factor driving his support. Other reasons voters supported Castillo also centered around personalistic criteria (i.e. personal brand), as opposed to programmatic or issue-based sensitivities. These considerations included ascriptive traits (10% liked him because of his region of origin). What the literature on personal brands calls “personality brand” constituted a very important set of considerations: no less than 63 percent of Castillo supporters favored him because “he understands people like me” or “he was honest” or “he was a good leader” or “he knows how to work in teams.” (Note that the sum of choices adds up to over 100 percent because respondents could choose more than one category). Keiko Fujimori supporters also prioritized an amalgam of personal brand

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considerations in their decision-making calculus. In contrast to Castillo supporters, the single most important factor cited by Fujimori supporters was issue-based (37 percent said they liked Fujimori’s proposals). Yet, there is coincidence in the overall prioritization voters gave to personal brand considerations: no less than 22 percent cited her gender (ascriptive trait) as a reason to support her, and 10 percent cited “newness” as a reason to support her. Factors centered around socialization experiences (“she has experience/she is well prepared” gathered 30 percent of answers) and a set of four personality brand considerations garnered a sum total of 52 percent of responses. Both candidates were thus assessed through the representational prism of their personal brands. Personality brand considerations stood out as the most important dimension of the three comprising personal brands, followed by ascriptive considerations, according to the responses elicited. This data is in line with the public polls cited earlier in this chapter associated with previous elections, which also pointed to the primacy of personal brand considerations over other more standard independent variables that political scientists tend to focus their analyses upon. 6.2

Examples of Personal Brands

The personal attributes of candidates comprise the chief source of political information for citizens in party non-systems. Personal brands delimit a political entrepreneurs’ potential “natural” electorate. Campaigning and political marketing can amplify a candidate’s support beyond his or her prototype voter but given Peru’s marked voting behavior divides (Lima and the coast versus the interior and south, etc.), only in limited fashion. (We allude here to sincere voting, not the strategic kind). To be successful in Peru’s partyless polity, politicians must sell an idea about themselves to voters: in effect, they must project a personal brand. The personal background, geographic provenance, and professional trajectory of a candidate are revealed as essential information in configuring his or her personal brand. For example, Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, an economist and technocrat hailing from Peru’s high society, is perceived as a competent and highly trustworthy pair of hands by many in sectors A and B (upper and middle-upper class). However, in the interior and impoverished parts of Peru, his elite (pituco) background and limeno provenance (alongside his US passport, given his dual citizenship) were always viewed very suspiciously; this explains why his utter inability to

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appeal to low-class voters was notorious and well-established. In an infamous well-publicized public remark made when he was prime minister in the Alejandro Toledo government, Kuczynski noted that “the idea of changing contracts and nationalizing firms is an idea typical of parts of the Andes where altitude does not allow oxygen to reach the brain, and that is fatal.” This racist attitude, not uncommonly witnessed amid Lima-based elite circles, exemplifies the rejection many Lima candidates of privileged background generate among broad swaths of the electorate. Pedro Pablo Kuczynski’s efforts, during both the 2011 and 2016 presidential campaigns, to amplify his electoral base beyond the scope of the urban middle and upper-classes, reflected the recognition that his personal brand elicited profound distrust and alienation among underprivileged voters. With that purpose in mind, Kuczynski attempted (albeit half-heartedly and intermittently) to refashion his personal brand into an antiestablishment political outsider (perhaps best summarized in his succinct “politics stinks” remark), even though the well-connected investment banker unambiguously belonged to the very core of the national political and economic establishment throughout his career (Sifuentes 2019). Because of Peru’s manifold and profound class, ethnic and territorial cleavages (capital/coast versus interior), candidates whose personal brand is appealing to Peruvians situated on one side of the divide are prone to alienate Peruvians who belong to the opposite side of the divide. It is rare to find personal brands that can straddle deep structural and ethnic divides. That was the case with the personal brand of an individual who became President of the Republic: Alejandro Toledo. Toledo was the eighth of sixteen siblings born into peasant parents in the Ancash province of Pallasca. Raised in a village without running water or electricity, his parents eventually decided to migrate to the coastal city of Chimbote, to exchange the subsistence living barely afforded by agriculture for the hope of joining the thriving fishing industry. As a brilliant student, Toledo won a scholarship to pursue his university studies in the United States, where he graduated with a degree in Economics from the University of San Francisco. Self-financing his studies by taking on a number of assorted jobs, he pursued and received a doctorate in Education in Human Resources at the prestigious Stanford University, where he had previously earned two bachelor degrees (CIDOB 2007). Thereafter, his professional career would be laden with positions as university professor, consultant, and international bureaucrat for prestigious organizations

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including the World Bank, the United Nations, the Inter-American Development Bank, and visiting stints at the University of Waseda in Tokyo, and Harvard’s International Institute of Development (St. John 2010). Toledo joined the political fray by running in the 1995 presidential elections atop an electoral vehicle called Pais Posible, at the height of Alberto Fujimori’s popularity, but his candidacy was barely noticed by the mass publics, languishing and earning a meager 3.2 percent of the nationwide vote. Toledo was well aware that his geographical provenance as well as his professional success could be leveraged for electoral advantage. When Toledo ran again in the 2000 presidential contest, he had learned from his previous electoral experience that the indigenous communities constituted an important fountain of votes that could be tapped with a considered appeals strategy, breaking with historical practice in Peruvian electioneering, which had ignored the indigenous. With this lesson in mind, notwithstanding the fact that he “did not self-identify as indigenous, [he] presented himself [in 2000 and 2001] as more ethnically proximate to the indigenous population than [his] main competitors, who represented the Lima elite” (Madrid 2011, 268). To be sure, this purposeful crafting of his personal brand could not have been effected in a vacuum. His ascriptive traits made that crafting plausible. Toledo’s laudable record of socializing experiences, as captured by his professional trajectory, granted his brand an interesting complexity. But what also distinguished his personal brand in 2000 from what his brand had been in the year 1995 rested on a crucial new feature: his sustained public efforts to oppose the Fujimori authoritarian regime during the late 1990s converted him, in the public imagery, into an authentic flagbearer of democracy at a political time when the recuperation of democratic governance and probity to public life stood as leading priorities for many Peruvians. Toledo’s new, reworked personal brand conveniently hid from view the empirical reality that he had been an implicit supporter of the regime he now opposed, promising Peruvians in the 1995 campaign that he would build “the second floor of Fujimorimo.” Much as Toledo had read the spirit of the times in 1995 as overwhelmingly pro-Fujimori, he correctly surmised by the late 1990s that public opinion had soured on the Fujimori regime, and there was an opportunity to ride that wave of discontent by recrafting his brand into a democracy brand. Toledo gained wide societal recognition from the time he lead in 2000 an ample popular movement of opposition to the announcement that Alberto Fujimori would seek a second re-election in the April 2000 general election. The

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economist denounced Fujimori’s attempt as unconstitutional, but decided to participate in the presidential contest nonetheless. When Fujimori won the first round of the 2000 in an election that fell short of free and fair electoral standards, Toledo reasonably refused to take part in the second round of the contest unless changes in electoral administration were made and the date of the election was delayed (Taylor 2005). When the Fujimori regime fell from power after the Vadivideos revealed that a systemic bribing scheme underpinned the regime, Toledo had already gained a nationwide political identity and enormous political capital as a democracy fighter. Toledo’s relentless diatribes and mobilization efforts against the Fujimorista regime’s corruption and anti-democratic practices shaped public perceptions: among the slate of candidates running in 2000 or 2001, no other personal brand embodied anti-Fujimorismo nearly as authentically as his. In addition, Toledo could leverage his multifaceted brand to capture both the rural indigenous vote as well as the urban middle-class vote of Lima and other cities. His campaign strategy was deliberate in the crafting and dissemination of a unique personal story and brand. With the aim of winning popular support, “he flaunted his Andean [highland] origins and made emphasis on having been a dweller of a marginal neighborhood in a provincial town—Chimbote—who by dint of his own efforts ascended in the social scale, in spite of all of the difficulties” (Cotler 2011, 543). He also courted the vote of professionals and entrepreneurs, “highlighting his academic experience and international trajectory. That is, Toledo situated himself at the center of the political spectrum, in the quest to represent divided and contraposed worlds” (ibid). The remarkable capacity of Toledo’s political personal brand to straddle these contraposed Peruvian worlds was manifested in the geographical as well as urban–rural distribution of his votes, more evenly spread out than is common for individual candidates, given the structural divisions of the national landscape. Let us delve into another example of a personal brand. George Forsyth led the 2021 presidential contest for many months, with large voter preference differentials over his rivals. What components of his personal brand made him a compelling candidate to voters? Forsyth is a former goalkeeper for Alianza Lima football club, with which he won four national championships. He entered politics as a councilman for Lima’s La Victoria municipality, and won La Victoria’s mayoralty contest with hefty margins in 2018. While he served as councilman for many years, he was concurrently a sportsman. That fact “kept sports central to his image.” (O’Boyle

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2020). His decade-long involvement in politics (since 2010) proceeded apace at such low level of governance that his past participation in politics did not tarnish his personal brand; he did not partake in the unedifying and corrupt national political limelight. Indeed, in the public imagery he stood out among the set choice presented to voters in 2021 as the embodiment of newness. As mayor, he built a reputation for a tough-oncrime approach and targeted criminal rings that extort informal vendors. Forsyth also developed a pro-business persona, not least in his approach to address the problem of economic informality, prevalent throughout Lima. These “socializing experiences” aspects of his personal brand made him appealing to law-and-order as well as pro-business oriented voters. The legitimacy of performance track record he was credited with as mayor of La Victoria, upgraded his political profile in the Lima political stage somewhat. What also gave him a national profile was his participation in high-viewership television shows, as well as his short highly public marriage to a Peruvian actress. By the time Forsyth decided to run for the presidency, he was a known figure to many Peruvians and perceived as a political outsider. Several of his ascriptive traits translated into political assets, including his sports background, youth, and good looks (said to appeal to female voters). Forsyth was very cognizant of the electoral value of such ascriptive traits. In his words: “my youth is a plus point. I have the energy and the drive, and I represent a fed-up generation that no longer believes in politicians. That mismocracia [‘sameocracy’], those old-school politicians, are afraid of us” (US News 2021). Another biographical characteristic of Forsyth’s, his privileged family background as the son of a former diplomat, was considered to have appeal among Lima middle and upper classes. The former goalkeeper studiously crafted and molded his personal brand, insofar as he had leeway—that is, beyond the inalterable ascriptive dimensions. In particular, he deliberately avoided the labels “left” and “right”; instead, his public utterances railed against the political establishment (often using the disparaging label mismocracia or “sameocracy”) and incessantly stressed the need to “renew Peruvian politics.” The former goalkeeper also sought to forge a personal brand that depicted a focused anti-graft crusader, in the knowledge that corruption had become the foremost citizenry concern in the wake of a string of presidential corruption scandals. Forsyth’s specific political stances on most issues, however, remained unknown well into his 2021 presidential run. The former goalkeeper did not see the need to develop a programmatic

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profile, instead he focused on projecting the image of someone who delivered results, which is how his stint as mayor had been packaged for public consumption. However, it is well to remember that personal brands are inherently divisive in the electorate. That is to say, the same traits that appealed to some voters, such as Forsyth’s youth and sportsman background, repelled others who viewed him as a political lightweight devoid of substance, unprepared for the highest political office in the land—or otherwise as an out-of-touch privileged limeno ignorant of the plight of peripheral and rural Peru. Let us briefly examine the personal brand of the winner of the 2021 presidential election, Pedro Castillo. A rural schoolteacher from Cajamarca, one of the poorest provinces in Peru, Castillo’s geographic provenance and socializing experiences situated him squarely on one side of the national structural estadonacional (state-nation) cleavage. Castillo, like other candidates, did not strictly need a political program to sell in order to convey essential political information to the electorate: his ascriptive traits and socializing experiences transmitted a political project, in the eyes of voters. Castillo’s personal brand represents Peruvians not incorporated into the state, and not symbolically incorporated into the nation. Peruvian historian Raul Asensio (2021, 46–48) describes Castillo’s personal brand as follows: “If Castillo has been able to do all this, it is because his role as a ‘true Peruvian’ is credible. His personal traits (teacher, rondero, peasant, provincial) allow for the coupling of the fatigue towards globalization and attendant nationalist reaction, with themes that are intrinsically Peruvian such the sense of abandonment on the part of rural and Andean populations. [Castillo] embodies a political figure very well known in Peruvian history: the provincial redeemer. It is an archetype profoundly inserted in Peruvian public imagery… It is an intellectual construct based on the idea that there exists a difference between the capital and the rest of the country that is not only socioeconomic, but also moral… [In this construct], provincial residents are hardworking and honest, proud of their identity and cultural heritage. [By contrast], Lima residents are better off due to their rapacious nature, not their hard work.” This description points to the benefits accruing to personal brands that, in public perception, authentically incarnate anti-limeno attitudes. While Castillo had been a local official affiliated with Alejandro Toledo’s Peru Posible outfit from 2002 to 2017, he was completely unknown on the national stage. One event granted him some temporary visibility. In 2017, he launched a nationwide teachers’ protest demanding

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higher salaries, in defiance of accords that the SUTEP teachers’ union had reached with the Ministry of Education, and effectively interrupting school classes for 75 days (Grompone and Jimenez 2021). When he was hastily invited to lead the Peru Libre electoral vehicle ticket, Pedro Castillo was still “unknown to the general public” (Doudtchitzky and Malaspina 2021). Castillo’s personal brand, in the dimension of “socializing experiences,” thus evinced the trait of newness that is endowed with such high a priori value in Peru’s electoral marketplace, a trait, particularly prized by belonging to the underprivileged side of the estadonacional cleavage, who do not enjoy the benefits of full citizenship or state services. The identity of the rural schoolteacher was “more provincial and peasant-based than strictly indigenous,” as Stefanoni (2021) affirms, which facilitated his ability “to conquer the southern vote as well as, in lesser proportion, the popular [lower class] vote in Lima.” In other words, the candidate’s geographical provenance demarcated which segments of voters he enjoyed traction with. Pedro Castillo’s long stint inside the ranks of Peru Posible constituted an objective biographical fact that, nevertheless, did not compute into his personal brand as voters perceived it. Castillo’s operative brand was that of a political outsider. While his many political opponents, evincing motivated reasoning, pigeonholed Castillo as a radical leftist, he can be best described as “an inorganic politician, who had not militated in any leftist party…nor had his [years-long affiliation with Peru Posible] left an imprint in him” (Vivas 2021b). A perusal of Castillo’s political trajectory reveals his personal skepticism toward party politics in general. Indeed, “his affiliation with [the Marxist] Peru Libre constituted a formality to enable him to run for office” (Vivas 2021b). While the vague economic reforms he advocated (nationalization of industry) fit into a left-wing agenda, on social issues his views were aligned with very conservative positions. The more politically relevant quality of his campaign discourse is that it comported with the key ascriptive traits and socializing experiences dimensions that make up his personal brand: the discourse was anti-system, advocating a radical departure from the status quo, understood as the inherited economic model and the inherited institutional infrastructure. Lacking in concrete policy measures or concrete institutional reforms, Castillo’s campaign rhetoric promoted rupture, much like his personal biography and ascriptive traits also conveyed the message of rupture—in ways more powerful than the personal brands of his political opponents.

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Personal brands can transmit political information in subtle but effective ways. The following description provides a revealing example. It outlines the personal brand of Gaston Acurio, Peru’s best-known chef and at one point floated as a potential presidential candidate: Why do analysts perceive that Acurio would be the ideal centrist candidate? It is not because he is known to have an ideas-based platform to govern the country. It is because of a sum of personal factors that can be translated into ideological terms. In economic terms, he is a successful businessman and entrepreneur, which distances him from the Left. But his business practices are endowed with a sense of patriotism and symbols of national community, something absent in the Peruvian Right. In institutional terms, he is perceived to be democratic because his last name is tied to the tradition of Accion Popular. While he is limeno, he comes from Cuzco, which ties him to Andean Peru…. His centrist credentials come very secondarily from his program or political activities. In the absence of parties, certain characteristics of the individual are translated into ideological terms, and other traits are not even translated but read directly: does he have ties to the provinces or is he eminently from Lima? In sum, without parties, the best message is the messenger. (Vergara 2015)

This nuanced description highlights at least two potential features of personal brands. The first is that brands can be endlessly multidimensional, in that the medley of personality, socializing experiences and ascriptive traits can configure a truly complex informational referent, not amenable to simplification. Secondly, personal brands can straddle marked societal divides, such that they can be concurrently appealing, within limits, to citizens on each side of such divides—whether regional, classbased, economic, ethnic, etc. Nevertheless, divide-straddling personal brands are not empirically common. 6.3

Personal Brand Dilution: Causal Factors

Personal brands can, much like party brands, be diluted. Indeed, the dilution of personal brands has inexorably doomed many electoral vehicles and person-dependent Peruvian electoral vehicles to political marginalization or disappearance. The political identities that are conveyed to mass publics are not given or static; instead, they are actively constructed, molded, and marketed by political entrepreneurs and politicians with

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longer careers. Personal brands are inherently vulnerable, and almost inexorably prone to dilution. We here outline four distinct causal factors that dilute a personal brand, either in isolation or in conjunction: personal corruption, incongruencies between the informational content of a brand and subsequent revelations (that contravene it); the length of time a politician has been a nationally recognized figure; and incumbency, that is, whether a politician has held a governmental position of national relevance (see Table 10). A first source of brand dilution is personal involvement in corruption. It is important to note that the prevalence of political scandals is not tantamount to the level of corruption (Jimenez Sanchez 1994). The manner and frequency with which the mass media ecosystem investigates, airs, and disseminates high-level political corruption, shapes corruption’s political repercussions and fallout—independently of whether corruption levels increase or not. The professionalization of journalism in Latin America, abetted by the Third Wave of political democratization, helped bring to light high-level political corruption to the public as never before (PérezLiñán 2007, chap 4). Political malfeasance became more exposed with the rise of investigative journalism (Waisbord 1996). In Peru, it was an independent mass media outlet’s publication of official corruption (the Vladivideos), namely canal N, which triggered the fall of the Alberto Fujimori regime (Cameron 2006). The rise of the middle class is known to lower societal tolerance toward political corruption, enhancing social and electoral (vertical) accountability. Political science research demonstrates Table 10 Causes of personal brand dilution Causes of brand dilution

Personal Corruption

Informational incongruencies

Length of time in political limelight

Incumbency

Examples of personal brand dilution

Alejandro Toledo Alan Garcia Ollanta Humala Pedro P Kuczynski Keiko Fujimori Kenji Fujimori

Cesar Acuna

Jaime Guzman Daniel Urresti

Susana Villaran Former Presidents

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that partisanship and clientelism are two critical factors that significantly blunt or reduce the social and electoral accountability associated with political corruption (Manzetti and Wilson 2007). Because partisanship and party-based traditional clientelism are marginal in Peru, miscreants and corrupt politicians confront the political consequences of their personal malfeasance nakedly, without the benefit of elite-citizen linkages that lower electoral accountability for corruption scandals. Indeed, the political effects of publicized corruption are often devastating and careerending for Peruvian politicians. Not coincidentally, the few figures who have partially and temporarily evaded corruption-related political repercussions, such as Alan Garcia and Keiko Fujimori, benefited from some measure of partisanship to cushion their political fall from grace. Peruvian voters have regularly punished and shunned a long list of former presidents, regional governors, mayors, and parliamentarians who have been personally implicated in corruption schemes. They include all former presidents in the post-2001 democratic era (except caretaker Presidents Valentin Paniagua and Francisco Sagasti), as well as former Lima mayors Luis Castaneda and Susana Villaran. Alan Garcia, suffered a steady dilution of his personal brand as mounting evidence of corruption during his second government (2006–2011) surfaced (Ioris 2016), rendering his brand an enormous electoral liability by the time of the 2016 election. Keiko Fujimori, who spent months in preventive prison accused of illicit party financing and other serious charges (Llanos 2020), also saw her personal brand damaged. The consequences thereof were manifested in a marked increase in her negative political identity levels (anti-voto or the percentage of citizens who rejected her) and an attendant decline in her electoral prowess. Nevertheless, the sociocultural brand Fujimorismo enjoys granted Keiko Fujimori a core base of supporters not available to most political figures in Peru. There has been no more common causal factor behind personal brand dilution in Peru’s post-2001 democratic era than the unveiling of corruption scandals, in most cases supported with documentary evidence. A second factor that can trigger brand dilution relates to informational incongruencies; that is, the surfacing of public evidence that contravenes the image and narrative political entrepreneurs have constructed to fashion their personal brand. Uncovered falsehoods can reveal a personal brand to be inauthentic. Inconvenient public revelations pertaining to the private life of politicians can also contribute to personal brand dilution, particularly if they have a bearing on, and contradict, important

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aspects of the constructed personal brand. Publicized actions and political decisions can contravene the (partly subjective) public identity of a political entrepreneur in such a way that they can deconstruct a previously deeply embedded personal brand in the collective imagery. Because Peruvian electoral vehicles rely so overwhelmingly for their electoral fate on the personal brand of their leaders and lack a reservoir of loyal voters, damaging personal information about politicians carry momentous electoral consequences, much greater than in more institutionalized party system settings. Cesar Acuna’s political trajectory provides a revealing example of personal brand dilution caused by revealed informational incongruencies. Acuna made a splash in national politics by defeating APRA in its historical northern electoral bastion when he won the mayoralty of Trujillo and later was elected governor of La Libertad region. Born into poverty as part of a family of twelve siblings, Acuna pursued education as a means of advancement, (purportedly) received graduate degrees from reputable institutions in Colombia and Spain, and proceeded to build a consortium of private universities that made him very wealthy. Acuna crafted a well-rehearsed image in the public eye that depicted him as a self-made man who personified the limitless possibilities for social and economic advancement that can come through hard work (Melendez and Pachon 2016, 55–59). He also projected the image of an entrepreneur who sought to extend educational opportunities to all Peruvians. Historian Antonio Zapata (2016, 130–31), further adds to this profile, painting the outlines of the elements that configure the businessman’s personal brand: Cesar Acuna combines two elements that make him capable of winning the [2016] election: he is a consummate patron [of a large clientelistic network] and he is contestatory; he comes from the provincial world and attacks the capital [Lima]. He does not belong to the establishment but rather, he has come to challenge it. It is there that his capacity to win resides. That image is reinforced because the candidate is the message. He need not talk. All that is needed is that voters see him and that they identify with his career…. He can win precisely because his rhetoric is not fluid and that [deficiency] has been no obstacle to his personal success. Finally, there is one trait that links Acuna to Alberto Fujimori. Both came from the university environment and both had a deep connection to the world of informality. Once they entered politics, they presented themselves to citizens as flag bearers of individual progress via tertiary education (my translation).

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Cesar Acuna’s valuable personal brand was irretrievably shattered when information surfaced showing that he extensively plagiarized his master’s and doctoral theses, and had published a book under his name (on education reform) he had in fact not written. Consequently, his personal brand, encapsulating an auto-didact who had worked hard and climbed the educational ladder despite the odds, was revealed as a fraud (El Comercio 2016b). The consortium of universities he owns and operates provided him with mobilizing structures and clientelistic networks around which to build a mass of captive voters at the local and regional levels (Barrenechea 2014). However, at the national level, whatever political appeal he enjoyed rested on his personal brand. He hired the services of famed Brazilian electoral strategist Luis Favre, but the scandal proved too damaging to Acuna’s personal brand to save the businessman’s 2016 candidacy (thereafter, Favre departed his campaign). Acuna’s polling figures plummeted as a result, ending his hope of entering the second round and battling for the presidency. While Acuna possessed political assets that many other candidates lacked, chiefly a lot of money as well as tertiary education mobilizing structures, the damage to his personal brand proved to be decisive and lasting in shaping his electoral viability in nationwide elections after the damaging information surfaced. Throughout the 2021 presidential campaign, he never emerged as a seemingly viable contender, on account of his lackluster polling prowess. His personal brand had been irreparably diluted by informational incongruencies that gave the lie to the brand. A third element responsible for brand dilution is simply the length of time a leader has spent in the public limelight. Ceteris paribus, the longer the time an individual partakes in the national political public sphere, the more he or she is associated in public perceptions with a discredited political system. The newness element of a personal brand, a significant political asset in negative legitimacy environments, wears off in rough proportion to the length of time that an individual has occupied the front pages of national newspapers, the high-viewership timeframes of national TV channels, and the screens of internet-based social networks. The logic here is straightforward: newness is an inherently perishable political commodity. It is well to note that newness need not be the exclusive prerogative of bona fide political outsiders. Political figures who are known only regionally or locally can be perceived as rather new in the eyes of a national electorate at large, where that figure is unfamiliar. Thus, little-known local or regional politicians can make the jump to

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national politics endowed with political capital derived from newness, the broad perception that they are new to the arena of politics. As is true of other facets of personal brands, as regards newness subjective (or candidate-crafted) public perceptions supersede factual (but unknown) realities in shaping electoral behavior. Julio Guzman’s political travails provide a telling example of how the erosion of newness damages a political entrepreneur in a negative legitimacy environment. Guzman carefully sought to cultivate an image as a nonideological, results-oriented politico that stood apart from the typical cohort of mediocre politicians comprising Peru’s unedifying political fauna. But his abundant presence in the public limelight from the time of his nearly successful 2016 presidential run as well as his anointed position as one of the favorites to win in 2021, gave enough incentives and time for his opponents and the media to scrutinize and damage his personal brand. Events of his personal life came under scrutiny, including alleged extramarital affairs, and his fleeing from a burning hotel room instead of helping to save lives, presumably putting into question his leadership qualities. To fend off these and other charges, he was forced to go into damage control and multiply his presence in mass media. In addition, his Partido Morado came to hold the caretaker presidency with Sagasti and the responsibilities and high publicity that come with the office. The upshot is that by the time the 2021 campaign began, Guzman could not credibly sell himself, or be publicly perceived, as an appealing newcomer, untainted by the dirty arena of Peruvian politics. Tellingly, Guzman attempted to separate himself from the presidency, in a last ditch and fruitless attempt to regain his former newcomer appeal and not be weighed down by the burdens of incumbency. But despite his best efforts, newness was no longer part of Guzman’s personal brand, helping to doom his 2021 presidential hopes. A fourth factor that dilutes politicians’ personal brand is incumbency. Presidential office-holders see their external appeal dramatically reduced not long after entering the Palacio de Pizarro. Legitimacy of performance proves elusive for incumbent national chief executives as well as incumbents at lower levels of government (regional governors, city and district mayors, etc.). The multiple deficiencies constitutive of the Peruvian state apparatus, its puny tax intake depriving it of adequate revenues to deliver public services adequately, and the absence of a statewide civil service (notwithstanding some partial, ad hoc reforms under the Humala administration), all conspire to produce serial lackluster results in crucial areas of public policy, administration after administration (Dargent

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2012). Mass publics blame incumbentsfor malperformance, particularly in a context where officeholders are deprived of elements that can blunt blame-attribution, chiefly partisanship. While serial malperformance across many issue-areas is largely structural in origin, limiting the room for political agency that advances public-regarding causes, incumbents bear the brunt of public dissatisfaction, nonetheless. Peruvian citizens have found incumbent Presidents of the Republic to have underdelivered and fallen well short of their promises. After serving only a few months as president, Alejandro Toledo, Alan Garcia, Ollanta Humala, and Pedro Pablo Kuczynski had seriously diluted their personal brands. It is important to note that the reputational capital accruing to these figures plummeted years before news broke out about their personal implication in the Odebrecht corruption scandal, which further diluted their personal brands. Ceteris paribus, a feature of party non-systems that militates against good incumbent performance is, of course, the likelihood that neophytes without political or administrative experience come to occupy the presidential office. The amateurish nature of many incumbents inexorably translates into decisions that damage governability and good public policy results. Not least, amateurish presidents are more likely to appoint inexperienced figures without technical expertise to cabinet portfolios, amplifying the skill deficits and incompetence of new governments. They are also less likely to appoint much-needed “technopols” (Dominguez 1997), which combine technical acumen and a political skillset that can improve governmental communication vis-a-vis social agents as well as shepherd and accrue political support for particular pieces of legislation, however temporarily. Ceteris paribus, we can expect amateurish chief executives, deprived of natural allies in the political world or in “the establishment” and insecure in their power to prioritize loyalty over competence. Besides the stock of personal qualities and deficiencies of particular politicians, which contribute to undistinguished records in public office, there are structural reasons why incumbency renders brands vulnerable to dilution. The personal and political shortcomings of officeholders become magnified under the daily, relentless public scrutiny that befalls presidents. The incongruous alliances and tainted arrangements that are part of the day-to-day management of power often contravene constructed anti-political, antiestablishment narratives. Presidents, in a minority position in congress, are incentivized to pursue open or ghost alliances with politicians and electoral vehicles who are detested by voters who catapulted incumbents to power. Crucially, incumbency also rapidly

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corrodes the newness quality of personal brands. Once officeholders operate in the unprincipled, transactional Peruvian political system, no longer can citizens project onto their personal brands the same valencetype and representational qualities they once did. Once presidents partake in the political practices and norms of a discredited political system, many erstwhile supporters part ways with the belief that the incumbent will be a change agent. In fact, “incumbency disadvantage” is part and parcel of Peruvian politics, for reasons related to deficits in stateness and extreme party universe under-institutionalization (see Chapter 6), both of which militate against the political success of officeholders. Had elected presidents in post-2001 Peru been able to stand for consecutive reelection (constitutionally forbidden), they would not have been electorally competitive, on account of their approval ratings upon exiting the Casa de Pizarro presidential palace. Public knowledge about blatant violations of electoral mandates, meandering and lackluster leadership records, the multiplication of widely publicized personal foibles, opportunistic political alliances and horse-trading, and other damaging legacies, all weigh heavily on their personal brands of incumbents. When attempting to resurrect their political careers, chief executives failed wretchedly—as shown by the lackluster post-presidency electoral performances of Alejandro Toledo, Alan Garcia (post-2011), and Ollanta Humala. In an analogous development, the personal brand of Keiko Fujimori suffered enormous dilution in no small measure because of her mismanagement and abuse of congressional power, as manifested in the first round of the 2021 elections, where Fujimorismo obtained a much lower percentage of the vote in comparison to 2011 and 2016. The Keiko and Fujimorista brands were diluted by both incumbency (its 2016–2020 control of Congress) and corruption. 6.4

Personal Brands and the Mass Media Ecosystem

The evolution and fate of personal brands are inexorably shaped by national mass media ecosystems. Features of a media system that are relevant for shaping personal brands include electoral legislation governing candidates’ access to media, the public service versus the commercial nature of media, the ideological or partisan leanings of specific mass media outlets, or the degree to which mass communication outlets provide negative coverage devoted to politicians (Barisione 2009, 478). The latter element, for example, can contribute or accentuate a polity’s negative legitimacy environment. The degree of concentration of the mass media

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ecosystem—that is the degree to which a few outlets concentrate most of the national viewership and readership—shapes the relative power of mass media business conglomerates to shape public opinion so as to safeguard big business’s material interests and ideological preferences. One of the major legacies of the Alberto Fujimori regime (1990–2000) was the increase in the political importance of mass communications, in particular television (Sandford and Panfichi 1996, 48). The Fujimori authoritarian regime captured much of the print and TV media, a task executed by the shadowy head of the SIN (national intelligence), Fujimori right-hand man Vladimiro Montesinos (Conaghan 2005, chap. 7). Another consequence of the Fujimorato was a significant decline in the readership of more professional print outlets (chiefly El Comercio and La Republica dailies, neither of which fell in line with the regime). The chicha or sensationalist press flourished during the Fujimorato and continues to thrive in the post-2001 period (Fowks 2015). The prominence of commercial media in Peru, as opposed to public service media, means that the profit motive is particularly prominent in its agenda-setting powers for the industry as a whole, thus shaping which personal brands receive more coverage. Commercial media tends “to cover politics in the ways and to the extent that it is good business to do so” (Swanson 1997, 1269) thus focusing on more communicative leaders and those who “earn” the spotlight by dint of their notorious or controversial acts and public declarations. It stands to reason that Peru’s highly commercial, low-quality media ecosystem does little to foster programmatic-based politics, as it fosters the individualization of political competition, privileges sensationalist “news” that generate greater audiences and thus profits and, in prioritizing scandal (real or contrived), actively contributes to the disrepute of personal brands, electoral vehicles and democratic political institutions writ large. Given the fecklessness of electoral vehicles in Peru, “media coverage ends up focusing on the actors while contributing to the personalization of politics” (Protzel, 2014, 93). Protzel (2014) characterizes the media landscape in Peru as defined by two key features: the predominance of political sensationalism, and the growing economic power of the strongest media organizations “that use their capacity to show images and give (or deny) voice to politicians” (Protzel 2014, 92). The national Peruvian mass media environment is decidedly heavily skewed—as most in the region—towards conservative and “establishment” figures, particularly those aligned with neoliberal

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economic policy continuity. One important strategy to further that political and economic agenda is to keep tarnishing information about “status quo” candidates and political entrepreneurs off the newspaper pages altogether, even when it is information of high political and journalistic relevance. In other words, the bias is evidenced not only in how information is framed, but also in what insider information is covered and what is purposely ignored, depending on which candidates are implicated. Political figures with leftist agendas or contestatory messages such as Ollanta Humala, Veronika Mendoza, or Pedro Castillo, among others, have received overwhelmingly negative coverage from Lima-based TV channels and newspapers. In the same vein, Lima-based national mass media outlets have framed political competition in ways that unambiguously favored Keiko Fujimori when, in presidential races, she faced second-round political opponents critical of the neoliberal economic model, as occurred in 2011 and 2021 (Transparencia 2011). These biases are measurably in evidence in the print, TV and radio mass media ecosystems (Boas 2013, 67). Revealingly, during the second round of the 2016 presidential campaign, when Keiko Fujimori faced a second-round rival that also displayed pro-business, neoliberal credentials (Pedro Pablo Kuczynski) the Lima-centered mass media did not evince skewed coverage. All in all, the Lima-based conservative mass media ecosystem has consistently shown that, when forced to choose, it prioritizes economic neoliberal continuity over democratic governance and human rights—indeed a reflection of the business community’s vital interests. The degree to which this reporting bias has shaped Peruvian public opinion and the public’s assessment of different personal brands is, of course, an empirical question. However, the influence of Lima-based mass media outlets on public opinion is considered to be limited in the peripheral and interior provinces where contestatory candidates (i.e. those who oppose the economic policy status quo and extant institutional infrastructure such as the 1993 Constitution) draw most of their support, according to noted public opinion expert Alfredo Torres (2010). This territorially segmented media influence can therefore be expected to blunt—but not eliminate—the nationwide electoral effect of the communication ecosystem bias in favor of status quo and free-market economy politicians. Another factor attenuating the influence of the national mass media ecosystem on personal brand perceptions and electoral preferences is the media’s low credibility among the mass publics. For instance, in the 2021 presidential election an IEP poll

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revealed that no less than 78 percent of voters believed that communication outlets favored the candidacy of Keiko Fujimori (La Republica 2021), evidence that the bulk of the electorate was cognizant of the direction of the national media’s built-in political bias.

7

A New Concept: Negative Legitimacy Environments

Party non-systems are the (chaotic) political expression of a particular mass attitudinal setting—on the demand side. Because mass attitudes shape the incentive system within which politicians (old and new) operate, they inevitably envelop national political logics. We here seek to briefly engage in concept formation so that we can succinctly capture a political stage defined by profoundly antipolitical and nonpartisan attitudinal traits. We have previously ascertained that Peru conforms to a textbook case of what the literature calls a complex political environment, on account of its enormous opacity and changeability. A more complete picture of any political stage can be drawn by looking at a central dynamic that underlies how politicians and citizens relate to one another: legitimacy. “Legitimacy,” according to Seymour Martin Lipset (1960), “involves the capacity of a political system to engender and maintain the belief that existing political institutions are the most appropriate or proper ones for the society.” Probably due to the complexity inherent to the conceptualization and measurement of what Samuel Huntington called “a mushy concept,” comparativists have not given legitimacy the analytical attention it deserves. As Gilley (2009, 201) writes, “when compared to other factors that influence the operation of politics, legitimacy stands out as particularly important, perhaps the greatest omitted variable in contemporary political research.” This omission has indubitably produced blind spots in our comparative analyses of democracies, which differ in system and institutional legitimacy levels. We here thus seek to give pride of place to this often omitted variable. But it is not the concept of legitimacy per se that we seek to tap into, but a variant of it. The analytical value of political concepts can vary across polities. Concepts and analytical categories sometimes do not travel well. In such cases, it behooves the analyst to move from a general to a contextual definition (Gerring 2001, 85– 86) that can enhance a concept’s validity and analytic utility. We here maintain that in some polities the keystone political currency acting as a medium of exchange and (ephemeral) store of value between citizens and

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politicians is not standard legitimacy per se, but rather, negative legitimacy. We define “negative legitimacy,” following and adapting Samuel Huntington’s definition (1991, 49), as political support “deriving from the failures” attributed to the extant politico-economic regime and, we here add, the failures of its perceived enforcers or representatives (electoral vehicles and politicians). It follows that negative legitimacy entails political support emanating from “apparent differences from” (to quote Huntington again) institutional and individual actors who are perceived to embody the political status quo. More broadly, negative legitimacy can be defined as political capital accrued on the basis of what a politician is perceived not to be, or otherwise political support accrued because a politician is perceived to be the opposite of a rejected prominent referent. In other words, in ascertaining what it is that provides legitimation in some national settings where political alienation is predominant, we can gain analytical leverage by describing the political stage (wherein politician–citizen interactions happen) in terms other than what is standard in political analysis. That is to say, we should contextualize the concept of legitimacy for such low trust norm settings. To be sure, standard political legitimacy and negative legitimacy coexist everywhere, but in national settings where political trust is exceedingly low and political allegiances practically absent, negative legitimacy stands as a comparatively more influential factor in the operation of politics. Where deep-seated, extraordinary illegitimacy afflicts all political institutions and becomes a permanent feature of the political landscape, the operative currency of the political game is negative legitimacy. Legitimacy, of course, is a latent variable in that it cannot be measured directly. There exist macro, micro, and meso approaches to measuring legitimacy (Weatherford 1992). The macro or system-level perspective takes the objective features of a structure whose legitimacy is being measured as the relevant indicator. We instead proceed here on the basis of the micro or individuallevel perspective that relies on referees’ (citizens) reported opinions about parties, electoral vehicles, and politicians—i.e. the objects being judged. Legitimacy can also be measured by including group behaviors, that is, public actions by referees (citizens, voters) that express a judgment about the conferee (whether the state, political parties, or politicians). We conceptualize a negative legitimacy political environment (NLE) as a mass attitudinal setting wherein three conditions are met: an electorate comprised of a supermajority of floating voters or non-partisans (over

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two-thirds of the electorate); the prevalence of negative political identities (manifested in negative partisanship or negative personal brands); and finally, a public opinion environs that, ceteris paribus, favors newcomers and political outsiders (see Fig. 2). A negative personal brand is here defined as one that elicits more rejection than approval among the voting public. It is operationalized as follows: the proportion of voters who would never vote for, or are undisposed toward a candidate, exceeds by at least 10 percentage points the proportion of who are predisposed, or at least open, to vote for him or her. Negative brands naturally limit the electoral growth potential of politicians; however, in a setting where all seasoned politicians and new political entrepreneurs carry the burden of a negative political identity, it is the absolute scope of the aversion level elicited and the size of the gap between positive and negative evaluations that is of import—i.e. determinative of a candidate’s electoral ceiling. Ceteris paribus, the electoral advantage accruing to political newcomers in negative legitimacy environments stems in part from the fact that their negative identities are of lower magnitude than the negative identities burdening more seasoned politicians. In NLEs, newcomers are not NEGATIVE

LEGITIMACY

ENVIRONMENT NEGATIVE POLITICAL IDENTITIES

ELECTORATE OF NONPARTISANS (Supermajories)

PREFERENCE FOR NEWCOMERS AND POLITICAL OUTSIDERS

DETERMINANTS OF REGIME LEGITIMACY: 1. HISTORICAL LEGACIES, 2. REGIME POLITICAL PERFORMANCE 3. PROCEDURES (PARTICIPATION & REPRESENTATION)

Fig. 2 Components of a negative legitimacy environment and determinants of regime legitimacy

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tainted by association with a discredited political ecosystem in the eyes of mass publics. Of course, some segment of voters shall always associate newness with political risk and thus eschew political options that embody newness. In the aggregate, however, NLE electorates consider the advantages of newness to outweigh the presumed risks posed by personal brands exhibiting this quality. While analytically distinct, the three elements here conceptualized to comprise a negative legitimacy environment share elective affinities, such that empirically they are likely to be found together in a polity— particularly if the individual elements display outlier, extreme values (i.e. extremely high level of negative identities, or very large majorities of floating voters, or an outsized public preference for political outsiders). For example, a normative preference for newcomers and outsiders should be expected amid electorates that overwhelmingly bestow negative political identities upon politicians, insofar as voters reject “politics as usual” and exhibit aversion toward those political parties/electoral vehicles and politicians with past executive or legislative responsibilities. Mass publics shall deem these politicos and electoral vehicles responsible for the political status quo. An important distinction bears mentioning. Individual voters who hold a given anti-partisan or negative political identity cannot a priori be theorized to favor outsiders. The association here posited between negative political identities and a preference for outsiders is one that should obtain, on average, for the electorate as a whole—not for individual voters or groups of voters, lest we commit ecological fallacy. There are segments of voters that will, of course, be attitudinally inclined to reject anti-establishment, outsider-type candidates while concurrently devoid of any (negative or positive) political identity or partisanship. It is national electorates characterized by a predominance of citizens who harbor one or (usually) several concurrent negative political identities, while concurrently nonpartisan in composition, that should display a high average preference for newness (notwithstanding normal preference variance within the electorate). Citizenries that measurably perceive all politicians in a negative light can be expected to be attracted to political outsiders and newcomers with no previous political trajectory—relative to other national electorates. The reasons underlying the societal rejection of politicians and attraction to political outsiders may, of course, differ across countries but some common causes are well documented.

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For example, there is empirical support ascertaining that when the political class is tainted by corruption scandals or held responsible for serial political and economic malperformance, support for political outsiders grows (Carreras 2017; Barr 2017). Similarly, we can theorize that a national electorate overwhelmingly comprised of floating voters should, a priori, reveal the widespread presence of negative political identities. The straightforward logic here is that floating voters are unmoored from political parties/vehicles because they have lost, or never developed, faith in the extant political ecosystem and the electoral vehicles and politicians that populate it. There is empirical evidence pointing to a robust correlation between levels of nonpartisanship and the prevalence of anti-partisanship. Samuels and Zucco’s (2018, 140–159) perusal of several democracies reveals that, on average, anti-partisans “add up to about a third of those [citizens] who qualify as non-partisans” (Samuels and Zucco 2018, 157). The same ratio obtains in the case of Brazil. The implication is that levels of anti-partisans and non-partisans co-vary. Therefore, a polity that displays a high level of non-partisans shall also display a high level of anti-partisans, relative to other countries. The stability of this correlation across countries suggests that they may share attitudinal micro-foundations—additionally, these variables may well influence one another. In national contexts where antipolitical attitudinal predispositions are most pronounced, higher absolute levels of both non-partisans and anti-partisans can be expected to obtain. In summation, there are intuitive theoretical reasons—and emerging empirical evidence—to expect the three variables configuring a NLE to cluster, thus providing the negative legitimacy environment concept with plausible internal coherence. To reiterate the formulation previously offered, a negative legitimate environment obtains where there are supermajorities (over two-thirds) of non-partisans in the electorate, where negative political identities are empirically much more prevalent than positive identities, and additionally, where a citizenry places a priori high value upon newness and is thus inclined to favor political outsiders and newcomers over the known cohort of politicians. What causal factors underpin negative legitimacy environments? Only some general indications can be offered here, derived from the literature on system legitimacy. Along with Hoogue (2020, 360), we here hypothesize that, “on average, partisanship will be associated with a more positive feeling toward the political system and democracy.” The direction of causality between these variables is probably two-way. The

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first direction of causality is perhaps more intuitive: citizenries alienated from the political system shall be less inclined to anchor their loyalties upon any given political party. The reverse causation process is also operative. Because independent or free-floating voters are deprived of the linkage function of political parties, they are not able to promote their interests and values in the partisan arena and thus do not feel that they are stakeholders in the extant political system. In a study examining 15 democracies, Anderson and Paskeviciute (2009) find that “party identifiers have more positive attitudes towards their political regime than unaligned citizens.” Other studies reach convergent conclusions, showing that citizens who identify as “independents” display low levels of political trust (Hoogue and Oser 2017). The existing literature on western democracies supports the “general conclusion that partisans are indeed characterized by higher levels of diffuse support for the political system” (Hoogue 2020, 363). There are theoretical and empirical reasons, then, to believe that negative legitimacy environments, as here defined, are associated with very low levels of system legitimacy (or regime legitimacy). The panoply of factors that drive system legitimacy is decidedly complex (for good overviews see: Diamond 1999, 192–217; Booth and Seligson, 2009, 1–37), including historical legacies (repressiveness or success of previous authoritarian regimes, history of democracy), features of the current regime (political and economic performance and their impact upon trust in political institutions), characteristics of party politics (in particular, party system institutionalization), and the level of socioeconomic development (at lower levels, a more instrumental or less procedural view of democracy prevails). At the empirical level, the identification of the factors that create or erode political legitimacy remains a source of scholarly debate, in what is still an underdeveloped subfield of study (for Latin America, see: Booth and Seligson 2009). For some scholars, policy performance takes pride of place as the key causal factor underpinning system legitimacy; others emphasize the processes by which policies are determined and the attendant level of public efficacy (a sense of influence over the course of politics). The major works on regime legitimacy adopt a performance-based lens, granting primacy to the quality of governance to account for variation on the dependent variable (Easton 1975; Norris 1999). According to these accounts, the evolution of regime legitimacy over time can only be explained on the basis of policy outcomes, not policymaking processes. For example, Rothstein (2009, 313) writes that “electoral democracy is highly overrated

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when it comes to creating legitimacy,” instead, “legitimacy is created maintained and destroyed not by the input but by the output side of the political system.” In a book-length study of Chile and Venezuela, Rhodes-Purdy (2017) reaches a very different conclusion. Participatory opportunities are found in his study to be “a key source of regime support” and explain why the Chavez regime maintained levels of regime legitimacy higher than would be expected given its policy performance. In the same vein, the Chilean non-participatory, technocracy-driven regime achieved lower levels of system legitimacy than would be expected from its (good) policy performance. Existing empirical evidence suggests that both procedural elements and regime outcomes are relevant. The particular mix of factors that influence regime legitimacy is bound to change across time and space, as Larry Diamond (1999, chap. 5) reminds us. Really Existing Democracies (REDs) differ in the degree to which the input dimension of the political system (procedures) influences regime legitimacy vis-a-vis the output dimension (policy performance). Ceteris paribus, in nation-states where basic economic and security needs are insufficiently provided, and in consequence large swaths of national citizenries showcase an “instrumental” or results-oriented view of democracy (a “survival” value system, to use Ronald Inglehart’s terminology), we should expect output-originating legitimacy to carry greater weight in influencing regime legitimacy. Latin American publics, on balance, exhibit a rather results-oriented view of democracy, as a famous UNDP (2004) Report documented. “In parts of Latin America,” wrote Larry Diamond (1999, 200) two decades ago, “legitimacy has not yet firmly taken root, and support for democracy appears much more conditional on assessments of how the regime is performing.” For most of the region, this remains true in the present day. Instrumental democrats, as opposed to substantive democrats, support democracy only insofar as it delivers results, and are ready to countenance nondemocratic regimes as long as their performance is better. If we regard, in a general sense, negative legitimacy environments as the inverse mirror of high political legitimacy settings, the empirically-based legitimacy literature can be probed for clues about plausible general causal drivers (or otherwise correlates) of NLEs. Following Gilley’s (2006) sophisticated conceptualization of legitimacy (incorporating mass attitudinal and behavioral components), Power and Cyr (2009) find the following variable clusters to empirically correlate with system legitimacy across 18 Latin American countries: democratic tradition (especially the totality of democratic experience);

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indicators of accountability and transparency (absence of corruption, rule of law); institutional trust (trust in parties and Congress); political representation (in the dimension of party system institutionalization); and socioeconomic modernization (especially GDP per capita). Tellingly, recent economic growth performance is found to be unrelated to system legitimacy. Pending future empirical studies that can qualify or modify some of these empirical findings, we can broadly expect negative legitimacy environments to be rooted in poorer, high-corruption, rule-of-law deficient countries, as well as in those with scant democratic histories and low levels of institutional trust. We can also infer from the Power and Cyr study that NLEs find congenial terrain amidst inchoate party universes and, especially amidst the most severely under-institutionalized, namely party non-systems. This last variable is a process-centered one, pointing to the relevance of the input side of the political system for regime legitimacy. Effective representation and channels of political participation are deemed to be important determinants of diffuse (system) legitimacy. Where does the case study of Peru fit within this legitimacy cross-country landscape? Bruce Gilley’s multidimensional legitimacy scores placed Peru 65th out of a sample of 72 countries in system legitimacy (Gilley 2006, Table 3). Using alternative measures of legitimacy, while in keeping with Gilley’s theoretical conceptualization of regime legitimacy, Power and Cyr’s (2009, 259) empirical results place Peru among the countries with the lowest levels of system legitimacy in Latin America (fourth lowest). In short, diffuse or system legitimacy in Peru is low even by Latin American standards. Inasmuch as corruption perception, party system institutionalization, and institutional trust indicators have empirically moved in the wrong direction during the past decade, it can be surmised that regime legitimacy in Peru declined during the 2010s. The data bears out this expectation. The 2018/19 LAPOP Peru country study recorded the “lowest level of support for [Peruvian] democracy since we measure this indicator,” registering at 49.3 percent in 2019, down from 52.7 percent in 2017, 58.6 percent in 2014, 59.7 percent in 2012, and 62.8 percent in 2008. Comporting with the general legitimacy literature, this decline in diffuse support correlates with the growing proportion of floating voters amid Peru’s electorate in recent years. Recent data from LAPOP surveys underscore a marked instrumental or results-oriented view of democracy among the Peruvian citizenry. Whereas two-thirds (65 percent) of Peruvians agree that “democracy is better than any other form

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of government”—albeit only 21.7 percent strongly agree—most respondents are willing to abrogate democracy under several circumstances (LAPOP 2020). In particular, no less than 65.5 percent of Peruvians polled favor a system that “provides economic security even if there are no elections,” and 59 percent believe it is justified for the chief executive to “close the legislature during difficult times” (LAPOP 2020). This data suggests that, in Peru, output sources of legitimation carry more weight than input (procedural) sources in accounting for levels of democratic regime legitimacy. Nonetheless, it is clear that technocraticdriven economic decision-making and the absence of effective party voter linkage mechanisms have been procedural sources of regime delegitimation over the past three decades. It is well to note that Gilley (2009, 54) finds Peru’s regime legitimacy to be 30 percent lower than would be expected from its performance (a composite of three performance indicators: governance, democracy/rights, and development). In other words, Peruvians grant their regime significantly less legitimacy than it “deserves” on account of its political and economic performance, rendering Peru an “under-legitimator.” Three possible complementary reasons may account for this gap. The first lies in the uneven impact of macroeconomic and public goods provision performance across the national territory. In consequence, objective nation-level performance indicators do not map into corresponding subjective perceptions in the regions of the country most neglected by the central state. The second reason may be traceable to the likelihood that particularistic sources of system legitimacy (such as nationalism, or effective regime-boosting propaganda) may be scarce or absent in Peru. Another complementary factor explaining this legitimacy gap between objective performance indicators and overall citizen-granted legitimacy may well be that input (procedural) sources of legitimacy detract from, rather than contribute to, positive overall legitimacy evaluations. To interrogate about the sources of regime legitimacy is, in essence, to inquire about what shapes attitudinal micro-foundations across societies. Anti-politics is a wide-ranging concept referring to a “broad set of beliefs and practices that demonstrate disillusionment, disaffection, and disenchantment with institutional politics” (Fawcett et al. 2017, 6). Those beliefs pose high challenges to the legitimacy of liberal state institutions. When anti-political attitudes are entrenched at the mass level, they fuel a generic public preference for newcomers, feed the ranks of nonpartisans, and help congeal negative personal brands. This, of course, raises the

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question of what accounts for widespread anti-political sentiments amid a society. The answers can be surmised to be similar to those provided above, for attitudinal factors take pride of place in “regime legitimacy” conceptualization and operationalization efforts. Longitudinal studies, which are best suited to uncover the causal factors behind legitimation destruction and creation, are still in short supply. While there exist global forces at play (see introductory chapter) contributing to the diffusion of the anti-politics trend worldwide, there are measurable differences in anti-political sentiments across nations that underscore the importance of perusing nation-specific factors. A nation’s political culture and levels of social capital constitute a baseline substratum affecting the depth of antipolitical attitudes. Historical failures at nation-building and state-building shape state–society interactions and societal attitudes. A prolonged historical track record of governmental ineffectiveness and/or systemic corruption (for Peru, see: Quiroz 2008) enhances and entrenches anti-political attitudes. In addition to these structural factors, past and more recent experience with democracy and party government molds political attitudes at large. Peru’s political trajectory since 1980 has certainly been inimical for the building of social capital and for building citizen trust in intermediary institutions (Burt 2011; Soifer and Vergara 2019). Political agency is of great import too. Political elites, via self-crafted socializing narratives, can choose to either assuage or accentuate the “politics of antipolitics” (Schedler 1996). It stands to reason that a feedback loop mechanism between structure and agency obtains once a critical mass attitudinal threshold is breached: as antiestablishment societal attitudes grow, political entrepreneurs are presented with powerful incentives to channel mass support via anti-political appeal strategies, thereby entrenching such mass level attitudes over time. Torcal et al. (2002) make the useful distinction between two different types of antiparty attitudes: reactive antipartyism and cultural antipartyism. These two sets of attitudes have different origins and consequences, according to the authors, which justifies the analytical differentiation to begin with. Reactive antipartyism is a “critical stance adopted by citizens in response to their dissatisfaction with the performance of party elites and institutions. It is a product of the inconsistencies between the promises, the ideological labels, and the rhetoric of politicians…[and it is also] a response to actual failures on the part of parties and elites” (Torcal et al. 2002, 260). By contrast, cultural antipartyism “is rooted in the historical traditions and the core values of a political culture, and thus independent of short-term changes

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in a country’s political conditions” (ibid, 261). Presumably, both types of antipartyism are prominent in Peru. Chapter 2 in effect outlined some of the historical factors underpinning Peruvian cultural antipartyism, an attitudinal disposition rooted in social factors such as “a long experience of dictatorships, and pseudodemocracies, a history of political turbulence and discontinuities, manipulated elections over long periods, and a prolonged negative socialization into politics” (Maravall 1997, 237). Peruvian contemporary political history is replete with all of these elements, in addition to the politically alienating experience bequeathed by the Shining Path guerilla’s violence from 1980 to 1992. After this excursus on causal factors behind regime legitimacy, let us turn to describing and analyzing Peru’s NLE. In a polity saddled with a negative legitimacy environment, citizens actively scorn party politics, while politicians and political entrepreneurs are thoroughly distrusted, such that negative political identities are more widely and intensively held than positive ones. In an evocative description, political scientist Carlos Melendez paints the contours of a country where negative identities dominate: There was once a time in the ancient past in which political parties conquered the minds and hearts of Peruvians. Today, rather than adherence, political parties generate such profound rejection, such intolerance and fear, that the identities that are most genuine are anti-identities. These anti-identities order [Peru’s] precarious electoral supply and become the main linkage between delegitimated politicians and hypercritical citizens. Today, Peruvian politics is nested in the intestines of those who largely vote to discard candidates, who vote for the “lesser evil,” aiming to prevent a scenario where their worst nightmare [candidate] is handed the presidential sash. (my translation, Melendez 2016)

Negative legitimacy entails political support accruing to a political entrepreneur or politician by dint of what he or she is not (or perceived not to be). This form of legitimacy, which constitutes a positive stock of political capital (albeit precarious), can be garnered by owning a personal brand that stands in contraposition to brands that embody the known political system or, more narrowly, one that stands in contraposition to the brand of a prominent electoral rival. More generally, personal brands are endowed with negative legitimacy if, in citizens’ imagery, they are counterpoised, and project opposition, to “politics as usual.” Political personal brands able to accrue the positive political capital that negative legitimacy

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confers are brands that authentically represent newness in the subjective perception of citizens. This nuance bears underlining. It is the perception of newness that shapes that image, in some cases belied by a reality of a (not publicly well-known) history of association with despised or establishment electoral vehicles or political parties, or otherwise with the political arena writ large. Hence, true political outsiders as well as mavericks, and even political insiders without national name-recognition, can accrue negative legitimacy. While the inalterable components of a personal brand crucially shapes political entrepreneurs’ ability to accrue negative legitimacy-derived political capital, there is room to accumulate, bolster, or recuperate such political capital via antiestablishment political behavior and rhetoric. In short, personal brands endow political entrepreneurs with a baseline stock of negative legitimacy, but it can also be accumulated in the (strategic) exercise of power. For example, Alberto Fujimori added to his already significant stock of this type of political capital when he took the momentous (authoritarian) decision to forcibly close Congress in 1992, an action supported by 80 percent of Peruvians on account of the national legislature’s enormous public disrepute (Kenney 2004). Fujimori’s defeat of the MRTA’s capture of the Japanese embassy entailed another daring action that bolstered his political capital (negative legitimacy) by contributing to his image as a “can-do” effective leader, in sharp contrast to the discredited, ineffective political class. The Fujimorato regime—or the Decade of Antipolitics, as Ivan Degregori (2000) labeled his monograph to describe the regime’s workings—accumulated popular support largely via the accrual of negative legitimacy-originating political capital, amassed on the back of a string of antiestablishment governmental actions. Negative legitimacy was also obtained by means of the anti-political narrative the regime incessantly peddled, armed with its welloiled propaganda machinery. Former President Martin Vizcarra provides a more recent example of how purposeful concrete political actions can help accrue negative legitimacy. Vizcarra was ambassador to Canada when he was surprisingly summoned to become Pedro Pablo Kuczynski’s VicePresident. The former governor of Moquegua was a very secondary and obscure actor in the disputes between the executive and the legislature that gathered national attention during Kuczysnki’s presidential stint. At the time that Vizcarra was unexpectedly thrust into the presidency, he was an enigma to most Peruvian voters. This “newness” quality constituted a facilitating condition to the accrual of political capital after gaining access to the presidency. As one Vizcarra biographer has put it, “in a country

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where most former presidents were in jail or facing corruption-related judicial processes… [Vizcarra] appeared as a blank canvas upon which citizens were eager to paint [i.e. fashion into existence] the honest statesman they believed they deserved” (Riepl 2019, 13). The new interim president seized upon the prevailing widespread public mood to build his personal brand on the basis of an antiestablishment persona. Indeed, Vizcarra “strategically constructed an anti-corruption political identity, [partly] wielded to counteract corruption accusations against him,” and partly aimed at political survival given his meager legislative clout (Cueva et al. 2020, 1). When the legislature demurred in considering an executiveinitiated battery of anti-corruption bills and reforms to the judicial system, Vizcarra closed Congress via a controversial procedure—the constitutional nature of which has been contested. As a result of his purposeful political agency and reformist agenda, Vizcarra accrued an enormous stock of negative legitimacy. This was the source of his sky-high presidential popularity, reaching approval ratings upward of 80 percent and leaving office with ratings much higher than those of his predecessors (Peru 21, 2020). The source of that support escaped no one. The “accidental president” came to be perceived as an honest, self-effacing chief executive with a real sense of urgency to overhaul a corrupt institutional infrastructure, a sui generis politico daring to take decisive action against a discredited cohort of politicians (Paredes and Encinas 2020). When the newly elected 2021–2021 interim Congress, deaf to popular sentiment, maneuverer to oust Vizcarra eliding due procedure for dismissal, the ousted leader’s stock of negative legitimacy was reinforced, buoyed by the manner in which he was victimized by an unpopular Congress. Vizcarra was later able to leverage this earned political capital to run for, and be elected to, a seat in Congress with the largest vote total (over 200,000 votes) of any lawmaker in the 2021 election. In so doing, he was defying the historical Peruvian trend whereby presidents leave office highly discredited and unpopular. Absent institutional sources of positive legitimacy, political entrepreneurs come to depend almost exclusively on performancebased evaluations (i.e. legitimacy of performance). In countries where parties are relevant, negative partisanship often coexists with standard partisanship, such that there exist some institutional sources of support for politicians (Abramowitz and Webster 2016). Because party-based, institutional sources of legitimacy are scant in Peru, the ephemeral

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popular support inherent to negative legitimation is further accentuated. Thus, in an environment where negative legitimacy stands as the predominant source of voter support, we can fully expect political cycles to be particularly short, accelerating politicians’ rise and fall cycles of legitimation. In such settings, the uncertainty enveloping political life is bound to be exceedingly pronounced. Politicians “live and die” based on large proportions of “borrowed” votes and “borrowed” political support—in relation to the proportion of sincere (non-strategic) votes. Indeed, such contingent-based support constitutes the bulk of their political capital. The prominence of negative legitimacy stands as an important causal factor undergirding the short-lived nature of presidential popularity in Peru. Levels of public approval for incumbent presidents falls markedly after they have served only months in office. It is unsurprising that empirical studies find that Peru displays one of the fastest declines in inter-temporal presidential approval in all of Latin America—despite the reality that fluid party systems blunt the “honeymoon effect” accruing to incumbents, which means incumbents proceed from a lower starting baseline (Carlin et al. 2018). More generally, the centrality of negative legitimacy in political life helps explain why political leaders at large—i.e. not only incumbents—lose political favor with voters in short order. Because support for candidates in negative legitimacy environments is highly contextual (i.e. inordinately dependent upon the electoral supply on offer), as soon as the political context mutates, the popular support once accrued declines, often precipitously. Political entrepreneur Julio Guzman provides a good example of such dynamics. After a promising 2016 presidential run, he was long believed to be a leading contender for the subsequent general elections, “a strong tip for the presidency in 2021” (Oxford Analytica 2018). But Guzman’s appeal in 2016 was predicated, in large measure, on negative legitimacy: he stood as an empty vessel who did not ruffle many feathers, a centrist armed with a studiously moderate anti-political message who could attract voters that were staunchly anti-Fujimori as well as voters opposing other candidate options. In short, Guzman represented, in voters’ eyes, an optimal “lesser evil” candidate. In 2021, partaking in an election comprised of an altogether different set of viable electoral options, and having depleted his honeymoon period and newcomer status, he was never competitive, languishing under 3 percent of nationwide voting intentions in polls. During the intervening years, a more pervasive presence in the national mass media, coupled with the publicizing of

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assorted foibles pertaining to his personal life, had diluted his personal brand—spent in terms of “newness.” Cognizant that they operate in a negative legitimacy environment, political entrepreneurs in Peru actively sell themselves to the public as new and different, and many avail themselves of a populist antiestablishment ideational strategy (Hawkins et al. 2018). Establishment politicians, operating in the very same environment, are incentivized to engage in similar strategies, that is, to play the role of political mavericks. Given Peruvians’ pervasive distrust of political parties and professional politicians, the country provides fertile terrain for the exploration of negative partisanship and negative brands. Available data from public opinion surveys indicates that, in Peru, this political phenomenon is more prevalent than positive partisanship, as Cyr and Melendez (2017) have documented (see also: Melendez 2019). In particular, the cohort of hardline antiFujimoristas in Peru, registering at more than one-third of the electorate (34.6 percent) in the mid-2010s, is large (Cyr and Melendez 2017). This anti-identity political milieu has constituted a key factor shaping electoral outcomes, most prominently in elections where Fujimorismo has participated—but it has also been important in other elections as well, given that anti-Alanismo (rejection of Alan Garcia) and other negative identities are pervasive. In fact, the most prevalent negative identity— anti-Fujimorismo—helped Alejandro Toledo win the 2001 presidential elections, delivered the presidency to Ollanta Humala in 2011, and catapulted uncharismatic Pedro Pablo Kuczynski into the presidential palace in 2016. The activation of latent anti-Fujimorismo also helped a widely feared and distrusted candidate burdened with a negative identity of his own, Pedro Castillo, lead public preferences throughout the second round of the 2021 presidential campaign and win the presidency. It is well known that positive identities can help structure party politics through time because they render voters loyal to parties that encapsulate those identities (Dalton and Weldon 2007; Mainwaring and Zoco 2007). Standard partisanship maps onto higher levels of party system stability because partisans do not easily leave their parties, granting them a reprieve when they malperform in or out of office. In two-party systems, antipartisanship can lower electoral volatility. By contrast, anti-identities do not help stabilize or streamline the party universe in settings with many electoral vehicles. Anti-identifiers display intensive feelings in their opposition to a party or politician, but little else unites them politically; they are widely scattered in their (faint) political preferences. Negative legitimacy

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environments inexorably fuel high levels of extra-systemic volatility as well as large-scale strategic voting at every electoral cycle. Negative identities in Peru are not circumscribed to anti-Aprismo or anti-Fujimorismo. Rather, they are extensive to all political figures who have held office, have run for elections, or have occupied the political limelight for some time. What is more, political newcomers in Peru are hardly exempt from the burden of embodying negative identities—albeit often of a lower of magnitude than politicians who are not new to the national political stage. An Ipsos-Apoyo poll conducted two months before the April 2021 general elections starkly illustrates the pervasiveness of negative political identities (see Table 11; El Comercio-Ipsos Apoyo 2021b). All the presidential candidates without exception were saddled with a priori levels of voter aversion that far surpassed their favorability levels, that is, the percentage of voters favorably predisposed toward voting for a candidate. Even the long-time leader in voting preferences heading toward the Table 11 Negative identities: Personal brands’ approval and rejection levels, 2021 presidential election I would…

Definitively vote for him/her Open to vote for him/her Never vote for him her Probably not vote for him her Do not know the candidate Nonresponse

Pedro Keiko Castillo Fujimori

George Julio Veronika Ollanta CesarAcunaYohnyLescano Forsyth Guzman Mendoza Humala

0

4

5

1

1

1

1

1

8

12

26

19

20

11

9

18

9

71

11

52

41

73

62

11

35

7

42

11

13

8

15

39

45

5

15

15

15

5

10

28

3

1

1

2

3

2

3

3

Source Encuesta El Comercio-Ipsos Apoyo 2021b. Answer to the question: “Segun la Siguiente escala, cual es su actitud ante la candidatura de…?” see bibliography: El Comercio-Ipsos Apoyo 2021b. Rejection levels, shown in italics, are operationalized as the sum total of “would never vote for him/her” and “would probably not vote for him/her”

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April 2021 presidential election, George Forsyth, holder of a personal brand endowed with newness, confronted the fact that he was endowed with a negative political identity: 53 percent of voters were unwilling to vote for Forsyth, while only 31 percent were favorably predisposed to cast their vote for him. Levels of voter aversion befalling candidates who, unlike Forsyth, had held political responsibilities in the past, were much higher: Keiko Fujimori entered the electoral contest with a remarkable 78 percent of voters unwilling to vote for her; Ollanta Humala faced voter wrath on a similar scale, such that no less than 81 percent of voters opposed him; businessman Cesar Acuna ranked third in anti-vote sentiment, with 71 percent of voters disinclined to cast their ballot his way, while only enjoying the goodwill of 16 percent of voters favorably disposed toward him; Veronika Mendoza faced the rejection of 61 percent of voters, while only 21 percent were inclined to vote for her or were open to that possibility; former interior minister Daniel Urresti had to overcome the adversity of facing 57 percent of hostile voters, while only 24 percent were inclined or open to voting for him. Longtime Accion Popular congressman Yohny Lescano, who led voting intentions with two months to go until the first round of the presidential election, was also burdened with a negative identity: only 19 percent of voters signaled that they were open to voting for him, while 50 percent were disinclined to do so. This polling data also highlights the unconvincing, unenthusiastic nature of Peruvians’ candidate adhesion. Otherwise stated, the elite-citizen chasm evidenced by the numbers quoted above is immense. No candidate elicited more than 5 percent of voters’ enthusiastic and clear endorsement! (that is, those choosing the “definitively vote for him/her” option). Even more startingly, most candidates did not surpass the puny threshold of 1 percent of citizens professing clear, unambiguous support for them (i.e. interviewees who would “definitively” vote for him or her). We here operationalize a negative identity as one enveloping a candidate that elicits a level of citizen aversion ten or more percentage points higher than his or her citizen favorable disposition level. On the basis of this operationalization, all the candidates running in the 2021 presidential election showcased negative identity personal brands. What is more, for most candidates the differential between negative and positive public perceptions was orders of magnitude greater than that ten-point differential—as can be calculated from Table 11. To be more specific, for Keiko Fujimori the differential was 62 percentage points; for Pedro Castillo it was 36 points; for George Forsyth it stood at 22

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points; for Julio Guzman it was 43 points; for Veronika Mendoza 33 points; for Ollanta Humala 69 points; for Cesar Acuna 67 points; and for Yohny Lescano the differential stood at 31 points. Past surveys carried out in the current post 2001 democratic era are aligned with the 2021 polling data here provided: virtually all Peruvian politicians, new and old, are saddled with negative identities. Let us illustrate the inter-temporal prevalence of negative identities by delving into the same Ipsos-Apoyo poll (with the exact same questionnaire phrasing) across time. This ensures the comparability of the polling data. The Ipsos firm’s 2015 poll revealed that all candidates except Keiko Fujimori evinced negative identities. More concretely, the differential between the a priori unfavorable and favorable citizen dispositions was 14 points for PPK, 14 for Julio Guzman (in data from 2016), 15 points for Cesar Acuna, 62 points for Alan Garcia, and 60 points for Alejandro Toledo (Ipsos-Apoyo 2015). A month before the 2011 presidential election, all of the candidates perceived to be the favorites elicited more aversion than approval among citizens. Keiko Fujimori, Humala, and Kucysnki showcased net rejection levels of minus 24, 39, and 38 percentage points, respectively; aversion toward Alejandro Toledo and Luis Castaneda’ was large, but more moderate in terms of positive-negative differentials (negative 5 points and negative 10) (Ipsos-Apoyo 2011). Going back in time further, the corresponding 2008 Ipsos poll showed that only Luis Castaneda enjoyed a net favorable public perception (53 favorable compared to 44 percent who rejected him). The polling results pertaining to the remaining slate of candidates comported with a negative legitimacy environment. Keiko’s net negative rating was 24 percentage points (61 unfavorable versus 37 percent favorably disposed); Ollanta Humala’s differential was 42 points; Lourdes Flores’s negative identity rested on a net negative differential of 30 points; Alejandro Toledo was viewed favorably by 30 percent and negatively by 67 percent of those polled; Cesar Acuna was viewed in favorable light by only 6 percent and negatively by 60 percent; finally the level of aversion toward Pedro Pablo Kucynski was 75 percent, while only 8 percent viewed him favorably (Ipsos-Apoyo 2008). The corresponding 2006 Ipsos polls, to go further back in time, showed all politicians and would-be politicians were burdened with negative identities, except Valentin Paniagua and Lourdes Flores, who were nonetheless rejected by 45 and 43 percent of citizens, respectively. (As seen in the later 2008 poll, Flores’s favorable ratings would soon take a tumble). Ollanta Humala’s net negative image stood at 5 points in 2006, but

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would later acquire enormous dimensions. The public image of the rest of the field was demonstrably abysmal. Alberto Fujimori was burdened with a net 40 point differential in the negative domain; Alan Garcia was rejected by 70 percent of those polled, and viewed in a positive light by only 27 percent. Longstanding establishment politician Javier Diez Canseco carried a similarly heavy negative identity (61 percent professed aversion toward him versus 17 percent who were open to vote for him); Susana Villaran, not well known by the mass publics at the time, only enjoyed favor with 5 percent of citizens and was rejected by 24 percent (Ipsos-Apoyo 2006). Accounting for positive to negative differentials, as done here, understates the aversion levels Peruvian politicians and wouldbe politicians elicit because it does not factor in the intensity of aversion. Indeed, the percentage of citizens who profess they would “definitively not vote” for someone stands at orders of magnitude higher compared to the percentage who would “probably not vote” for that same candidate. The ratio of radical to moderate public rejection levels spans the gamut from 2 to 1, to a ratio as high as 10 to 1, depending on the politician and the year in which he or she is evaluated (see Table 11 for illustration). The clear picture that emerges from this and similar polls carried out for past elections is that, ceteris paribus, being a known quantity to Peruvian voters heightens a priori levels of voter aversion. The so-called anti-voto (voter aversion levels toward individual politicians) reflects the electorate’s evaluation of a politician’s personal brand and past performance—including informational incongruencies, insincerities, track record of corruption, feckless actions, inexplicable alliances, and many such faux pas. Politicians who have held the presidency are particularly damaged because of incumbency disadvantage (as it obtains in Peru), but so are political leaders who hold important responsibilities in congressional politics or who have run as presidential candidates in the past and/or exhibited an active and visible presence in the mass media. (Alan Garcia’s 2001 and 2006 candidacies constitute a partial exception to the notion that past incumbency proves fatal for favorability ratings. This is because Gracia led a political party which, at the time, evinced nontrivial levels of partisanship, and because of the length of time elapsed since his first 1985–1989 presidency, such that he faced an electorate changed in its demographic composition). It is also noteworthy that politicians who have deliberately avoided defining themselves ideologically or abstained from getting enmeshed into ideological turf wars, such as Julio Guzman or George Forsyth, are not exempt from high voter rejection levels.

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In negative legitimacy environments, political capital can be accrued simply by virtue of being a real or perceived newcomer to the electoral arena (a political neophyte) and/or by dint of credibly disparaging the politicians and parties that currently populate the political landscape, successfully crafting an image that stands in contraposition to them. A standard theoretical assumption among students of party politics is that voters are generally biased against new parties and candidates, because of uncertainty about what they represent as well as uncertainty about the policy content of new options. This assumption takes as a point of departure the notion that voters are risk averse and seek to lower uncertainty (Alvarez 1998; Koch 2003). Tolerance for risk and the attendant relative appeal of new electoral options, however, is bound to be context-specific. It stands to reason that the relative voter appeal of new options differs across democracies in accordance to contextual factors, not least, the degree to which anti-systemic attitudes predominate amid the electorate. To be sure, new candidates and electoral vehicles can obtain electoral traction by tapping into representational deficits besetting extant party systems. But novelty itself can be, in certain national settings, an appealing quality in the eyes of voters. Indeed, it can be an invaluable a source of political capital, particularly in new democracies (for empirical evidence centered on four parties representing “a project of newness,” see: Sikk 2012). Peruvian attitudinal micro-foundations, conditioned by a history of political and institutional malperformance as well as anti-partisan political socialization, are conducive to viewing newness in a favorable light. A 2011 poll shows that 15 percent of Peruvian respondents chose “newness in politics” as their first criterion in voting for a presidential candidate (Melendez 2019, 225), while a 2016 poll revealed that 11 percent chose newness as their first criterium (see Table 8). It stands to reason that newness was important for other voters as well—even when it did not come at the very top of the list for them. The implications of this bias for newness for the electoral fortunes of new candidates (or still perceived to be rather new) are measurable. Among voters prioritizing newness, the probability that they cast their vote for Humala (when he was a new commodity in the Peruvian landscape in 2006) rose from 30 to 50 percent, while such voters were much less willing to vote for establishment candidates such as Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, Alan Garcia, or Luis Castaneda, as shown in Melendez’s (2019) statistical work. The empirical evidence also reveals that newness is a more important consideration for voters who display negative partisanship identities, voters

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who concurrently manifest more deeply felt antiestablishment attitudes. These empirical results are in line with theoretical expectations and help explain past electoral outcomes. Even a cursory look at Peru’s recent past presidential contests is indicative of the importance that newness has played. Alberto Fujimori benefited from being a newcomer in 1990, as did Ollanta Humala in 2006, Julio Guman in 2016, or Pedro Castillo in 2021. The most recent case of an establishment politician whose voting base was cannibalized by a newcomer was that of Johny Lescano, a longtime AP parliamentarian who ran as a populist maverick in the 2021 presidential election (Vivas 2021a). Lescano’s populist persona and strategy, as well as his southern Puno origin, initially gathered support in the south and the interior, but he was ultimately not successful. He was displaced by the allure of newness and a personal brand with ascriptive traits and socializing experiences that were much more appealing to voters on one side of the estadonacional cleavage. Voters in the interior provinces switched away from Lescano and coordinated their preferences around the candidacy of Pedro Castillo, the personal brand perceived to better represent the neglected provincial inhabitants of the country. Novelty in politics is, of course, part and parcel of a political personal brand—partly an objective trait and partly crafted by political agency. Political entrepreneurs can best prolong the perception of newness in the eyes of voters by cultivating an antiestablishment and antipolitical image. Empirically speaking, however, the electoral benefit associated with this personal brand trait dissipates after a politician has partaken in two or more electoral cycles, sometimes even faster. For obvious reasons, newness as a political asset also dissipates after an individual has held the presidency. The common fate of many national-level politicians whose political future once seemed promising but faded into oblivion, attests to the ephemeral nature of politicians’ electoral competitiveness in Peru. That “newness in politics” is a factor influencing electoral outcomes, insofar as it benefits political entrepreneurs endowed with this trait, should come as no surprise in political environments where trust in political parties has been decimated and the political class is widely derided. In these antipolitical settings, voters are primed to reward political outsiders and new candidates. Indeed, newness can be conceived as a form of negative legitimacy that accrues to some political figures, in particular those whose personal brands stand in salient contrast vis-à-vis the known cohort of politicians. Socializing experiences, ascriptive traits, and personality brands that, in the public imagery, clearly separate a candidate from a political

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world widely deemed to be ineffective, corrupt and self-serving, are a priori among the most valued components of a personal brand. To be sure, the quality of being a newcomer to politics is, per se, no guarantee of electoral competitiveness or success. Peruvian electoral history since 1990 suggests that combining newness with other appealing personal brand qualities yields electoral rewards. 7.1

Effects of Negative Legitimacy Environments

Negative legitimacy environments are pernicious for the functionality and workings of a democracy. Four effects of NLEs here are highlighted. First, negative legitimacy environments heighten political uncertainty at large, making it very difficult for political actors to foresee the outlines of even the near term. Secondly, NLEs foment political instability within the executive, in relations between the branches of government, among electoral vehicles, and among politicians. Thirdly, they contribute to the damaging phenomenon of “incumbent disadvantage,” crippling elected governments’ ability to govern and to deliver good governance. Fourth, negative legitimacy environments compress political time, producing many deleterious second-order effects (political outcomes) that ensue from the short-term nature of political interactions (see Fig. 3). Time compression and high political uncertainty mutually reinforce each other: the

HIGH POLITICAL UNCERTAINTY

NEGATIVE LEGITIMACY ENVIRONMENT

TIME COMPRESSION

INCUMBENT DISADVANTAGE

Fig. 3

Effects of negative legitimacy environments

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inability of political actors to place probabilities on likely medium-term scenarios shortens their decision-making horizons; in turn, the shorttermism informing the behavior of actors accelerates political time, and renders predictions about future political scenarios less reliable, thus reinforcing actors’ propensity to focus on the immediate. Political uncertainty is recognized to be higher in developing democracies, affecting the “puzzling evolution” of many party systems (Lupu and Riedl 2013). The reverse, of course, is also true: uncertainty surrounding the contours and component units of a party universe translates into operational uncertainty enveloping the political system writ large. Uncertainty, defined as the imprecision with which political actors can foresee future interactions, can vary significantly across unconsolidated democracies. The stability, enforcement capacity, and legitimacy of formal institutions map into more predictable patterns of political behavior among actors. If those institutions weaken, we can expect political unpredictability to rise. Because party systems constitute a central element of democracy’s infrastructure, the higher the level of party system institutionalization, the more predictability is afforded to democracy (Mainwaring 2018, Chapter 3). The above considerations raise the query of precisely how, and in what ways, negative legitimacy environments (NLEs) contribute to political uncertainty—above and beyond the manifold sources of uncertainty besetting young, unconsolidated democracies. In NLEs, the anti-system attitudes that prevail amid the electorate and the attendant dominance of non-partisans, perpetuate high levels of extra-systemic electoral volatility, feeding political uncertainty across different arenas of political activity. First, negative legitimacy environments promote and perpetuate irreducible uncertainty as regards electoral winners, who can be political entrepreneurs unknown to the establishment and to political formations represented in Congress. Relatedly, there is unparalleled uncertainty as pertains to the public policies that can emanate from the irreducible unpredictability surrounding the identity of future governments. Negative legitimacy environments militate against incipient party system closure—i.e. a narrow range of governmental formulas (Mair 1997). As a result, NLEs also help foment high uncertainty as regards governing public policy orientations. Economic policy volatility is high in underinstitutionalized party systems because they open the door to political outsiders and because electoral vehicles do not effectively constrain political entrepreneurs (Flores-Macías 2012). Insofar as NLEs should be

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found in, and help spawn and perpetuate, some of the most underinstitutionalized party universes in existence, these attitudinal environments undergird policy volatility. (The ceteris paribus condition applies here, for there are factors that can counteract the economic policy volatility emanating from electoral volatility, such as a captured state or captured economic bureaucracies within it; for the case of Peru, see Crabtree and Durand 2017). Negative legitimacy environments also promote political instability. Instability can engulf the political world as a derivative of wild swings in electoral preferences, time compression, and changing political power relationships. The tenor of interactions between basic democratic institutions can also change dramatically because of drastic changes in the seat composition of legislatures or unanticipated change atop the executive branch. Relatively smooth executive–legislative relations can become highly contentious in short order, and vice-versa. Formal democratic rules that have been hitherto respected may be suddenly subverted, such that more amateurish newcomers abide by the letter of the rules but not their spirit, or otherwise come to violate both letter and spirit. In addition, incipient democracy-supporting informal institutions that emerge and take root in polities evincing repeated inter-temporal interactions among a rather stable set of political parties (Helmke and Levitsky 2006) are unlikely not germinate, let alone take root, in negative legitimacy environments. Among other causal factors, the volatility in the composition of the vehicles and politicians that populate democratic institutions precludes the development of widely understood and enforced informal rules of the game resting on expectations of future interactions with the same players. There are innumerable avenues via which NLEs foster political instability. For example, the ephemeral nature of legitimacy accruing to governments in-between elections promotes a succession of governmental cabinet changes, as incumbent chief executives are incentivized to discard ministers and bring new ones into the cabinet in a (largely futile) quest to recuperate lost legitimacy. Because governments operating in NLEs rapidly lose public favor, the governing party’s lawmakers have incentives to defect from the legislative caucus in order to further their political survival (notwithstanding the patronage benefits potentially lost). In turn, changes in the composition of Congress, and attendant power equilibria, can have important repercussions for executive–legislative relations and for the fate of legislative initiatives. The rapid political

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weakening of incumbents engender power vacuums that render political life more uncertain and unstable. For example, the authority of delegitimized elected governments can be more safely challenged by political opponents and civil society actors, which frequently provoke mistaken governmental reactions that deepen incumbents’ unpopularity. NLEs, in short, contribute to systemic political entropy, such that political life is defined by power vacuums, disorder in political interactions, and volatile patterns of conduct. The relationship between stability and legitimacy was noted long ago by the late political sociologist Seymor Martin Lipset (1960, 164–180), who wrote in Political Man: “the stability of any given democracy depends not only on economic development, but also upon the effectiveness and legitimacy of its political system” (Lipset 1960, 64). Technological and economic features of the contemporary era are widely acknowledged to foster time compression, “undermining conventional ideas about executive-legislative relations, majority rule, constitutionalism and the rule of law” (Scheuerman 2001). The pace of social and economic life within which political affairs are inserted confronts liberal democracies with serious challenges (Hassan 2009). The acceleration of political time is considered to empower executive branches vis-a-vis legislatures, thereby undermining democratic deliberation. Beyond the known economic, social, and technological developments affecting the temporality of politics, democracies governed by negative legitimacy environments are, additionally, saddled with an endogenous driver of time acceleration. Negative legitimacy is more precarious and shorter-lived than standard (positive) legitimacy. Hence, democratic politics inserted in negative legitimacy environments proceeds at a faster pace than otherwise. When negative identities envelop political actors, and anti-system mass attitudes are predominant, political actors operate on “borrowed” time. The more specific factors undergirding time compression in negative legitimacy environments are manifold: voter loyalties are ephemeral; politicians’ loyalties are also transient; political relationships among actors are inherently instrumental; politicians’ ability to fend off adversity is lower, thus shortening political careers; the repeated irruption of newcomers and outsiders disrupts political order and displaces the extant cohort of political representatives; amateurs are more prone to commit political mistakes that shorten their electoral and political life. It bears remembering that a component trait of NLEs is personalism, more specifically, the prevalence of negative identity personal brands. We have highlighted in previous pages that personal brands are very prone to dilution. When political

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personal brands become diluted, political time accelerates. Amid the forbidding conditions that obtain in NLEs, repeated electoral success is highly unlikely—provided that a level playing field obtains. What is more, electoral victory tends to accelerate the path towards political decline, due to incumbent disadvantage, as explored below. Electoral defeat tends to spell the end of political careers, or otherwise fatally damage future electoral competitiveness. Without political parties that can confer ideological or administrative capital, “politicians are more vulnerable to devaluation after an electoral defeat, and their relevance in the political scene is shortened” (Zavaleta 2014, 148). While the above-delineated characteristics of political life can be found to some degree in many democracies, they are dominant and allencompassing features of democracies inserted in negative legitimacy environments. Otherwise stated, NLEs structurally define key parameters of political life for all actors trapped in such environments. Time compression informs the short-termism of politicians and political actors in civil society at large. Negative legitimacy accrued in an electoral context is very ephemeral because it is obtained as a by-product of a relational condition with an expiration date: a candidate accumulates this form of political capital as citizens instrumentally lend their support to avoid an electoral and political outcome perceived to be worse. Thus, a perspective that helps provide insight into electorally accrued negative legitimacy rests on its instrumental character: for some voters, it is a “means to an end” political option. In consequence, once that political “threat” has been conjured away, the candidate propelled by negative legitimacy is rendered highly vulnerable once the raison d’etre for his or her public support has vanished. For example, the very negative identity (i.e. anti-Fujimorismo) that helped propel to the presidency figures such as Alejandro Toledo, Ollanta Humala, Pedro Pablo Kucyznski, or Pedro Castillo, turned into a political liability not long after these political outsiders entered the Casa de Pizarro presidential palace. Their approval or favorability ratings diminished rapidly. Many voters had “loaned” their vote to these figures provisionally, and in instrumental fashion, but soon returned to their status quo ante as nonaligned voters (or independents). Negative legitimacy can, of course, also be accrued in the exercise of power. But much like when it is accrued during an electoral campaign, it is a highly contextual source of political capital that evaporates once the political context changes. Both newness and antiestablishment identities are forms of negative legitimacy that naturally

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erode with the exercise of power. Negative legitimacy dynamics and time compression thus go hand in hand. The key political currency acting as a medium of exchange in NLEs— negative legitimacy—is highly perishable. Negative legitimacy is a poor store of (political) value. The consequences thereof for social and political outcomes are devastating. Polities where political capital is highly precarious and evanescent inhibit democracy-enhancing political and institutional reforms (on the difficulties of enacting reforms in Peru see: Dargent 2021). NLEs also preclude the emergence of a professional political class, arguably a necessary condition for democracy to be operationally functional—albeit certainly not a sufficient condition. Democracy is a political system well known to engender myopic decision-making because of the incentive system facing elected officials. This intrinsic flaw of democracy is accentuated exponentially when elections routinely churn out amateur politicians with little prospect of forging careers in the political profession. Political theorist Daniel Innerarity has expounded on the matter of political societies afflicted by short-term horizons. It is worth quoting him at length: There is no collective intelligence if societies cannot anticipate the aggregate result of their decisions in the medium and long run, that is to say, if societies are unable to reasonably govern their future. The future amounts to a work in progress that needs to be anticipated with certain coherence. When decisions are adopted with a short-term horizon, without factoring in negative externalities and the long run consequences, when decision making cycles are too short (electoralism, tactical rationality, opportunism), the rationality of political actors is necessarily myopic. When the temporal horizon is shortened, and only immediate interests prevail, it is difficult for things to evolve in a way that pre-empts catastrophe (Innerarity 2019, my translation).

Because they heighten and entrench short-termism, negative legitimacy environments deprive societies of what Charles Lindblom (1965) called “the intelligence of democracy”—that is, the ability of a democracy’s institutional infrastructure and systemic conditions to facilitate interactions between political actors that reduce the production of adverse results and increase the frequency of public-regarding outcomes. The very underlying conditions inherent to negative legitimacy environments render public-regarding outcomes elusive. While certainly not alone among Latin American countries in this regard, Peruvian democracy is particularly

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deprived of collective intelligence because its practices, norms, institutions, and elite-citizen linkages, do not exert the required disciplining power and guidance necessary to avert collective drift and political entropy. Finally, negative legitimacy environments contribute to the insidious phenomenon of incumbency disadvantage, with harmful consequences for democratic performance. This stands in contrast to what is usually observed across democracies. Incumbents generally enjoy political advantages denied to their out-of-office opponents, both in older and younger democracies. Incumbents benefit from more public recognition, that is, they are better known to voters. They can deploy the financial wherewithal and powers of the executive to dish out selective favors and pork to enhance the scope of their political coalitions and to win favor with voters. Time in the presidency also affords incumbents the opportunity to accumulate personal power (thus the key rationale for installing term limits in presidential systems). Empirical evidence from Latin America shows that the right to reelection “increases the electoral advantage of incumbents” (Corrales and Penfold 2014; Corrales 2016). However, at least some of the advantages of incumbency are predicated on office holders wielding functional levels of positive political capital (for example manifested in public approval ratings). In some settings, this assumption does not obtain, such that the generalized absence of sustainable political capital defines the political system—that is, it is a structural condition thereof. Negative legitimacy environments generate, in short order, unpopular chief executives, or otherwise incumbents with modest and very evanescent popularity—as seen in countries like Peru and Guatemala (Sanchez-Sibony 2016). Unpopular incumbents find it much more difficult to build alliances in Congress or in society, or to infiltrate institutions in the quest to accrue more power, or to circumvent institutional opposition by resorting to plebiscitarian appeals in the court of public opinion. These manifestations of political weakness, in turn, strongly entice other politicians to engage in noncooperative behavior, thereby deepening the political isolation besetting incumbent presidents—whose lack of an institutionalized political party already condemn them to an initial baseline of political isolation. What makes incumbents laboring amid negative legitimacy environments unpopular? First, legitimacy and political capital foisted upon political entrepreneurs is transient when it is accrued contextually as a result of voters’ relational calculus; that is, incumbents are voted into office in large measure because of negative legitimacy dynamics, a

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conjunctural social choice aimed at preventing a more unpopular politician from taking office. Once the context changes (for example, the despised rival has been defeated electorally or another more instrumentally valuable political figure irrupts on the scene), the political capital foisted upon the elected figure vanishes, because the raison d’etre for supporting him or her dissipates. A second important factor fostering incumbent disadvantage is that, in NLEs, sitting Presidents of the Republic lack the benefit of elite-citizen loyalty ties (such as partisanship) known to attenuate negative retrospective evaluations; therefore, the political consequences of governmental malperformance are particularly dire. Malperformance, of course, is structural in origin in much of Latin America, fueled by pervasive infrastructural state weakness (Soifer 2015; Giraudy and Luna 2017; Mazzuca 2021). But the combination of state weakness and negative legitimacy environments, characterized by floating voter electorates and negative identities, proves especially devastating for incumbent presidents, depriving them of both functional institutional tools and underlying political capital with which to accomplish much of substance. The upshot is that incumbents can become “lame ducks” early in their tenure in office, powerless to guide the body politic. These dynamics set the stage for a new round of political entropy and drift. A third reason why incumbency proves to be a political curse in NLEs centers on the high political fragmentation these environments produce, because political preferences are not only flimsy and ephemeral but also very dispersed. Non-partisan, there is no reason to expect free-floating electorates to concentrate the vote around a few electorate vehicles. In fact, highly disperse voting preferences are more common, thereby producing highly fragmented legislatures and minority presidencies. A growing literature on minority presidentialism and multiparty presidentialism (see: Chaisty and Power 2018) documents the perils of this combination for effective governance, political stability, or functional interbranch relations. In NLEs political honeymoons for incumbents are shorter in duration than in other (non-NLE) political environments. Political cycles of (limited) popularity and unpopularity succeed one another in rapid fashion. Without an autonomous reservoir of political capital, nor a political party that can provide political “shelter” (i.e. professional cadres, partisan structures, or organizational know-how to circumvent or shift blame), politicians are battered by the changing tides of politics and public sentiment directly, in naked fashion. Politicians’ margin of maneuver is

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smaller, and their mistakes are more severely punished in the court of public opinion. The transience of political legitimacy is a phenomenon that, amidst negative legitimacy environments, affects populists and nonpopulist politicians alike. This shortening of legitimacy cycles, in turn, damages governmental performance and mandate fulfilment, generating a feedback loop mechanism that discredits the political profession and democracy further. In important respects, therefore, negative legitimacy environments help generate dynamics that render the recovery of mass publics’ faith in democratic party politics elusive. NLEs are self-perpetuating, because the malperformance to which they contribute further discredits the political world, feeds the ranks of non-partisans, deepens negative political identities, and grants a priori credibility and negative legitimacy to newcomers and outsiders. The “Peruvian paradox” of unpopular presidents despite high economic growth, as Vergara and Watanabe (2019) describe this intellectual conundrum, can be explained partly by the “destruction of the organizational foundations of democracy” that transpired during the Fujimorato (1990–2000). It can also be traced to the emergence of the negative legitimacy environment that helped precipitate the collapse of the 1980s party universe. The likely decline of Fujimorismo after its 2021 presidential defeat (and Keiko Fujimori’s legal troubles), alongside the continuing decline or disappearance of the traditional “parties” (APRA, AP, PPC) should lead to negative dealignment, to use Rose and Mishler’s term (1998, 230). That is, negative partisanship in Peru shall decline in scope as these electoral vehicles become ever-more marginal in the public sphere and in political life. A priori, a smaller number of citizens shall be able to identify an electoral vehicle they will never vote for. Nonetheless, this development will not necessarily attenuate the country’s negative legitimacy environment, because absent an increase in positive partisanship, the ranks of floating voters will not diminish. Nor will the appeal of newcomers dwindle. Hence, in this negative dealignment scenario, electoral volatility and extra-systemic volatility can be expected to be as immensely high as seen during the 2016–2020 and 2020–2021 electoral dyad periods. Peruvian political life shall continue to display vacuums of political authority, weak incumbents, irreducible uncertainty, and political entropy. Peru’s negative legitimacy environment reached new heights from around 2018 onward as evidenced by an enlarged free-floating electorate,

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propelled by higher levels of political disaffection and anti-political sentiment. In line with the arguments here presented, it is not coincidental that political uncertainty increased, and political life accelerated, reaching a furious pace—including the spectacle of seeing the rotation of three different presidents in the space of two weeks (Carranza Ko 2020). The disconnect between the “street” and politicians widened; the political capital that free agents accrue became ever-more ephemeral; and electoral vehicles aligned with popular sentiment were unable to steer, even marginally, street political activity toward institutional channels. In NLEs, antiestablishment public attitudes do not find steady or stable institutional representation. In the context of party non-systems, anti-political sentiment is not institutionalized—i.e. it does not find partisan expression. Peruvian elites, bereft of political parties capable of vertical aggregation, were unable (and unwilling) to lower societal tensions and political instability in ways elites in other party universes do, namely reaching broad-based agreements. While standard political science theory conceives of elections as conflict management instruments that can temporarily “settle” political discord, the 2021 presidential election only boosted political strife, fueled by the absence of “loser’s consent” (Anderson et al. 2005) on the part of the defeated electoral vehicle, the electorally defeated establishment writ large, and significant segments of voters (Levitsky and Vergara 2021). The rational-legal legitimacy of origin owed to winners of democratic elections was denied to the victor (Pedro Castillo) on spurious grounds. This episode illustrated the constrained ability of electoral processes to fulfil one of its key putative functions in the context of negative legitimacy environments. There are certainly conjunctural, specific factors that explain why the 2016 and 2021 presidential elections failed in their nominal conflict resolution role. But the background attitudinal setting is relevant as a productive condition. Wherever citizens (and politicians) are attitudinally undisposed to accord legitimacy at large—as occurs in NLEs—processes, rules, and adverse electoral outcomes are a priori more likely to be rejected.

8

Conclusion

Between 2001 and 2021, Peru’s marketplace of floating voters ranged from 70 to 90 percent of the national electorate. It is therefore not surprising that the Peruvian partisan arena displays persistent turnover in power and change in the identity of the main political formations—such

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that what were once electorally important electoral vehicles become small or marginal in a short period of time. During the post-1990 period, the Peruvian polity has been devoid of a party system, inchoate, or otherwise. It is best categorized as a party non-system: a chaotic party constellation showcasing high levels of extra-systemic volatility, devoid of systemic political parties that structure political life inter-temporally, even modestly. The emergence of an electoral vehicle (Fujimorismo) that grew in electoral support and exhibited apparent staying power, ushered in somewhat lower levels of extra-systemic volatility during part of the 2010s. While Fujimorismo reduced, for a time, the effective “domain of competition” to about 70 percent of the electorate, it was not a reduction large enough, nor sustained in time, to alter Peru’s party non-system dynamics. Free-floating voters, not partisans, continued to dominate the electoral marketplace, rendering the party universe amorphous and unstructured. There has been no movement toward party universe closure. Instead, the electoral marketplace is almost fully comprised of floating voters which means that all electoral vehicles face the prospect that they may not survive from one election to the next. This chapter also probed the nature of elite-citizen relations. Personalism is the central, defining feature of Peru’s elite-citizen linkage profile. While other linkage modalities certainly exist in Peru, they are of much lesser scope and significance. Behavioral personalism defines not only the modus operandi of politicians, but also that of citizens. Peruvian citizens evaluate politics and engage in electoral decision-making calculi utilizing the heuristic political personal brands offer, which we have here conceptualized as a combination of ascriptive characteristics, socialization experiences, and subjective personality traits. Because personal brands are highly vulnerable to dilution—triggered by personal corruption, informational incongruencies, length of time in the political spotlight, and/or incumbency—personalism is a key driver of political time compression and the attendant fast-paced nature of Peruvian political life. Behavioral personalism in the electorate and among politicians alike precludes Peruvian electoral vehicles from fulfilling the functions of social choice and collective action that political parties are called upon to provide in a democracy (Aldrich 1995). Behavioral personalism also renders elusive the construction of more substantive elite-citizen linkages. The preponderance of personalistic linkages is aided by Peru’s complex, low-information political setting. The bewildering changeability of electoral supply, coupled with the opacity and insubstantial content typical of

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electoral vehicles, incentivizes the adoption of simple informational shortcuts—such as personal brands—to come to terms with an otherwise inscrutable, complex political reality. Granting analytical pride of place to negative political identities— without a corresponding level of positive partisanship elsewhere in the political universe—helps us come to terms with operative political dynamics in Peru. Most Peruvian voters know which individual figures they are determined not to vote for, without concurrently evidencing bonds of loyalty towards any given political figure, new or old. Negative personal brands—i.e. those that elicit substantially higher aversion than approval levels—are predominant, as polls confirm in stark fashion. By contrast, positive personal brands are scant or nonexistent. This chapter has advanced the concept of a “negative legitimacy environment” as an ideal type category to describe a political stage wherein illegitimacy, antipartisan and antipolitical attitudes are all-encompassing. A polity’s mass level attitudinal background constitutes the political stage wherein elite– citizen interactions take place, governments try to govern, politicians transact among themselves, and electoral candidates seek approval. The particulars of national attitudinal configurations differ across countries. To the extent that the nature of the political stage is omitted from political analysis, we miss an important productive condition fueling political entropy in Peru. No aspect of Peruvian political life escapes the influence of the pernicious attitudinal ecosystem we have here named a “negative legitimacy environment.” It is comprised of three elements: a nonpartisan disposition; the overwhelming prevalence of negative political identities (applicable to political parties, electoral vehicles and personal brands); and a public preference for political outsiders and newcomers. These ambient factors cannot help but powerfully affect and condition Peruvian politics, in regards to elections and well beyond. Because deep-seated illegitimacy pervades the body politic, negative legitimacy constitutes the operative political currency—an inherently precarious and fleeting form of political capital. This chapter has delved into some of the reasons why negative legitimacy environments can be expected to produce very fluid politics and, over time, generate directionless political drift—as opposed to a discernable pattern of political development or otherwise one unfolding within recognizable parameters. We have theorized that these mass attitudinal settings, wherein illegitimacy pervades the players and institutions of the democratic game, are associated with several deleterious dynamics for the functioning of democracy:

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irreducible uncertainty in all areas of politico-institutional life; political instability at large; time compression that shortens decision-making horizons for all actors; and incumbent disadvantage, such that elected officials lose political capital quickly. Over time, negative legitimacy environments engender political entropy, conceived as political disorder and decay, deepening the atomization of political life as well as spawning (and reproducing) intractable social choice problems. In a real sense, political entropy is an outcome built into negative legitimacy environments. The damaging volatility and unpredictability plaguing Peruvian political life rests upon structural and attitudinal foundations that can be explored, foundations that can be expected to continue reproducing instability and political entropy. Political developments and outcomes that are often described as a product of contingency and happenstance are not infrequently endogenously generated, stemming from a negative legitimacy environment.

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CHAPTER 4

The Involution of Peru’s Electoral Vehicles

1

Introduction

Descriptions of Peruvian electoral vehicles often offer snapshots in time. Perusing the inter-temporal evolution of several such vehicles can offer more revealing insights about behavioral regularities and repeated internal dynamics that hobble party building. The study of several electoral vehicles proves important in order to elucidate factors underpinning the perpetuation of a party non-system at the level of analysis of its component (electoral vehicle) units. Does each electoral vehicle decay due to singular, idiosyncratic reasons, or are there common causal patterns fomenting decay across all vehicles that can be uncovered? The elapsing of several presidential and parliamentary elections since the end of the Fujimorato era now furnishes scholars with the electoral data and the inter-temporal perspective necessary to pursue said intellectual exercise with more confidence. The chapter delves into the trajectory of traditional parties and new electoral vehicles over the twenty-year period following the Fujimorato regime (1990–2000). Tracing these trajectories reveals, without exception, a decrease in Peruvian political formations’ level of institutionalization, measured in terms of social rootedness and internal coherence. Furthermore, none of the examined electoral vehicles or parties is shown to have gained enhanced political or operational autonomy qua organizations vis-à-vis their founders or natural leaders over time. The account provides empirical evidence supporting a key © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 O. Sanchez-Sibony, Democracy without Parties in Peru, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-87579-4_4

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causal factor advanced in Chapter 2 to explain the perpetuation of partisan under-institutionalization: the genetic origin of under-institutionalized electoral vehicles plants the seeds of decay by unleashing pernicious internal dynamics and fostering myopic, poor decision-making that undermines party building. That is, initially low levels of organizational autonomy, low social rootedness, and high internal incoherence practically portend future partisan decay and entropy. The chapter evaluates traditional parties, defined as those existing before the party collapse of 1990, as well as newer non-traditional parties, defined as those emerging after the collapse. The analysis shows that the Peruvian party universe has witnessed convergence among electoral vehicles in terms of their institutionalization. The traditional parties (APRA, Accion Popular, Partido Popular Cristiano), once endowed with some ideational and organizational resources (see: Cyr 2017, chap 5), have come through time to resemble their newer partisan competitors (Fujimorismo, Partido Nacionalista Peruano, and others) in terms of (lack of) autonomy, internal coherence, and social rootedness. Traditional parties have also come to resemble newer electoral vehicles in their political modus operandi: behavioral personalism, short-termism, programmatic vacuity, reliance on personal brands, the hiring of free agents, and many other elements. The Frente Amplio, a new leftist outfit which stood out in terms of vertical aggregation and collective action, also underwent decay. The study of Peru’s electoral vehicles provides support for Panebianco’s (1988) notion about the essential role of a party’s “genetic code”— that is, its constitutive traits at birth—to explain its subsequent institutional trajectory. The largest empirical study of party-building in the Latin American region (Levitsky et al. 2016) shows that since the onset of the third wave successful party building has been exceedingly rare. This chapter advances one explanation for partisan deinstitutionalization not explored in the Latin Americanist literature. To be sure, one country case study cannot disentangle the independent role played by international, national, and party-centric factors behind party decay. The ambition here is more modest: to show that the roots of future institutional decay or entropy are often contained within the electoral vehicle itself on account of its top-down, candidate-centered, and socially uprooted origins. In other words, the future fate of an electoral vehicle is endogenous to its internal character bequeathed at birth.

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The chapter is organized as follows. It first delves briefly into the theoretical literature on party institutionalization. It then places Peruvian electoral vehicles across a two-dimensional party institutionalization continuum on the basis of expert surveys to allow for comparison with each other. Peruvian electoral vehicles are also placed within the broader Latin American canvas of political parties along the same dimensions. The first half of the chapter delves into the level of institutionalization of Peru’s “traditional” parties (APRA, Accion Popular, Partido Popular Cristiano, and the Left), that is, those which dominated politics during the 1980s. The second half of the chapter pursues the same exercise with respect to the most important electoral vehicles since the return of democracy in 2001 (Fujimorismo, Partido Nacionalista Peruano and Frente Amplio). More space is dedicated to Fujimorismo, given its historical role in shaping Peruvian politics, and its status as the largest and (for some time) the most socially rooted political formation in Peru. The criterium for selection has been simple: we have included only the most important electoral vehicles in the post-2001 era, as gauged by their electoral performance at the national level. The selected entities comprise the three traditional parties of the 1980s that survived into the 2000s—i.e. all four except Izquierda Unida (United Left), which did not survive (see: Van Dyck 2018a, b)—as well as the newer political formations that have held national office or have otherwise been key pillars of the party opposition. Frente Amplio has been selected on account of its importance within the spectrum of the political left, its initially higher levels of institutionalization, and its ambitious party building objectives. This outfit set out to build a bona fide political party endowed with programmatic content, rules-based governance, and social incorporation of grassroots groups. Each electoral vehicle is perused along three dimensions of institutionalization: institutional autonomy from party leaders; internal cohesion or the ability to act as a unitary actor; and social rootedness, or the degree to which the vehicle enjoys organic links with social groups and organized civil society as well as loyalty from voters. While other factors matter in perusing and categorizing a party universe, studying the nature of its units is essential for a simple reason: stable systemic interactions are predicated on the institutionalization of individual party organizations.

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Conceptualizing Party Institutionalization

Let us briefly consider other prominent efforts to conceptualize party institutionalization and examine areas of conceptual convergence and divergence with the Luna et al. classificatory scheme. Levitsky (1998) expounds on the important distinction between routinization, or the degree to which party processes are effectively guided by rules, and value infusion, or the attitudinal dimension, alluding to the degree to which party actors (elites and masses) display an emotional attachment to their party. Randall and Svåsand (2002a) have defined party institutionalization as “the process by which the party becomes established in terms both of integrated patterns of behavior and of attitudes.” They further unpack these dimensions into their internal and external elements (i.e. party relations with society). Scholars are broadly agreed on the importance of distinguishing between organizational development and societal rootedness, both regarded as key constitutive elements of party institutionalization (Kuenzi and Lambright 2001; Mainwaring 1999; Webb and White 2007; Basedau and Stroh 2008). Most extant conceptualizations of party institutionalization make use of Huntington (1968) and Panebianco (1988) to emphasize the importance of both organizational stability and value-infusion. We here define party institutionalization as a process whereby electoral vehicles or political parties acquire greater levels of organizational stability and organizational value, in both external and internal dimensions. Thereby, an electoral vehicle becomes more institutionalized when its internal rules and procedures (for reaching decisions, candidate selection, leadership selections, etc.) are valued, abided by, and not arbitrarily or frequently changed. An electoral vehicle also becomes more institutionalized when it acquires more independent electoral and political value in the eyes of citizens and the politicians who comprise it, thus enhancing the loyalty both showcase toward it. The reasons why an incipient partisan organization may come to acquire more political value, of course, are manifold. It may develop a party brand that stabilizes its intertemporal vote patterns and thus allows politicians to develop a career within it. Or the organization may be able to provide administrative and symbolic resources that individual politicians would not otherwise have access to (Cyr 2017). The causal factors underpinning party institutionalization are complex and multifaceted. Bolleyer and Ruth-Lovell (2018) demonstrate the

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complex array of empirical conditions associated with party institutionalization in the dimensions of routinization and value infusion for a sample group of 18 Latin American democracies. These conditions include access to executive office, a party’s formative environment, group ties, party system polarization and fragmentation, permanent state subsidies, and legislative office. The use of the term political party suffers from conceptual stretching, for it is used to describe very different political formations in terms of their degree of institutionalization. Their ability to fulfill essential functions of representation, interest aggregation, state–society mediation, recruitment and training, and coordination of political elites, among others, can vary enormously. Luna et al. (2021) have recently provided the most comprehensive attempt to delineate a conceptual scheme separating full-fledged political parties from diminished subtypes. The authors wield two keystone definitional attributes of political parties as their point of departure, based on a synthesis of standard political science theory: horizontal coordination and vertical interest aggregation. Fullfledged political parties facilitate the coordination of ambitious politicians during campaigns and during electoral cycles, while they also mobilize and intermediate collective interests and demands between election (vertical interest aggregation). In the empirical world, electoral vehicles vary dramatically in the extent to which they exhibit these two traits. Only those entities that exhibit both collective action and vertical aggregation capacities deserve the label of “political parties” in this conceptual scheme. Those entities that showcase horizontal coordination but little to no ability to channel and represent societal interests are labeled unrooted parties. Electoral vehicles that exhibit the opposite combination of characteristics, such that they represent interest groups and evince formal or informal links to them but do not coordinate the actions of politicians, are labeled uncoordinated parties. An increasing number of electoral vehicles in Latin America lack both traits, which places them in the category of Independents. This diminished subtype proliferates in the context of party system crisis, or in a post-party system collapse environment (Morgan 2011; Melendez 2014) and is most prevalent in party nonsystems (Sanchez 2009). Peru as a case study holds especial relevance for theorizing about party non-building, not least because thirty years have elapsed since it suffered party system collapse. It thus offers a lengthy

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timespan to analyze the rise and fall of newly created parties and to draw implications about the difficulties inherent to party institutionalization in post-collapse environments. After experiencing partial or total party system collapses, several Latin American countries have witnessed a rise in the number of Independents. Purely personalist vehicles have acquired added political relevance and electoral prowess in the region over the past quarter-century. Within a polity, however, it is common to observe electoral vehicles that differ in levels of institutionalization, sometimes markedly. Political parties and diminished subtypes can, of course, coexist within the same political system. 2.1

Scoring and Placing Peruvian Electoral Vehicles

We here deploy the expert survey devised by Luna et al. to score six key Peruvian electoral vehicles in terms of institutionalization. Several scholars with expertise in Peruvian electoral vehicles were asked to evaluate one vehicle across several issue-areas that, in the aggregate, yielded a composite score for each of the two key dimensions1 : “vertical interest aggregation” and “horizontal coordination” for the 2010–2020 period. The findings can be seen in Fig. 1. Using Luna et al.’s (2021) innovative categorization and accompanying survey questionnaire also allows us to situate Peruvian vehicles within the broader fauna of Latin American electoral vehicles and political parties (see Fig. 2) on the basis of the same survey and evaluative criteria. The picture that emerges is unmistakable: most Peruvian electoral vehicles are best conceived as either Unrooted Parties or Independents. This is true of both the so-called traditional parties as well as those electoral vehicles created in the post collapse period—that is, post 1990. While it is widely acknowledged that Peru ranks among the least institutionalized party universes in Latin America (Mainwaring 2018), no work has yet assessed in a theory-informed fashion how each of Peru’s main electoral vehicles stands across standard dimensions of party institutionalization. Scholarly descriptions of organizations such as APRA, Fujimorismo, or the Peruvian Nationalist Party (PNP) sometimes differ in appraising their level of institutionalization because this multidimensional 1 These scholars were: Carlos Melendez, Rodrigo Barnechea, Sofia Vera, Mauricio Zavaleta, Felix Puemape, Valerie Tarazona Kong and Jennifer Cyr. I am grateful to all for their input.

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0.4

0.6

Frente Amplio

Partido Popular Cristiano APRA

0.2

Vertical Interest Aggregation

0.8

1.0

4

Partido Nacionalista Peruano

0.0

Fuerza Popular

0.0

0.2

0.4

0.6

0.8

1.0

Horizontal Coordination

Fig. 1

Peru parties

concept is not disaggregated into its constitutive components. Figure 2 offers a broad canvas of Latin American electoral vehicles and parties that can serve as a benchmark against which to place Peruvian vehicles. On average, Peruvian vehicles score higher in terms of their horizontal coordination capabilities by comparison to their ability to aggregate societal interests. Only the leftist Frente Amplio showcased a healthy score across both dimensions. This leftist outfit has also been the least influential of the vehicles here considered, on account of its small parliamentary presence and inability to be competitive at presidential elections. Peru Posible, Partido Nacionalista Peruano and Fuerza Popular (Fujimorismo) are revealed as pure Independent vehicles. That Peru Posible ranks as severely underinstitutionalized is not surprising, for there is overwhelming evidence that this outfit was little more than Alejandro Toledo’s personal vehicle, and that it enjoyed little social rootedness, or internal coherence inasmuch as it was crafted as a coalition of independents (see: Tanaka 2004; Taylor 2005; Levitt 2012, 137–142; Vera 2011; St John 2011).

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1.00

FA

Justicialist Party

MAS

PRD

Vertical Interest Aggregation

Colorado Party

VP

0.75 MORENA

PRO

PLN

PAC PC

0.50 AP

PLRA PL PPD

0.25 UNE

PJ FP

0.00 0.00

0.25

0.50

0.75

1.00

Horizontal Coordination

Fig. 2

Latin American parties

Perhaps less obvious is the placement of Fujimorismo as an Independent diminished subtype. At first blush, arguments made in the 2010s that Fujimorismo was showing possible signs of enhanced institutionalization (Levitsky 2018), as well as the observable reality that the outfit commanded a steady share of the vote throughout the 2011 and 2016 electoral campaigns—eluding the high electoral volatility of its adversaries—do not seem to concord with the institutionalization scores here obtained. That is in good part because electoral performance and stability are not tantamount to social rootedness. Fujimorismo’s electoral performance in the 2010s has far outpaced its social rootedness. Moreover, Fujimorismo’s collective action capabilities have been overestimated and have dwindled through time. Vergara and Augusto’s (2021, 354) indepth study concludes that “Fujimorismo is a weak electoral coalition composed of politics devoid of major social connections.” The Partido Nacionalista is also situated in the category of an Independent outfit, albeit it scores better on horizontal coordination abilities than on vertical

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aggregation. The conservative PPC, the populist APRA, and the centerright Accion Popular belong to the category of Unrooted parties, because their intra-party coordination abilities are slightly over the 0.5 threshold on a 0 to 1 scale. These parties have some capacity for coordination among their elites, however, over time this capacity has dwindled, most overtly in Accion Popular. In sum, neither APRA nor AP are far from the category of Independents—a slight decrease in their coordination score would place them in that category. Overall, these expert surveys show that Peruvian electoral vehicles evince some variation in their ability to coordinate political elites but are uniformly deficient in aggregating interest groups in society. Their representation and interest incorporation qualities are abysmal. The expert survey results reveal that there is only one entity deserving the label of a political party in Peru—Frente Amplio—while the other six are diminished type electoral vehicles that do not rise to the standard of a political party proper, following the theoretical classificatory scheme of Luna et al. (2021). Moreover, in recent years the Frente Amplio has showcased increased disarray, defections, lack of internal autonomy, violations of party statutes, a major factional split, and electoral decline, all of which have set the political formation on a path of convergence toward other more inchoate vehicles. Over time, the Frente Amplio has become quite aligned with the Peruvian norm, feckless and personalist, and lacking unity. To situate Peruvian vehicles within the Latin American partisan landscape, it is useful to compare Figs. 1 and 2. Latin American counterparts that share the unrooted party status include the Party of the Brazilian Democratic Movement in Brazil or the Partido por la Democracia (PPD) in Chile (Luna et al. 2021, 9). The most underinstitutionalized of the diminished party species, Independents, include Guatemala’s Union Nacional de la Esperanza (UNE) and Paraguay’s PLRA, among innumerable other examples across the region. The expert survey approach is very valuable to measure vehicles’ level of institutionalization against one another and to place them within a well-regarded typology. However, this exercise can only offer a snapshot in time (or average over time) of these vehicles’ level of institutionalization. The scoring tells us little about their inter-temporal evolution and inner political life through time. Electoral vehicles may undergo institutionalization or deinstitutionalization over time. This chapter shows that in Peru, the latter constitutes the empirically dominant trend. In

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Table 1 Dimensions of Party Institutionalization External Internal

Stability

Value-Infusion

Roots in Society Level of Organization

Autonomy Coherence

turn, this empirical regularity—observed also in much of Latin America— points to the error of using party age as a measure of, or proxy for, institutionalization, as the party scholarly literature often does. With the objective of tracking the inter-temporal evolution of these political formations, this chapter evaluates the institutionalization of Peruvian parties according to three of the four criteria outlined by Basedauh and Stroh (2008). The dimensions of institutionalization evaluated are as follows: rootedness in society, measured by electoral performance and volatility as proxies; party autonomy2 from individual leaders and founders, which gauges the degree to which the latter are constrained via informal or formal partisan structures; party coherence, which denotes the degree to which the party acts as a unified organization commanding cadres’ loyalty. Autonomy and coherence are external and internal dimensions of value-infusion, respectively; whereas social rootedness and party organization are elements of external and internal stability, respectively (see Table 1). Party organization is here sidestepped for reasons of space and for lack of reliable, comparable information across all parties. The available evidence on Peruvian parties’ enforcement level of their parchment rules, formation and reservoir of cadres, strength of their deliberative organs, party finance, or national territorial reach, point to very low levels of institutionalization along the (multidimensional) organizational criterion (Melendez 2007; Zavaleta 2014). The study of party organizations in Peru and much of Latin America remains something of a black box, in part due to the high informational demands inherent to the enterprise of data collection along this dimension as well as political parties’ reluctance to pry open this box, particularly as it refers to the informal rules of the game. Most political parties and electoral vehicles in Latin America

2 Party autonomy can also allude to meaningful independence from particular interest groups, such that the party has an independent identity and purpose, and is not merely an instrument created by a special interest group to advance its interests.

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are internally governed by informal institutions (see: Freidenberg and Levitsky 2006) and are burdened by varying levels of personalism. Let us briefly stetch out the substance of three dimensions perused in this chapter. Basedauh and Stroh’s conceptual dimensions are broadly in alignment with conventional conceptualizations of party institutionalization, such as Randall and Svåsand’s (2002a). Their dimensions also have strong resonance with Luna et.al’s conceptualization of party institutionalization: party coherence aligns with the variable “horizontal coordination,” while “social rootedness” aligns with vertical aggregation capabilities. Party coherence on the part of party officials, “in the sense of loyalty towards the organization they act for, signifies that they value it in terms of abstract existence (Basedauh and Stroh 2008, 10). This loyalty implies the “subordination of private interests for the sake of the party’s performance (ibid.).” Partisan coherence facilitates the advancement of a political party’s ambitions and performance in the electoral arena, in the executive, and in the legislative realm. Voters tend to reward coherent parties, and punish those formations whose members contradict one another, send mixed messages, and act at cross-purposes. Coherent parties are better able to provide a robust and consistent opposition to incumbents. Finally, they are also better able to coordinate their actions across branches when they ascend to the executive, articulating executive-legislative relations in predictable ways. It can also help with party building, including in the maintenance of a party brand. Coherence may ensue from several different sources, including shared historical experiences, ideological commitment, devoted adherence to rules, or personalistic leaders with internal dominance (on this last source, see Van Dyck 2018b). Schisms can be fatal for the future of a fledging political party (Van Dyck 2018a). While personalism can be a source of internal loyalty and coherence, it is a vulnerable sort of glue, particularly if it is based on an instrumental calculus—usually a leader’s electoral appeal. As soon as personal brands become diluted and the electoral viability of a leader is seriously damaged, the latent incoherence of a political formation is usually activated. Factionalism is conceived as antithetical to party coherence (Janda 1980). Factions within a party may emerge and solidify as a result of ideological differences or personalistic power struggles, to name the two most obvious ones. But factions do not work against party institutionalization in all settings. Of particular relevance is the degree to which the factions are institutionalized, “in the sense of being

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mutually governed by recognized rules and procedures,” as Randall and Svåsand (2002a, 20) write. Where the internal rules are weak, rampant factionalism can break havoc upon an electoral vehicle. Partisan social rootedness denotes close links between an electoral vehicle and society. This can either refer to the adherence of large collections of individual citizens to an organization or to linkages vis-à-vis organized civil society—labor unions, or organized business, peasants, social movements, churches, Non-Governmental Organizations, professional groups, and others. The linkages between these interest groups and parties may be formal or informal. Parties that have developed a core constituency among the citizenry are rewarded with stability in voting patterns. To be sure, the sources of partisan social rootedness are varied. They can be based upon programmatic linkages, or interest incorporation linkages, or a party brand rooted in socio-cultural aspects. The presence of parties with social rootedness is, of course, essential for the representative function of democracy. However, it constitutes a necessary but insufficient condition for the advent of representative government: only when an electoral vehicle can both coordinate political elites and aggregate social groups can it “establish a coherent and legible offer for voters, channeling demands and interests of social groups to transform them into policies” (Luna et al. 2021, 303). In the absence of one of these two traits, the representative quality of democracy, as well as its function, is hampered. Party autonomy has been theorized as a condition whereby an organization is externally autonomous such that it possesses functional independence from other organizations. By contrast, electoral vehicles are epiphenomenal if they are a mere extension of another organization or an individual politician. This points to the importance of studying internal autonomy. The variable of party autonomy is not captured in Luna et al.’s (2021) two-pronged conceptualization of party institutionalization. In a national context in which many vehicles appear to be simply extensions of individual politicians and have little independent electoral clout, external identity, value infusion, or organizational separateness, it is particularly important not to sideline this dimension of institutionalization. As Panebianco (1988, 21) has written, “in order to examine a party’s organizational order we must first investigate its power structure: how power within the organization is distributed, how it is reproduced.” One key dimension of party institutionalization is “the degree of correspondence between a party’s statutory norms and its actual power structure (Panebianco 1988, 58–59).” Party statutes are routinely subverted when

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a party leader is de facto above the parchment rules and can proceed to make decisions with full discretion. The personalization of decisionmaking within electoral vehicles is one of the chief obstacles to party institutionalization (Harmel and Svasand 2019). Nominal power structures among political parties may differ considerably but can be rendered quite similar if parties undergo personalization of power. Insofar as politics in Peru is perceived to be person-centered, it is pertinent to ask: which existing electoral vehicles constitute bona fide political institutions evincing operational and political autonomy from their founder and/or leader? Relatedly, do such vehicles develop autonomy and value-infusion through time, as revealed from the inter-temporal trajectory of Peruvian political formations? Delving into these important questions justifies the separate consideration of this variable in this chapter. 2.2

Party Institutionalization, Party Systems, and Democracy

There exists a general correlation between party institutionalization and democratic quality and consolidation (Mainwaring 2018). Moreover, institutionalized parties can be a crucial first line of defense in the protection of democracy against authoritarian takeovers, as Bernhard et al. (2020) show empirically for a large set of countries. But the relationship between party institutionalization and the level of democracy is not straightforward. A democracy lacking institutionalized parties will inexorably reveal serious deficits in quality and lower prospects of democratic consolidation. However, party institutionalization per se is an insufficient condition for democratic consolidation. Political scientists increasingly recognize that party institutionalization does not contribute to democratic consolidation or to the quality of democracy in linear fashion, and under certain conditions institutionalized parties can damage democracy. What accounts for the complexity of this relationship? First, party institutionalization in the dimension of electoral support may be the product of broader institutional and cartel type arrangements that limit democratic competition but are not indicative of strong linkages with society. Such arrangements are inherently brittle. Second, the effect of party institutionalization on democracy is mediated by several factors, one of the most important of which is ideological polarization (Yarmdimci-Geyyikci 2015). High levels of polarization amid highly institutionalized political parties visit great damage upon democratic governance, as party actors come to view democratic opponents as mortal

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enemies to be defeated at all costs, including rule-breaking behavior. In that context, institutions are more prone to be used as tools against opponents and lose their conflict-management potential as they decay in strength. Third, political parties can be over-institutionalized, such that they become self-referential and unable to mediate social and political conflict, and unresponsive to social demands. Over-institutionalized parties co-opt part of civil society and stifle independent associational life. Because of their very nature, over-institutionalized parties are brittle and can break down because of their inability to represent society or adapt to new conditions and demands from below. This can pave the way for the breakdown of democracy itself. Venezuelan democracy under the ADCOPEI partisan duopoly of power provides the classic example in Latin America (Coppedge 2007). Similarly, the relationship between party institutionalization and party system institutionalization is also more complex than scholars initially theorized. It has been long assumed that “the institutionalization of a party system directly depends on that of individual parties” (Meleshevich 2007, 16). But the latter may be better conceptualized as a necessary but insufficient condition for party system institutionalization. Party and party system institutionalization may not be mutually supportive in some cases, and in others they “may be at odds,” as Randall and Svåsand (2002b) point out. A systemic party can be highly institutionalized but concurrently behave in ways that impede the institutionalization of party rivals. Third, inter-party asymmetries in levels of institutionalization within a polity can be damaging for democracies, because organizational assets can be the source of important power asymmetries between parties that can aid processes of autocratization (Sanchez-Sibony 2014; Corrales 2008, 66–68).

3

The Fate of the Traditional Parties in Post-Fujimori Peru

The 2001 presidential and parliamentary elections witnessed the electoral success of politicians associated with party politics during the 1980s. Some scholars tentatively labeled these results a “resurgence” or “rebirth” of the Peruvian party system (Kenney 2004) or a “partial resurgence” of it (Levitt 2012, Chapter 4). The resurgence of a party system could not be certified on account of the results of one electoral cycle, however, for one election (or two) does not a party system make. A system implies

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some regularity in voting patterns and stability in the identity of its main units, which cannot be ascertained by analyzing one snapshot in time of electoral results. In fact, that members of the traditional (1980s) political class could obtain good electoral results in the immediate post-Fujimorato period was, in a real sense, a manifestation of the absence of party system reconstruction, not a measure of its renewal. In the 2001 presidential and parliamentary contests, the openness of a party universe composed of floating voters, a group now swelled by ranks of Fujimoristas who either became disenchanted or were forced to vote for other candidates given the absence on the ballot of Alberto Fujimori, opened a window of opportunity to seasoned politicians as it did for outsiders. Circumstantial and agency-type factors can be summoned to explain the electoral performance of traditional politicians at that conjuncture. The abrupt implosion of the Fujimorato regime and what it revealed about its unsavory inner workings (Degregori 2000; Cotler and Grompone 2000) endowed traditional party politicians with negative legitimacy, or that which accrues from what a political player does not represent (in this case, authoritarianism with a Mafioso flavor). However, little had changed structurally or institutionally to suggest that Peru in 2001 enjoyed a better environment for the construction of a bona fide and stable party system; nor had the incentive structure pervading the Peruvian political landscape changed to entice politicians to invest in arduous party-building. The three subsequent parliamentary and presidential contests shattered the notion that Peruvian party system was being reconstructed. The presumed resurgence of Peru’s political society of the 1980s in the early 2000s has been revealed as a mirage in a very barren partisan desert. Instead, the postFujimorato period has provided abundant evidence that Peruvian politics has not recovered from the implosion of the (proto) party system of the 1980s. Evidence that traditional party labels had become a clear liability for office-seekers during the 1990s was abundant and unmistakable (Degregori 2000; Conaghan 2005; Tuesta 2005; Roberts 2006). Thirty years after the demise of the party system, the landscape for party-building remains forbidding. Three phenomena illustrate the changed landscape: the defections of ambitious party politicians from their label to run as independents; the hiring by traditional parties of independent or nonaffiliated candidates to lead electoral tickets; and the proliferation and success of political outsiders (Taylor 2007; Roberts 2006; Melendez 2011a, 2011b). All three processes were at work in the 1990s and

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continue to define political life in a “post-Fujimori society,” as the late Peruvian sociologist Julio Cotler aptly named it. A perusal of the trajectory and evolution of the surviving traditional parties qua institutions paints a very desolate picture. All of them show clear signs of profound deinstitutionalization and much-weakened popular support. While they were never solid agents fulfilling the classic functions of political parties (representation of social groups, mediation between state and society, aggregation of societal interests, the recruitment and training of cadres), Peru’s traditional parties have moved ever further away from that textbook ideal. In their modus operandi and institutional feebleness, the traditional parties have converged in form and function with the feckless electoral vehicles against which they compete. 3.1

Alianza Popular Revolucionaria Americana (APRA)

The APRA is Peru’s oldest surviving party, boasting a long if tortuous trajectory in twentieth-century Peruvian history (Manrique 2009; Graham 1992). It has often been taken as an article of faith that APRA is the only entity that escapes the vacuous nature of political parties in Peru—in allusion to their lack of programmatic content, their purely pragmatic character, their lack of linkages with and rootedness in society, their domination by a caudillo, or their pursuit of private rather than public interests. But such an assertion could not be made in the postFujimorato era. Its hallowed origins notwithstanding, APRA has come to resemble in most respects the empty and feckless electoral vehicles against which it competes. 3.1.1 Autonomy Alan Garcia, who took the mantle from the legendary Victor Raul Haya de la Torre as APRA’s leader, governed the internal life of the party with an iron fist. In his quest to maintain his status atop the party, he systematically suppressed promising party figures that could potentially contest his all-encompassing leadership and played divide-and-rule tactics to remain the indispensable leader. In addition to structural demand-side factors beyond party control, agency (on the part of Garcia) is responsible in no small measure for APRA’s growing deinstitutionalization. Upon becoming the organization’s Secretary General in the 1983 party congress, Alan Garcia “began dismantling many elements of the party: discipline, symbols, basic programmatic and party platform commitments,

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and the vibrancy of internal debates,” in the words of former Aprista leader Jesus Guzman Gallardo (Saravia 2010). Garcia brought to the party, individuals who were not Apristas, including Leon Alegria and Jorge del Castillo, as well as figures who had been expelled from the organization, such as Mercedes Cabanillas and Gonzalez Posada. These were early signs that the new leader aimed to disrupt many party traditions and exercise leadership with utmost personal discretion. Many of the bewildering decisions and developments witnessed inside APRA have simply obeyed efforts to further Garcia’s personal interests, not to develop the party as an institution. Once ensconced as President of the Republic for a second time in 2006, Garcia all but ignored the party during his time in power, in much the same fashion as in his first term (1985–1990) (Sandborn 1991). In both administrations, governing cabinets were largely filled by independents, while the party was not consulted and enjoyed little input on important public policy decisions. (Crabtree 1992; Graham 1992). During the 2006–2011 Aprista administration, Garcia effected a move to the right that contravened the party’s ideological traditions, as well as his campaign platform. The rightward programmatic shift also generated unease among a good number of party cadres. It was a move toward the adoption of neoliberalism tout court that was not consulted inside APRA. Garcia was determined to erase the memory of disastrous performance associated with the economic populism that doomed his first government. While the macroeconomic picture was highly favorable during this second administration (2006–2011), and economic growth rates were high, fueled by the commodity boom (2003–2013), the Aprista leader bypassed an opportunity to enhance social integration and to improve the quality of public services. The narrow-mindedness of his policy objectives in office—that is, catering to the investor class and the macroeconomy alone—produced pernicious consequences for his party. The APRA, historically endowed with an imagery that positioned it as the representative of the popular and working classes, suffered a dilution in its party brand. Unlike other episodes of party brand dilution in Latin America, this one was not a result of an austerity-type economic environment that reduced the viable economic policy options available to the incumbent party. Rather, it was the result of Garcia’s political overlearning (in reference to his failed 1985–1990 government) and governing pragmatism. His unswerving command over the APRA made possible this new party orientation without internal deliberation. In terms of his public image, “Garcia came to be perceived as another politician of the political

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right and his popularity descended notably, not least because he had not fulfilled his promises” (Torres 2010, 157). Garcia’s anti-party behavior was a constant throughout his political life as APRA’s leader. During the two times he served as President of the Republic, he undermined the party, while out of power he did not provide active support to APRA presidential or legislative candidates. In the 1990 contest, his support for the party’s presidential nominee Castro Alva was tepid at best, insofar as Alva’s success could derail Garcia’s return to power in 1995. This behavior was repeated in the 2011 contest, when Garcia put distance between him and the party. His calculated indifference did little to prevent the organization from descending into ugly internal squabbles that damaged the party brand and its cohesion; nonetheless, the internal disarray placed Garcia in a better position to lead APRA’s presidential party ticket again in 2016, just as he intended. Alan Garcia’s logic was consistent through time: to make the political terrain fertile for his personal power-centered ambitions, which often enticed him to sabotage his own party and rising figures within it. In short, Garcia actively disinvested in the APRA as a rules-based and autonomous organization since becoming Secretary General of the organization in 1982; the institutionalization of APRA was damaged as a result. In private, Garcia confided that his worth as a political actor went beyond that of APRA and that the party bureaucracy and party interests held him back (Tanaka 2011a). Garcia’s political dream appears to have been to create a party-movement larger than the APRA, as when he floated the idea of concocting a Frente Social (a broad alliance including organized business, labor unions, peasants, and other groups) for the 2006 campaign (Peru 21, 2004). This was conceived as an all-encompassing PRIista type structure. The APRA’s voyage toward personalization deepened and was on full display during the Humala presidency (2011–2016). Rather than rebuilding lost links with society, developing a programmatic profile, or forging a constructive opposition to the Humala government, APRA cadres spent most of their time and the organization’s political capital defending Alan Garcia from well-founded accusations of corruption and influence-trafficking in the case of the narco-indultos (Peru 21, 2015). Garcia granted sentencing reductions to more than 3000 individuals charged with narco-trafficking and freed from jail more than 1100 narcos, “a ghost that followed him even before the revelations about the Lava Jato corruption scandal” (El Comercio 2020d). The General Attorney’s office would later determine that the second Garcia government had created a de facto criminal

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organization (the Commission on Presidential Pardons) to grant these reductions in exchange for money for party coffers (ibid.). These illicit activities implicated at least 13 APRA party members. APRA’s steadfast defense and protection of Garcia revealed the degree of partisan involvement in the scandal as well as a shared perception of where the organization’s short-term electoral interest rested. Aprista party notables and insiders considered their political future to be inexorably tied up to the political future of Garcia himself. In seeking to shield Garcia from public opprobrium at any cost, the party again subordinated its interests as an institution and a brand, to those of its longtime leader. This behavior on the part of party apparatchiks only accentuated an ongoing pattern amidst Aprismo. Writing in 2010, the renowned Peruvian intellectual Carlos Ivan Degregori offered this assessment of the APRA: What is most discouraging about those of us who miss political parties has been to see… the conversion of this party of militants into a party of sycophants of a second messiah… starting in the 1980s but particularly since 2006…the shout of “Alan si puede” [Alan can do it] heard in Congress on July 28 was a declaration of intent on the part of the Aprista leadership, extirpating themselves voluntarily from any semblance of agency in order to put their future as courtesans in the hands of the only one able to guarantee them an intermittent [political] life. (Degregori 2015, 565)

Degregori rightly noted that the personalization of power and decisionmaking was rooted not only in Garcia’s purposeful erosion of the institutional edifice of Aprismo; a permissive causal factor behind APRA’s institutional personalization can be traced to party notables’ abdication of the defense of the party qua institution. To summarize, the post-Haya de la Torre APRA was unable to shake the caudillismo that always pervaded the organization. While it was Garcia-centered in the 1980s, the party’s level of personalization became more extreme in the post-Fujimorato era. The degree to which the party transmuted into an instrument of Garcia closely resembles the predicament of parties such as Toledo’s Peru Posible, Humala’s Partido Nacionalista Peruano or Castaneda’s Somos Peru. The decade of the 2010s showed that the APRA no longer enjoyed any more autonomy from the party leader than other Peruvian party formations. Its pedigree at the center of Peru’s twentieth-century political history endowed it with some internal and external value-infusion. But by the mid-2000 the APRA had degenerated, to a large degree, into

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Garcia’s personal instrument. The 2016 presidential elections confirmed that Garcia’s personal brand was irreparably damaged, associated in the public imagery with corruption and extensive self-dealing. Alan Garcia was perceived by the Peruvian public as the most corrupt politician in the country; a remarkable 87% of Peruvians thought him to be corrupt. He was burdened by the highest public rejection rate among any of the Presidential candidates (Anti-Alanismo became even more prevalent than anti-Fujimorismo), in good part due to his over-exposure in Peruvian public life and, especially, the manifold corruption scandals in which he was implicated (Ioris 2016). The leader of Aprismo’s performance in the 2016 election sealed his political descent into irrelevance. He gathered a mere 5.8% of the vote in the first round, far from what was necessary to make it to the second round (Dargent and Munoz 2016). The legal troubles afflicting Garcia seemed to catch up with him by 2018, as he faced formal accusations of money laundering and collusion with the Brazilian giant Odebrecht (El Pais 2018a). These developments underscored, once more, the mortal dangers of tying the fate of a political party to the political fortunes of one man. Garcia had been able to skirt the many formal corruption processes throughout his political career due to Aprismo’s considerable influence vis-a-vis the Fiscalia and the judicial system, “with the same efficiency as evidenced when [Garcia] was President of the Republic” (Leon Moya 2020, 102). Traditionally, judges and public prosecutors archived most of the cases against him. However, a new cohort of judges who managed the Oderbretch scandal operated with unprecedented judicial autonomy from political powerbrokers. In addition, Alan Garcia’s clout inside the mass media ecosystem also diminished, and his ability to influence public opinion waned (Leon Moya 2020, 105–106). These developments transpired in a context where corruption became a leading concern among Peruvian citizens, as revealed by public opinion polls. In a dramatic denouement, when Garcia reckoned that his ability to evade justice was spent, and police officers came to arrest him, he shot himself. Garcia’s departure offered, in principle, a golden opportunity to rebuild itself as an organization along new lines, without the oppressive influence of the party caudillo. However, the legacy of more than three decades of active party disinvestment weighted heavily: the party brand was much diluted and tarnished, its social base diminished, internal rules of party governance largely absent, and morale among cadres was very low. The absence of the party leader would predictably let surface into the

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open the rifts and factionalism amid the organization, without any figure capable of acting as a bridge between factions. Nor had Garcia groomed publicly a successor who could take over the reins of Aprismo with the implicit widespread approval of its upper cadres. 3.1.2 Partido Popular Cristiano (PPC) In the post-2011 era, APRA has been pervaded by internal factionalism, fostered in no small part by long-simmering resentment among top party figures towards Garcia’s asphyxiating caudillismo. This factionalism followed not ideological fault lines, but eminently personalistic ones, a trait of under-institutionalized political entities. The most relevant such fracture pitted the jorgistas (followers of former prime minister and Aprista heavyweight Jorge del Castillo) against the cuarentones (a group of Apristas in their forties who enjoyed the calculated patronage of Alan Garcia). The cuarentones, led by Omar Quesada (who became APRA secretary general), were fashioned into existence by Alan Garcia, who upon ascending to the presidency wanted to reward some of his favorite party militants with responsibility for managing the government’s social programs—in light of the fact that Garcia had handed most ministerial portfolios to independent figures outside the APRA. Promoting and nurturing this group of young leaders certainly ensured their subservience to Alanismo. The cuarentones faction included Carlos Arana, who headed the FONCODES (or Fund for Social Development and Cooperation), Omar Quesada, head of COFOPRI (Organ for the Formalization of Informal Property), Freddy Hinojosa, who led the National Program of Foodstuff, and Javier Barreda, vice-minister in the Ministry of Labor (Vergara 2011, 50–51). Other more minor factions have also populated the organization. Some party cadres followed Mauricio Mulder, a former party’s Secretary General, who identified with the party’s old guard. Mulder acquired power inside the organization at the behest of Alan Garcia, partly in order to counterbalance the growing clout and autonomy of Jorge del Castillo, who harbored presidential ambitions. Another minor, but short-lived faction was led by party leader Mercedes Cabanillas, a reformer (Caretas 2009). Alan Garcia informally created and nurtured the cuarentones, but he remained studiously above all factions, playing divide-and-rule tactics for personal political gain. This conscious political strategy of Garcia’s comprised both institutional decisions and informal behaviors. In 2004, for instance, Garcia created a collective-leadership structure such that the partisan machinery would be

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concurrently managed by three Secretary Generals: Mercedes Cabanillas, Mauricio Mulder, and Jorge del Castillo (Vergara 2011). This arrangement aimed to avert the concentration of power in any one figure— other than Garcia. Informal tactics also played a role: “within APRA everyone knew that Garcia inflates and deflates aprista cadres, and turns party figures against one another” (Vergara, 2011, 24). In other words, Garcia would sing the praises of, and foist leadership qualities onto, different party figures through time, as it suited his motives. Divideand-rule tactics have clearly created and perpetuated factionalism. But an autonomous source of division was not rooted in human agency, but in APRA’s lackluster governmental performance and the perceived role that particular cadres had played in posting that track record. While factional divisions were somewhat fleeting and changing, their existence reflected a party internally divided and affected by low morale among cadres and the rank-and-file. The glue of party identity and mystique, once the markers of aprismo, had largely dissolved. APRA, now an electoral vehicle more than a party proper, became increasingly self-referential and politically autistic, divorced from its historic social base. More and more of old-timer Aprista elites grew resentful about the high-handed manner that Garcia made decisions and handled internal party affairs, and more were willing to air such grievances openly (El Mundo 2011). Their common refrain was that the party has grown very distant from the ideology and ideals of the historic party patriarch and chief ideologue, Haya de la Torre. The second Garcia administration’s (2006–2011) neoliberal orientation irritated and dismayed a good many partisan militants, insiders, and cadres. Another prominent grievance among some cadres centered on lack of internal party accountability for the corruption enveloping the second Garcia administration (2006–2011)—echoing a central grievance of Aprista militants—and its effect on the external appeal of the organization. In a manifestation of Robert Michels “Iron law of oligarchy,” there was little responsiveness to militant demands of top leadership renewal or accountability for past unethical behavior on the part of Aprista ruling leaders implicated in the well-publicized corruption tarnishing APRA’s 2006–2011 governmental tenure. Many leading jorgistas (including Jorge del Castillo himself) and cuarentones still populated the commanding heights of the party a decade after those events, including the powerful Comision Ejecutiva Nacional party organ. The selection of independent Mercedes Araoz to head the 2011 APRA presidential ticket was the result of a compromise between Aprista

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leaders who could not agree on the designation, given existing internal divisions. It was also a manifestation of the absence of institutionalized leadership (Salazar 2011). The naming of Araoz was proposed by Mauricio Mulder, and unenthusiastically accepted by his internal adversaries precisely because she did not change the internal balance of power amid the organization. Mercedes Araoz had been called the “star minister” of Garcia’s second term and enjoyed favorable ratings in the polls. Some party insiders thus believed she could deliver a coattails effect that would enhance the electoral results of the Aprista congressional slate of candidates. In any case, the constitutional impossibility of fielding Alan Garcia as a candidate, “subsumed APRA into an organizational crisis” (Salazar 2011, 5), one which its weak (and often contested) internal mechanisms of candidate selection could not resolve. Garcia studiously distanced himself from any role in organizational matters as pertains to leadership selection, while he bid his time for his future 2016 presidential candidacy. When Mercedes Araoz accepted to head the APRA presidential ticket on the explicit condition that Aprismo would not field scandal-ridden Jorge del Castillo for a congressional seat, the party demurred, forcing her to renounce her presidential candidacy. The evidence shows that the diminished party had no enforceable accountability mechanism that could help push forward a process of partisan renovation; nor were party elites ready to cede institutional power amid the organization. APRA would come to pay the ultimate price (i.e. the loss of its militant social bases and legal disappearance) for its incapacity to adapt. The factions here described have compromised party unity, but these divisions did not generally extend to open and fragrant partisan disloyalty. The APRA was almost alone among Peruvian electoral vehicles) in the post 2001 era in not partaking in rampant transfugismo (party switching). The APRA also showcased remarkable party discipline in its legislative voting behavior, unlike most other Peruvian electoral vehicles (Valladares 2010). While APRA was unrooted party because it failed in fulfilling the function of vertical integration of societal groups, it was able to minimally achieve the horizontal coordination of ambitious Aprista politicians (see Fig. 1 in this chapter). Alan Garcia’s declining external appeal and mounting legal troubles generated growing unease among APRA cadres during the 2010s, but Garcia enjoyed enough internal dominance within the organization to pre-empt any attempt to carry out a renovation of the leadership. Relatedly, no Aprista within the top echelons mustered enough internal

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support to contemplate replacing the longtime leader of APRA. Crucially, the ample corruption besetting the 2006–2011 government created a commonality of interests vis-a-vis Garcia among those Aprista leaders who had partaken in corrupt and illegal activities. Scholar Luis Pasara writes that the second Garcia government, “elevated corruption to the systemic levels introduced by the Fujimori-Montesinos regime” (Pasara 2021). These partisan leaders were veritable stakeholders in Garcia’s control of the organization, as well as stakeholders in the ghost coalition with Fujimorismo, a coalition that sought, first and foremost, impunity for past illegalities—via its influence in the judiciary and the blockade of legislative initiatives aimed at corruption control or the investigation of past practices. Garcia decided to step down from the presidency of APRA only after the disastrous 2016 general election results, in order to “train young partisan cadres and be an advisor to the party,” in the words of Javier Barreda (El Comercio 2016c). The months previous to the 2021 April general elections showcased an organization in internal disarray and desperate to gain legitimacy vis-a-vis the disenchanted Aprista militancy and appeal amid Peruvian society at large. With Garcia out of the picture, the historic (diminished) party aimed to renovate itself by holding internal primaries to select its presidential and congressional slate of candidates for the general election. The Aprista militancy was summoned to vote in a process that the APRA’s secretary general called “an opportunity to strengthen the party.” Three Apristas aspired to lead the presidential ticket: former congresswoman and minister (during the 2006–2011 Garcia term) Nidia Vilchez, economist Juan Carlos Sanchez, and Rafael Zeballos. All three precandidates expressed confidence in the selection process and the evenness of the playing field; and all three agreed on the urgency of renovating the beleaguered party (El Comercio 2020i). Vilchez won the contest for leading the party ticket. Many new faces won the primaries to decide the candidates that would vie for a seat in Congress in circumscriptions throughout the country. But when the time came to formally register the Aprista candidates with the relevant state entity, the Jurado Nacional de Elecciones, no less than 24 circumscriptions with the corresponding Aprista candidates had been left unregistered at the time of the official deadline. Only the “paperwork” for three circumscriptions had been submitted (Lima was not among them), which mathematically eliminated the possibility that APRA would surpass the 5 percent nationwide threshold or the 7 elected congressmen in more than one jurisdiction, needed to enter Congress (La Republica

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2020e). In an unusual move, the personero (party representative vis-avis the electoral agency) requested that the regional candidates send him the party lists so that he could personally effect the registration. The Aprista cupula (inner leadership circle) had concocted an effective boycott against APRA’s democratically elected slate of candidates and, by extension, against duly elected presidential candidate Nadia Vilchez, who was not fooled by the stratagem. When she made her way to a scheduled party meeting with the party leadership at the Casa del Pueblo (main Apra headquarters) she was denied entry. As she put it: “I am conscious that after 35 years, some [in the party leadership] are opposed to the real renovation of APRA... I am sad to inform that those of us who won the internal primaries and represent that party militancy, have not been registered by the party leaders.” In response, Vilchez demanded “the immediate renovation and reorganization of APRA” via the summoning of an extraordinary congress to replace the existing National Executive Committee (CEN) (La Republica 2020e). Vilchez pointedly named the members of the CEN—in particular Mauricio Mulder, Javier Velasquez Quesquen, and Elias Rodriguez—as the schemers behind the plan, and officially declined to run in the 2021 elections. Once the absence of a presidential Aprista contender was made official, the partido de la estrella lost its party registration vis-a-vis the national electoral management body and would need to begin the registration process from scratch in order to contest future elections. During the post-Alan Garcia period, the APRA qua organization had failed to jumpstart a process of renovating its image and leadership in the most ignominious manner conceivable: beginning a process of internal democracy that was then disavowed by longstanding party notables who represented, and had partaken in, the organization’s ugly recent past. Once more, behavioral personalism aided the self-destruction of yet another Peruvian diminished party. Alan Garcia’s self-referential and corrupt behavior had damaged the party’s future viability from the time he took the reins of government up until his suicide. Now his successors finished the job of APRA’s immolation by reproducing some of the same behavioral patterns, in no small part a legacy of the insidious, non-democratic internal political culture Garcia had bequeathed. The stage was set for a high-level battle between party dinosaurs not wishing to relinquish control and institutional power, and those who, backed by partisan militants, avowedly wanted to transform the organization.

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3.1.3 Societal Roots With the benefit of historical perspective, the end of Alan Garcia’s first presidential term can be said to have “closed, seemingly definitively, the historical phase of the APRA where the party constituted the representation of popular sectors” (Manrique 2009: 411). The electoral performance of APRA in the 2001 general elections, where it catapulted itself to the second round, and the victory in the 2006 presidential contest, conveyed the impression that this historic party had returned to center-stage of Peruvian politics and seemingly provided confirming proof of its institutionalization. This was a misleading reading of events, as later party performance would attest to. The party’s electoral performance in those two presidential elections was more a product of Alan Garcia’s gifts as a politician and campaigner than of APRA’s presumed inherent strengths or linkages with society. The party’s level of institutionalization in the dimension of social rootedness can be gauged by assessing the electoral strength of Aprismo without Garcia. Was the electoral appeal of the party steady through time, regardless of who headed the party ticket? Since the collapse of the party system, whenever the APRA contested presidential elections without Garcia on the ticket, partisan electoral results have almost invariably been dismal. In the 1995 elections the party fielded Mercedes Cabanillas as the presidential candidate and received a mere 4.1 percent of the vote; in the 2000 contest, Aprista candidate Abel Salinas took home a puny 1.3 percent of the vote (Schmidt 2003a). While these two elections, conducted under the reign of fujimorismo, were admittedly not free nor fair and thus cannot be an exact gauge of voter support, they nevertheless gave an intimation of the (meager) electoral appeal of the APRA qua institution—i.e. without Garcia. When Garcia could not run, the dismal performance in polling intentions of chosen Aprista presidential candidates convinced the party to withdraw from participating in the election. In the 2011 presidential race, APRA put up former minister Mercedes Araoz as its candidate. Polls consistently granted the party no more than 3–4 percent of voting intentions before it withdrew from the contest (Pagina 12, 2011). In sum, APRA faced an inescapable dilemma: its institutionalization was eroded by the presence and modus operandi of Alan Garcia, but its electoral strength was seriously damaged without him. The APRA, not unlike Peru’s electoral vehicles at large, has therefore been a prisoner of Peru’s personalistic politics. Another way to gauge APRA’s strength as a political

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organization is to pose the question of whether Garcia would be electorally successful under a different party label. Grosso modo, given the dispensability of party infrastructure for electoral performance witnessed in post-1990 Peru, there is little to suggest that Garcia’s fortunes would would have been doomed without his party’s label or support. It was his charisma, finely tuned political instincts, popular touch, and formidable campaigning skills, together with his renowned political acumen, that were truly valuable for electoral purposes in a landscape dominated by personalistic party-voter linkages. The party brand still enjoyed residual value by the mid to late 2010s, but hardly enough for a less known and gifted Aprista to be electorally competitive. By the early 2010s, APRA’s hard vote was estimated to be merely around 5 percent nationwide (Fundación Friedrick Ebert 2012). APRA’s performance at the regional level was also dismal. It squandered ample electoral terrain even in el solido norte (the northern coast), which has historically been APRA’s electoral bastion. The party lost its Trujillo stronghold in 2006 and other northern party bastions in the regional elections of 2010 (La Republica 2010; Peru 21, 2010; Remy 2011). This historically Aprista territorial stronghold continued to elude the APRA in the 2011, 2016 and 2021 general elections. In addition, the party’s ideological profile was, by early 2010s, in shreds. The programmatic and sociocultural linkages that APRA had historically forged with voters (an ideology characterized as centerleft, anti-imperialist, pro-worker, pro-poor) was left in tatters from the time Garcia governed squarely on the political right during his second term (2006–2011) in office (Tanaka 2008b; Cameron 2011, 387–394). In the minds of many erstwhile voters, and indeed many leading party cadres (particularly old-timers), the very identity of the party was thrown into disarray by Garcia’s embrace of neoliberalism tout court (Perú Hoy 2008). This ideological vacuum was costly in terms of party morale, cohesion, and value-infusion. As a noted biographer of Aprismo, historian Nelson Manrique, wrote: “the major demand from [party cadres] is for an ideology. There is no ideology and the APRA runs the risk of turning into an employment agency (2011, 10).” While historically the APRA’s programmatic identity has been diffuse and malleable, a consequence of its transformations and contradictory historical alliances with political rivals, it was able to maintain a socio-cultural party brand in

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the eyes of its followers. Garcia’s unabashed embrace of pro-market, proforeign investment worldview, alongside his public disdain and condescension of critics of Foreign Direct Investment, severely damaged APRA’s progressive party brand. During the 2006–2011 Aprista administration, public policy was deeply conservative, following a neoliberal program in words and deeds (Tanaka 2008b). Moreover, it missed the opportunity to engage in an active social agenda with the fiscal surpluses emanating from years of high commodity prices. The APRA was thereafter not able to credibly sell itself as a social-democratic party. Some populist parties with socio-cultural brands have in the past changed their ideological stripes without fatal consequences for their electoral fortunes—witness, for instance, the Peronist party transformation under Menemism (President Carlos Menem’s neoliberal orientation). APRA’s move from center-left, to center, and then to center-right (post-2006) seriously diluted the party brand and affected its electoral performance. This drifting, itinerant political voyage reached new heights of incongruity with Alan Garcia’s opportunistic alliance with its longtime ideological rival, the Partido Popular Cristiano, for the 2016 Presidential elections (Puepame 2016). The Alizanza Popular alliance manifested the APRA’s calculation that it stood to fare poorly in the elections if it faced the electoral contest on its own, as shown by early public opinion polls. By associating himself with the PPC, a party of republican values, Garcia hoped to diffuse his public image as a corrupt politician—an image particularly battered as a result of the narco-indultos. Garcia’s disapproval ratings stood at a staggering 83 percent by January 2016 (Puepame 2016, 72). The alliance, however, depleted any residual credibility accruing to the APRA as a reformist party. This maneuver also exacerbated APRA’s internal party problems by reducing the ability to dole out congressional seats among the party’s cadres. By the early 2010s most voters identified Alan Garcia as a right-wing candidate. His voter base was decidedly centered on Lima, drawing upon middle to high socioeconomic strata. The party’s historical popular appeal in regions outside the capital city had faded. All in all, by the early 2010s the APRA had long shed its historic status as a mass-based party and became a professional-electoral party—if one that is differentiated from others on account of its historical significance, pedigree, and residual mystique. High-level APRA party decisions obeyed the logic of electoralist parties. A telling case in point occurred when the APRA chose party outsider Mercedes Araoz (a technocrat

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without party affiliation) to head the 2011 presidential Aprista ticket because public opinion polls indicated she was less “radioactive” than traditional party figures. That is, her personal brand engendered lower levels of rejection amid the electorate. Party insiders also hoped she could help attain for APRA a respectable showing in the parliamentary elections via the coattails effect. It was, in short, a blatant renunciation of party identity and tradition in the desperate search for votes, an act of short-termism reminiscent of those taken by other venerable but sinking parties in Latin America. In the event, an internal dispute between APRA party notable Jorge Del Castillo and outsider Mercedes Araoz, and the absence of solid party support for her candidacy, convinced Araoz to withdraw from the race, leaving the APRA without any presidential candidate. The disarray was compounded by Aprismo’s performance in the concurrent 2011 parliamentary elections, where it barely surpassed the legal threshold for entry, allowing it to fill a meager four seats in the new 2011–2016 Congress (La Republica 2011b). Its subnational performance over time unmistakably points to a steady decline. In 2002 APRA won 12 regions and 34 provinces; in 2006, it scored victories in 2 regions and 17 provinces; in 2010, the diminished tally was one region and 9 provinces (Vera 2010); while in 2014 failed to win any region and only won 3 provinces. APRA’s 2014 showing was particularly symptomatic of its societal uprootedness because it failed to win in its historic electoral bastion (el solido Norte), the province La Libertad, where, from 2014 onward, it was surpassed in importance by an electoral vehicle of recent creation, Cesar Acuna’s APP. Predicting a lackluster performance in the 2016 presidential elections, APRA forged a last-minute alliance with the right-wing PPC—named Alianza Popular—to be led by Alan Garcia. The alliance, ideologically incongruous and rather unnatural otherwise, aimed to add both parties’ supposed strengths and presumed loyal electorates. But this (flawed) reasoning contravened the historical performance of such alliances in Peru’s post-Fujimorista society, where voters are guided by personal brands, and thus alliances are often electorally less than the sum of the parts. The meager electoral result, a mere 5.8 percent of the nationwide vote, registered as the third worst in the history of the APRA, only better than the results garnered in the unfree and unfair 1995 and 2000 presidential elections held during the authoritarian Fujimorato without Garcia leading the party ticket. The APRA’s disastrous 2016 presidential election performance showed in no uncertain terms that Garcia’s personal brand was spent. It thus renewed calls within the party for a

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replacement for Garcia, which were led by a faction of young Apristas named Corriente Democratica aiming to renovate the party. Environmental factors beyond APRA’s control inexorably undermined the party, but self-inflicted human agency was also responsible for its electoral descent and increased social uprootedness. High-level corruption uncovered as a result of the Petro-audios investigation, a classic case of corporate kickbacks and influence peddling involving party heavyweight Jorge del Castillo (Gorriti 2009), further dented the capital of a party that founder Haya de la Torre had sought to infuse with the important values of probity and transparency. Well-documented accusations of large-scale corruption during APRA’s 2006–2011 presidency naturally hurt the party image, while Garcia’s narco-indultos (the presidential pardoning of drug lords) cemented the image of Garcia as a fundamentally corrupt politician. The APRA, therefore, did not escape the fate of other Peruvian electoral vehicles which live and die as a function of their patriarch’s fortunes. Notwithstanding its long history as a party which deployed and peddled political ideas, the APRA became part and parcel of Peru’s hyper-personalistic politics. Garcia’s personal foibles sunk the party to a greater degree than would have been the case had the party attained some autonomy from his all-embracing control and successfully engineered the renovation of its top party ranks. Instead, party notables put all their political chips in the Garcia basket, anchored the future of a historic organization upon the fate of one man, deploying a team of damage control spin doctors to defend the leader from corruption charges. Damage control became the diminished party’s key activity in the public sphere for years. (A good number of would-be successors to Garcia or Apristas with potentially prominent political careers were sacrificed and wasted in that task). That strategy proved, long term, to suffer from diminishing (electoral) returns. APRA’s well-known slogan “Solo el APRA salvara al Peru” (only the APRA will save Peru) came to acquire a sad and sarcastic undertone, as the pertinent question became whether the APRA would be saved from itself. Notwithstanding all the above-described succession of political calamities, the APRA was reasonably well-positioned for political survival. In contrast to the other traditional parties, the APRA’s comparative advantage rested on its network of party activists who could “revive” the party even if it failed to gain congressional representation in the future (as it almost occurred in 2011), thus allowing it to emerge from the ashes (Cyr 2011). Its estimated hard-core base of roughly 5 percent of the

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electorate throughout much of the 2010s was hardly enough to make it a systemic or politically influential party, but it was essential from the viewpoint of political survival. However, the string of corruption scandals (illicit financing, Lava Jato, narcoindultos), coupled with APRA’s congressional alliance with Fujimorismo, damaged the party brand further. In the 2020 congressional elections, APRA earned only 2.7 percent of the votes, failing to surpass the 5 percent legal threshold needed for congressional representation. This abysmal performance showed that APRA’s base of loyal voters had eroded, subsuming Aprismo into a truly existential crisis: its future viability qua electoral vehicle was questionable. The crisis predictably accentuated internal squabbles among historic party notables (El Comercio 2020b). 3.2

Accion Popular (AP)

3.2.1 Autonomy Accion Popular was born as a personalistic vehicle created by one of the leading political figures of Peru’s contemporary history, Fernando Belaunde. After AP’s unexpected victory in the 1980 presidential elections, its political capital eroded because of economic and public security malperformance in office (GDP fell by 11%, accumulated inflation stood at 3,584%, and over 8,000 lives were lost in the elusive battle against the Shining Path). The party paid a high price in subsequent electoral support, and never recovered. The firm control of Fernando Belaunde over the party’s internal decision-making was evidenced until his death, inhibiting the development of organizational autonomy. Belaunde decided on his own whom the party chose to lead the presidential ticket or what ideological hue it would present to voters. In a period in which the traditional political class came to be derided and “radioactive” in the public eye, few represented the essence of that out-of-touch cohort of politicians as well as Fernando Belaunde. During the 1990s the party courageously confronted the Fujimori regime, but weakened as an organization, alongside all of Fujimori’s partisan opponents. In a telling sign of the enfeeblement of the organization, Accion Popular candidates were required to donate funds to the party and fund their own campaigns (Levitt 2012, 110). The fortuitous arrival of AP’s Secretary General Valentin Paniagua to the presidency after Fujimori’s resignation infused

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the AP with new hopes (FRIDE 2002). It was believed that the political capital Paniagua had amassed in his widely praised stewardship of the transition to democracy could be leveraged for electoral gain. Paniagua’s death in 2006, left the party leaderless. Accion Popular entered a period when it struggled with political survival. The quest for congressional survival enticed the political formation to join electoral alliances, hoping to live for another day. In the 2011 Congressional elections, it joined Somos Peru and Peru Posible under the banner of the Alianza Peru Posible, which counted with Alejandro Toledo as the presidential candidate. Accion Popular thus relinquished fielding a presidential candidacy of its own, revealing very low confidence in its electoral prospects. It hoped to survive riding the electoral coattails of Toledo’s personal brand. In the process, AP fell short of fulfilling the Giovanni Sartori’s minimalist definition of a political party as an entity that fields candidates for public office. After years in the political wilderness, the party’s upper cadres faced strong pressure from middle-ranked cadres to strive for electoral pragmatism and to open up the process of candidate selection to choose the presidential candidate (Vivas 2020a). The 2015 internal primary election was won by a party newcomer and former member of Aprismo: journalist and intellectual Alfredo Barnechea. Party bases choose the candidate who was deemed to be most electorally competitive, bypassing internal party cadres with longer affiliations to the party, such as Mesias Guevara and Beatriz Mejia. Barnechea’s performance in the 2016 elections was notable. However, failing to enter the election’s second round, Barnechea withdrew from the party’s day-to-day affairs. The traditional political formation entered a period of “hibernation,” until the next presidential contest (Vivas 2020b). In broad terms, it can be averred that during the post 2001 era the AP was not afflicted by the ravages of caudillismo, that is, the practice whereby a leader who enjoys total internal dominance and turns the organization into a personal vehicle. In fact, as later events would soon demonstrate, “the party leadership [was] weak vis-à-vis AP congressmen, mayors, and militants,” (Vivas 2020b). The AP, in terms of its de facto internal power structure, has thus been described as microcephalous, evincing a small head and a large body. The Political Commission organ, which comprises the nominally most powerful members of Accion Popular (Victor Andres Garcia Belaunde, Yohny Lescano, and others), struggles to impose its authority over other

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actors within the organization. Notably, AP mayors, who mobilize the vote in internal primary processes, are endowed with substantial power. Rather than falling prey to one overpowering figure, the AP has been ravaged by power struggles and scuffles between party notables, on the one hand, and between party notables, local officials, and newcomers, on the other. Behavioral personalism among its high-ranking officials has rendered the organization adrift, without internal unity or a political map to follow. 3.3

Partido Popular Cristiano (PPC)

While Paniagua’s interim presidency (2000–2001) successfully steered Peru toward democracy and was widely recognized as laudable and exemplary (PUCP 2010). Paniagua’s decision to govern the above parties and not name AP members to his interim government was a deliberate move to depoliticize his administration in the task of rebuilding democratic institutions that had been decimated during the authoritarian Fujimorato. Because of his successful management of the transition away from authoritarianism, Paniagua accumulated significant electoral capital. His moral authority–derived in no small part from his steadfast opposition to the Fujimori authoritarian regime as well as his career-long adherence to democratic principles–endowed him with the stature of a highly respected elder statesman, a rara avis amid Peru’s undistinguished political fauna. In line with his commitment to place national interests above party interests during the extraordinary transition away from the Fujimorato, he chose not to run in the 2001 presidential election. This decision rendered the party leaderless, curtailing its capacity to maintain the allegiance of militants, who “left the party in droves” (Cyr 2017). In turn, Accion Popular’s seemingly dismal electoral prospects provoked a wave of defections from party free agents who scurried to other party formations that could improve their chances of political survival, reproducing a dynamic frequently seen in Peruvian politics. No less a figure than Raul Diez Canseco, Fernando Belaunde’s nephew, left the AP in order to run as Alejandro Toledo’s Vice-Presidential candidate. The party’s fragmentation and disloyalty of its upper cadres was notable, as Canseco’s case reveals in stark fashion. Since 2015, the Accion Popular had opened itself up to newcomers, thus mimicking the move toward concocting a pure “coalition of independents” that Keiko Fujimori’s Fuerza Popular had embarked upon. This

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pragmatic option, while availing the party of more electorally competitive candidates at the local level, also lowered its already frail internal cohesion. The AP did not enjoy a leadership akin to Keiko Fujimori’s to make its congressional delegation cohere or to impart discipline in the management of the internal affairs of the party. In order to stem defections and open fractures within the party, the AP has deliberatively allowed its congressional delegation to exercise a “vote of conscience” (i.e. a free vote, unencumbered by a party line) on all manner of issues (Vivas 2020b). This deliberate decision to allow room for indiscipline would not be inconsequential. In a plenary process in 2020, the AP bases did a volte-face when it closed the doors newcomers by voting for a party regulation according to which parliamentary candidates must be official militants. This new internal rule foreclosed the discretion of party leaders to invite outsiders. The party was divided, as so often true in Peruvian politics, by personalism. Yohny Lescano, Alfredo Barnechea, and Diez Canseco aspired to head the top of the presidential party ticket. In addition, as the 2021 general elections approached, the party showcased growing divisions in its midst between what have been named conservative and left-wing factions. Components of the latter current, led by AP lawmaker Orlando Arapa, publicly proposed a nationwide referendum to change the national constitution, which earned a public rebuke from the conservative faction, led by Alfredo Barnechea and Raul Diez Canseco (who described himself as a social democrat). Legislative voting patterns showed the left-wing faction dissenting from the party line, while the leftist Antauro Humala’s UN party overtly calling for these leftist AP members to defect and join UN (El Comercio 2020d). The president of the AP, Mesias Guevara also charted an independent route, putting distance between him and the Canseco-Barnechea tandem. Personalism cleaved the electoral vehicle presumably best positioned, on account of public polls, for the 2021 elections: no less than four prominent party members aspired to head the party ticket (La Republica 2020a). As a method to channel those ambitions, the party prepared for bruising internal party primaries to define its presidential candidate, which threatened to formalize the divisions and prompt the party exit of the losers of the primaries alongside the lawmakers that supported them. The Political Committee was barely able to impose, against the wishes of party militants, Manuel Merino as the congressman who would become the President of Congress.

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3.3.1 Social Rootedness Paniagua was chosen as president of the party’s national executive committee for the 2001–2006 period in an extraordinary September 2001 national party congress. While the party had a skeletal representation in Congress, showcasing only three lawmakers, polls placed Paniagua as the most valued politician by Peruvian voters (CIDOB 2016) during the Toledo presidency. Paniagua’s personal brand thus emerged as potentially more valuable than an AP party brand that had been decimated alongside those of other traditional parties. The AP conducted a widely hailed “responsible opposition” to the Toledo government. The party predictably put forth Paniagua to contest the 2006 elections, but his lackluster electoral results were surprising to many observers. While in public opinion polls Paniagua “scored the highest for honesty and commitment to democratic principles,” he was allegedly perceived as “lacking energy and drive” (McClintock 2006, 99). Accion Popular sought to buttress its electoral prospects by building an alliance with two small centerright parties, to conform the Center Front alliance. The Center Front included former Lima mayor Alberto Andrade’s Somos Peru, Yehude Simon’s Movimiento Humanista Peruano (a center-left outfit), and the recently founded Coordinadora Nacional de Independientes. In what constitutes a recurrent feature of Peruvian electoral politics, this electoral alliance proved to be less than the sum of its parts. Again, the strategy to build an electoral alliance proved unproductive in a political environment dominated by personalism. While initially perceived as one of the front-runners in the 2006 election, the Paniagua candidacy declined in the polls and never recovered, ending up with a meager 4.6 percent of votes. The party barely surpassed the legal threshold needed for congressional representation, obtaining only 5 seats. Unlike other traditional parties in Peru that by the 2010s had shot their party brands and come to depend almost exclusively on attractive candidates for their electoral performance, the AP maintained a party brand with some value. The AP’s party brand includes a narrative that “mixes the great infrastructure projects [of Fernando Belaunde] with a preoccupation for the middle and lower middle social classes” (Dargent 2020). But the relative success of Alfredo Barnechea’s 2016 presidential campaign was widely attributed to the personal brand he managed to fashion, not AP’s party brand. Barnechea strayed from an establishment discourse by dint of “openly questioning the prevailing economic model and public policy as regards extractive industries” (Lanegra 2016,

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23). This message gained some traction in social networks. He thus positioned himself as an independent political entrepreneur seeking to tap into the reservoir of negative legitimacy from which many other candidates have profited in Peru’s recent political history. Barnechea’s long stint away from politics (he had been an Aprista lawmaker in the 1980s for a brief time) also granted him the quality of newness, in addition to his intellectual gravitas. However, Barnechea’s personal brand did not generate a discernible coattails effect, given that the parliamentary election yielded a lackluster result for AP: five congressional seats. In practice, the AP’s political journey continued to be a quest for political survival, rather than prominence. During the 2015–2020 period, Accion Popular fared better than other traditional parties. The AP’s distancing from the high stakes brinkmanship between the Fujimorista congressional caucus and President Kuczynski proved politically rewarding. Another newcomer to Accion Popular, Jorge Munoz, won the 2018 provincial mayorship of Lima, a large electoral prize. The party was also successful in winning Lima district mayorships as well as the regional government of Cajamarca. As a result of these victories, the AP party brand became more valuable to free agents with high political ambitions. The party added to its string of good electoral performances in the 2020 congressional contest, where it emerged as the most voted party with 10.2% of the vote. The reason for that (relative) success was largely rooted in the accrual of negative legitimacy: the AP was not involved in the Lava Jato corruption scandal and did not partake in the abusive and unpopular Apro-fujimorista management of legislative power during the ill-fated 2016–2020 Congress (El Comercio 2020a). Accion Popular’s good performance in the 2018 regional and local elections and attendant presence in local administration were also parlayed into good nationwide electoral performance two years later. The district AP mayors who won office in 2018 were able to mobilize their social bases of support in Lima districts such as San Juan de Miraflores, Ate or Magdalena, among others. These mayors thus became important ‘electors’ for the forthcoming internal elections to select the party’s presidential candidate as well as its congressional list for 2021. Merino then emerged as the quixotic protagonist of grand-scale indiscipline: he allowed Alarcon to spearhead in Congress a formal vacancy process against President Martin Vizcarra, without any due previous investigation in the legislature’s Oversight Commission to document and provide proof for the (at the time) alleged Vizcarra infractions. Merino

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then, in private calls, consulted with the military high command in an attempt to garner support for what some analysts called an opportunistic “soft putsch,” one that would have landed the AP lawmaker the interim presidency. These high-profile actions, undertaken by Merino without consultation with his own party, showcased the absence of AP party rules, formal or informal to discipline its legislators. It also evinced the extent to which individualistic motives permeate the behavior of free agents within AP, motives not dissimilar to those found in other Peruvian electoral vehicles. The failure of the illegitimate vacancy attempt, as well as the ignominious circumstances surrounding it, damaged Accion Popular’s centrist party brand as it headed toward the general 2021 elections. The populist fashion in which the AP-led national Congress behaved throughout 2020 betrayed that brand, and consequently, risked the loss of a part of the party base. Interestingly, the information-miser status of many Peruvian voters coupled with personalism in the electorate can partially protect political formations from severe brand dilution. For illustration, a December 2020 poll showed that only 36% of respondents associated Manuel Merino with Accion Popular (El Comercio 2020f). Many voters thus mistakenly attributed the shenanigans of an AP party notable to those of a loose cannon congressman. A large 52% of voters admitted they did not know what political formation Merino represented, while an additional 12% gave a wrong answer about Merino’s partisan affiliation (El Comercio 2020f). Accion Popular’s results in the 2021 parliamentary election provided further supporting evidence for the supremacy of personal brands over party brands in Peru, even for (diminished-type) political parties which can make a claim to possessing an institutional brand. Notwithstanding the disruptive parliamentary behavior of the AP during 2020—fomenting political uncertainty and spearheading the initiative to oust a popular incumbent chief executive by skirting due procedure—it managed to gather a vote total of 9.1% in the 2021 parliamentary elections, not dissimilar to the 10.2% it had posted the year before. Accion Popular’s electoral performance would have been presumably worse except for personalism in the electorate. The AP was buoyed by the personal brand of Johny Lescano, who led the presidential race for some time, and only ceded his rank-order atop voting intention polls with a week to go before Election Day. Lescano was not openly backed by large sections of his fractionalized party. Rather, “he walked alone” during the presidential campaign, and he deliberately distanced himself from Merino-led party

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faction that had triggered the popularly repudiated political crisis a few months earlier. He was also estranged from the party factions led by Raul Diez Canseco and Victor Andres Garcia Belaunde (El Comercio 2021b). Evincing a populist, maverick-type personal brand Lescano managed, in the popular imagery, to blunt the objective reality of his political insider status—namely his socializing experience of 19 years as an AP parliamentarian. Lescano’s leftist discourse and Puno provincial provenance played well in the central and southern highlands comprised of Peruvians not incorporated into state and nation. Conservative on social issues, Lescano was critical of the rules that governed extractive mining activities and hewed to the left on economic matters. Had Jorge Castillo not cannibalized Lescano’s social base of electoral support found in state-neglected regions of Peru during the last days of the campaign, Lescano could have propelled Accion Popular to the presidency despite the organization’s visible internal disarray, collective action travails, and dismal political performance on the national stage. 3.4

The Conservative Right: Partido Popular Cristiano

The Partido Popular Cristiano (PPC) was created in 1966 from a splinter right-wing faction of the Christian Democratic party. The PPC is distinguished in the Peruvian political fauna by being one of the few imbued with an ideological doctrine. It is armed with a declaration of principles that “underscores its humanitarian and social democratic roots, reaffirms the family as the basic unit of society and holds private property a natural right, albeit not unlimited” (Schmidt 2003b, 451). It espouses a neoliberal economic agenda, calling free markets “the expression and guarantee of liberty.” Its high point in electoral terms came in the 1978 Constituent Assembly elections, ruled in coalition with the AP during the 1980–85 Belaunde presidency, and won the mayoralty of Lima in 1983. However, neither of these governing experiences proved successful, and thereafter Fujimori profitably tarnished its reputation by packaging it as part of the discredited “partitocracy.” The party’s history since the mid1980s was buffeted by a string of electoral defeats and a steep descent in terms of social rootedness (Levitt 2012). In the late 1980s, it opposed Alan Garcia’s drive to nationalize the banking sector and joined the FREDEMO coalition led by Mario Vargas Llosa. In the wake of the party system collapse, the PPC possessed little by way of organizational or

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ideational resources (Cyr 2017, chap. 4). Yet, the 2001 general election appeared to give the party newfound political life (Kenney 2003). 3.4.1 Autonomy The PPC has not escaped the Peruvian curse of being overshadowed by caudillista figures. In the 1980s that strongman was limeno lawyer Bedoya Reyes. The PPC participation in the failed Belaunde government of the 1980s (1980–1985), limited the ability of Bedoya Reyes to benefit from the fall of Aprismo in the later half of the decade. It also entrenched the PPC as a failed establishment party in the public imagery, squarely at the center of Alberto Fujimori’s targeted anti-establishment rhetoric. The PPC could not shake the image “as the political vehicle of Lima’s white upper and middle-classes” (Taylor 2007, 4). Bedoya Reyes’ personal brand entrenched that public perception. The party’s greatest asset from the mid-1990s onward has been its new well-known leader, Lourdes Flores Nano. Her personal brand was forged in part by dint of her determined opposition to Alberto Fujimori’s authoritarian regime, when she distanced herself from members of the Partido Popular Crisitano who gave political cover to the regime because of economic policy affinities and material interests. Flores stood as a principled defender of democratic principles. The enormous decision-making power Flores wielded within the PPC became manifested in several ways. Her untrammeled ability to hand-pick individual free agents she identified as promising and her de facto prerogative to offer them party candidacies to important posts without internal consultation, ruffled feathers amid her party. She also repeatedly embarked the PPC on (incongruous) inter-party alliances with other electoral vehicles for the purpose of shoring up the electoral viability of her political formation. These alliances, particularly the 2016 joint venture with the APRA, were opposed by high-ranking PPC officials. As was the case with candidate selection, the decision to forge alliances occurred without an internal process of deliberation. Lourdes’ external appeal, considerably greater than Bedoya’s electoral appeal in the 1980s, granted her a lot of authority within the party. Indeed, during the decade of the 2000s Flores was a demonstrably viable contender for the presidency, twice standing on the brink of entering the second round. Political dynamics within the PCC changed, however, as soon as the decay in her external electoral appeal became more pronounced: internal challenges to her authority grew in tandem with that decay.

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An important difference with other Peruvian political caudillos in their handling of party affairs, however, lies in Lourdes’ deliberate decision to actively promote the PPC’s human capital renovation and position young promising recruits to lead the organinzation into the future. In short, Lourdes actively thought about and sought to foster the party’s future institutionalization, preparing it for the day when she would no longer be in the political scene. And yet, her actions in this respect were contradictory, inconsistent, and sometimes counterproductive. For example, as part of the alliance with Aprismo, she postulated herself as the vice-presidential candidate for the general 2016 elections, long after her mass appeal had waned, instead of promoting one of her young political proteges. The attraction of her personal brand was largely spent by the early 2010s, which prompted her to scale down her ambitions. Lourdes’ leadership was somewhat kept in check due to her rivalry with another PPC caudillo, Raul Castro Stagnaro. Once Castro attained the party presidency, he used this powerful position to attract party cadres to his faction via prebendal tactics, not ideas (Roncal Hernandez 2018). However, neither leader sought to fortify internal party structures so as to make party recruitment and decision-making became less driven by the vagaries of personalism. Life inside the Partido Popular Cristiano during the 2010s was bereft of deliberation or democracy. It was an era of bi-caudillismo at times challenged by younger and leadership-aspiring cadres. 3.4.2 Coherence The PPC has crafted a laudable trajectory as a legislative actor, displaying an organic internal party life, and recruiting and forming party cadres and leaders. A number of these prominent cadres, however, went on to chart a political path as independent politicians—including Alberto Andrade, Alex Kouri, Ernesto Blume, and others—, yet another example of the low partisan loyalty pervading Peruvian politics, even within a traditional party steeped in ideology. Flores became the PPC president in 2003 and began a quest “to move the party to the political center in order to obtain more votes, but also to open the doors of the organization to young professionals outside of politics, aiming to institutionalize the party” (Puemape 2016, 78). Many of these young professionals came to comprise what became known as the Frente Reformista, led by Flores, which aimed to open up the party further so as to democratize its internal structures, and wrestle control away from that party stalwarts that commanded the party bureaucracy. Lourdes Flores, however, ended up granting power to

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a small clique of Lourdistas. In reaction, a good part of the Reformist Front faction came to oppose her, thus contributing to the waning of her influence inside the PPC. Lourdistas, the party cadres Flores has promoted, are described as media savvy, and educated; however, they are faintly tied to the party base and their capacity for mobilizing militants is limited. From 2006 onward, the PPC was internally divided into two factions: the so-called institutionalist wing led by Raul Castro, and the Frente Reformista (Reformist Front). Raul Castro effectively became Flores’ most formidable internal rival. Once Castro obtained the PPC presidency in 2011, he deliberately excluded the Lourdistas from important party postings. The party roster, in control of the Castristas, has often been a source of internal contention, for its composition can decide the fate of party primaries. However, beyond their differences, both factions have recognized the importance of keeping and cultivating party cadres evincing external appeal and electoral prowess. Indeed, the party has granted such promising figures important spheres of power and supported their candidacies to high offices in order to retain them (including Kouri and Heresi)—often to no avail. The PPC has been a leader in the Peruvian landscape in terms of promoting internal democracy. It has held party primaries for the selection of electoral candidates since the 1990s, from mayors to presidential hopefuls. (Other parties that have carried out primaries include the APRA, Accion Popular and Frente Amplio). There is little evidence that primaries have rendered the Partido Popular Cristiano any more electorally competitive; but nor is there evidence that it has damaged its electoral prospects, contra what Colomer (2003) and other scholars have theorized about the effect of party primaries. What can be ascertained is that these PPC party primaries, given their precarious institutionalization and haphazard nature, have not acted as effective mechanisms of dispute resolution within the organization, often resulting in acrimonious disputes that solidify factionalism in its midst (Puemape and Jimenez 2017). The public airing in the mass media of internal infighting is widely recognized to have damaged the PPC’s appeal among voters, much in line with standard theory about the electoral consequences of overt factionalism for parties. Flores has publicly acknowledged that by the mid-2010s, the PPC was a “fractured party” and regretted her contribution to the party’s divisions (Flores 2017). All in all, the Partido Popular Cristiano exhibited more party-like attributes than its Peruvian counterparts. Alongside APRA, the PPC was an entity where politicians continued to pursue partisan careers,

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in contrast to the non-partisan norms of free agency, transfugismo and coalitions of independents that permeate most other electoral vehicles (Levitsky and Zavaleta 2016, 426–427). Nonetheless, over time the PPC’s fading party brand and electoral appeal, spurred once-prominent cadres to defect. By the early 2010s, this conservative formation was hardly an institution within which an aspiring politician could hope to build a political career. The haphazard party “renovation” Lourdes Flores ambitioned did not materialize, in no small measure due to internal divisions amid the organization. The PPC’s electoral fortunes rose and declined in tandem with her personal brand. As Flores’s personal brand diluted, the PPC’s electoral prospects sank with her. 3.4.3 Social Rootedness The Lima-centered organization—with party cadres comprised of lawyers and jurists—was reasonably well-rooted among the middle and upper classes of the capital city but lost the (quite limited) support it once enjoyed elsewhere. While the PPC performance in the 2001 and 2006 presidential election was very promising (Kenney 2003), which delivered 24% of the nation-wide vote, it was not the result of party-building. Rather, these electoral results are derived from Flores’ personal brand. This is clearly manifested in disastrous performances in local and regional elections where the PPC fielded candidates. Without Flores on the ticket, the party floundered. Indeed, the PPC “did not win a single regional or major mayoral election during the 2000s” (Levitsky 2018, 333). An assessment of the PPC’s organizational resources reveal them to be “less territorially widespread than AP or APRA,” such that the party relied on assorted negotiations with local parties and personalities to run candidates outside of Lima (Cyr 2017, 88). The evolution of the PPC-led Union Nacional between 2001 and 2006 would foretell the contours and reasons behind the PPC’s inter-temporal electoral decline. Its vote share became more Lima-centered and also more concentrated in richer sectors of the metropolis. These trends became more accentuated with the passage of time. The great mass of informal workers proved to be out of reach for this conservative political formation (Conaghan 2000). Crucially, the widespread perception of the PPC as a party of the rich, not altogether divorced from reality and peddled to fruition by political opponents, has limited its electoral appeal beyond the confines of Lima. The party continued to be regarded by subaltern Peruvian sectors as racist and elitist, and fundamentally unconcerned with their plight. In short,

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the PPC’s party brand constituted a serious electoral limitation. In the post-Fujimori era and in a country where upwards of two-thirds of citizens live outside of metropolitan Lima, the PPC needed to extend its political constituency beyond the socioeconomic elites that make up its core constituency if it wanted to be competitive in nation-wide elections (Sandborn 2011). It largely failed to do so. The uncharitable caricature of the PPC’s party militancy as composed of “four neighbours in San Isidro” (a rich Lima district) rang increasingly true as successive electoral cycles elapsed. Lourdes Flores’ determined attempt to concoct a catch-all party by diluting its right-wing programmatic content and attracting new cadres from outside the political world, did not alter the party’s elitist public image. The recognition of the PPC’s diminished electoral clout forced Flores to scale down her erstwhile presidential ambitions and run instead for the Lima mayoralty in 2011, which she also lost, subsuming the party into a deep crisis. Throughout this period of electoral failures, the party did not renovate its top leadership. It also failed to expand its societal linkages in the underdeveloped interior or the Lima underclass in the shantytowns. In addition, it did little to contravene the public imagery that afflicted it and damaged its electoral appeal: a party for the rich. The party’s brand as elitist and out-of-touch proved enough of a liability that a number of ambitious free agents once associated with the PCC defected because “they judged that the party was unpopular and did not add anything to their political careers” (Puemape 2014, 102). These politicians included Salvador Heresi, Alex Kouri, and Francis Allison. Melendez (2019, 22) theorizes that the PPC has been the electoral victim of the polarizing dynamics generated by a political cleavage undercurrent in Peru, represented by a conservative-populist right versus a technocraticliberal right. Because these two political right-wing factions enjoy a priori more support, polarize the political environment, and embody irreconcilable positions in the realm of values, there is little space for a political right that straddles this political cleavage, such as the PPC’s technocratic conservatism. The battle between Fujimorismo and Pedro Pablo Kuczynski would be an example of such dynamics at work. As the social base undergirding the technocratic right came to embrace liberal values in the post-Fujimorato era, in tandem with the democracy/authoritarianism cleavage that emerged, there was little social space for the PPC to grow its support. As pertains to the described political cleavage, the Partido Popular Cristiano found itself stranded in barren, vacated terrain. Its

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basis of social legitimation—namely, technocracy—caters to voters who do not support its conservative agenda, while a lot of conservative voters are seduced by populist options. Amid widespread predictions that the PPC would perform poorly, the party allied itself with a historical rival (the APRA) in 2016 general elections. This decision can be presumed to have damaged the remaining positive remnants of the PPC’s party brand. Under the leadership of Lourdes Flores, the party had publicly espoused the virtues of strong institutions as the road to democratic consolidation and the battle against corruption. An alliance with APRA, which had become associated with corruption both in its 1980s incarnation and during its second tenure in executive office (2006–2011), established tactical alliances with Fujimorismo, and shown scant respect for institutions, was a particularly jarring decision from the viewpoint of building the PPC brand. Flores had long been a critic of Alan Garcia, both from the lens of his corruption and his programmatic stances. The incongruity of a PPC alliance with APRA was enormous. Indeed, prominent party cadres, including Perez Tello and Alberto Beingolea openly opposed this alliance. Flores judged that the party’s survival was at stake and that a high public political post in a third Garcia government could be parlayed into greater political visibility for her and her party. This rampant opportunism proved fatal, further lowering the survival prospects of the PPC. While the Alianza Popular coalition proved damaging for both traditional parties, the PPC fared worse: it failed to gain representation in Congress at all and entered a period of soul-searching and internal infighting. While Alianza Popular passed the threshold of entry into congress, the five seats the alliance earned belonged to APRA. A party stalwart lamented that the “lack of PPC party machinery had not contributed to the alliance [with APRA]” and that its vote in Lima (its historical stronghold) had been “ridiculous” (El Comercio, April 24, 2016a). In 2017, the PPC convoked a national party congress in order to renovate its leadership. This party congress resulted in the victory of Alberto Beingolea, a prominent Lourdista. From the 2016 electoral defeat onward, the PPC’s internal divisions became more accentuated, as befits a party in crisis facing uncertain prospects. Beingolea lay the organization’s crisis at the feet of the old party leadership, which blocked change and “did not allow internal democratic procedures to renovate the party,” judging that only young cadres held the key to revamping the fortunes of the PPC. (El Comercio 2016b).

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An overview of the post-2001 period shows that the Partido Popular Cristiano underwent a secular decline in its electoral prowess. Cognizant of its lack of political competitiveness, the PPC choose not to field its own presidential candidate after 2011. Its dwindling legislative presence inevitably paralleled this erosion in competitiveness: from 17 legislative seats in both the 2001 and 2006 parliamentary elections, to 12 seats in the 2011 elections, to a further decline in the 2016 contest, when its coalition with APRA gathered merely 5 seats. These results were obtained as part of broader inter-party alliances, and thus the real seat haul accruing to the PPC was smaller still. This inter-temporal deterioration in parliamentary clout continued unabated in the legislative 2020 election, where it earned only 3.9 percent of the vote and thus failed to pass the threshold of entry into the chamber. The failure to obtain any gain congressional representation subsumed the political formation in a period of soul-searching and mutual recriminations. It was the first time in the post-2001 era that the PCC fielded candidates under its own party label, eschewing alliances. But this made little difference in the results. Bereft of an attractive candidate with coattails effects, the party’s programmatic platform, a mix of “citizen security, defense of the market economy model, political reform” failed to garner voter interest. The PPC’s irrelevance and muted opinions during the 2016–2020 high-stakes disputes between sitting Presidents of the Republic and the national Congress, did not help its electoral performance. The traditional party failed to take a stance aligned with popular opinion, which sided against Congress. Moreover, the organization had little to say about corruption, which had acquired newfound political issue salience in the eyes of voters. The diminished party’s incapacity to adapt to changing winds, revealed once more, its political autism and stultified internal structures. At this juncture, Javier Bedoya, a notable voice within the PCC because of his lineage as the grandson of the party’s founder Luis Bedoya Reyes, urged a complete renovation of the party leadership. As the PPC headed to the 2021 general election, it once more signaled a lack of confidence in its electoral prospects by sealing a last minute electoral alliance with Cesar Acuna’s APP, an alliance that would exclusively carry the APP label. Lourdes Flores opposed this tactical maneuver, alongside Javier Bedoya, who summarized the PPC’s predicament in no uncertain terms:

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Beyond the personal qualities of Mr Acuna, he and his party represents what [the PPC] has historically opposed; that is, a caudillo with money, owner of an electoral vehicle without a program or ideology, whose objective is to obtain power at all costs, recruiting people of all ideological tendencies and levels of preparation. This is total clientelism and improvisation… This decision means that the PPC has succumbed to the pragmatism that inundates Peruvian politics, and it means the PPC loses its values, principles and dignity. (La Republica 2020d)

No less than 70 party notables and militants signed a letter rejecting this alliance of convenience. The alliance with Acuna’s political formation was voted into existence by the PPC comision politica, the highest party decision-making body. Both general secretary Marisol Perez Tello as well as PPC president Alberto Beingolea signed off on the alliance, despite strong personal reservations. Some pepecista bigwigs questioned whether the alliance had been sealed respecting party statutes. In particular, party notables disagreed over the institutional attributions and purview of the Directorio de Unidad Nacional, the party organ tasked with starting conversations with other political formations (La Republica 2020e). The PPC had reinstituted this organ in search of viable electoral vehicles, broad-based alliances, or independents, that could help its political survival come to the 2021 general elections. The travails afflicting the organization mirrored those found amid newer Peruvian electoral vehicles. The divisions amid the PPC alongside belittling comments about Acuna came into the open after an audio recording was leaked, leading Acuna’s APP to break off the alliance it had formally signed with the PPC only five days before. Thus, with the official deadline for forging alliances elapsed, the historic conservative formation did not have any options other than to field its own presidential candidate, unlike in 2016. In the 2020 congressional elections, the PPC had also postulated candidacies alone, free of alliances. It obtained a mere 3.9 percent of the vote. The 2021 electoral results were even more disastrous for the Partido Popular Cristiano. PPC presidential candidate Alberto Beingolea obtained a meager 1.97 percent of the nationwide vote; the party garnered only 1.58 percent in the congressional contest, far from the 5 percent threshold for entry into the chamber. In consequence, the languishing political formation lost its legal registry, joining the fate of APRA in its voyage towards disappearance.

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The absence of a viable and electorally prominent right-wing party has historically contributed to political instability in Peru. The relationship between political instability and the absence of an important right-wing party holds for Latin America at large (Gibson 1996). Ceteris paribus, a democratic game where the interests of capitalists, conservative poderes facticos, and moneyed interests are not well represented in the party system can potentially become “an impossible game” a la Guillermo O’Donnell. In the post-Fujimori era, the partisan Right lost against a political neophyte without a party (Toledo), against a former president whose legacy in office was hyperinflation (Garcia), and against a military officer who generated fears among many voters (Humala). Its electoral performance has been lackluster at best. This raises the query of what explains the absence of party-building efforts on the part of Peruvian economic elites. A first approximation to an answer lies in the institutionalization of the famous piloto automatico: successive governments have pursued a neoliberal economic agenda regardless of campaign rhetoric, in effect, leaving the management of the economy to technocrats in the Ministry of Finance (Vergara and Encinas 2016). The upshot is that the economic preferences of the CONFIEP (Peru’s umbrella business association) have not been contravened since the early 1990s. In consequence, the business community has seen little need to invest in a political party or develop organic links with an existing one. It has been safe in the knowledge that its preferred economic agenda has become consolidated in Peru, virtually immune to the changing constellation of parties in the Congress or alternation in the presidential office.

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The New Electoral Vehicles of Post-2001 Democracy

Having scrutinized the traditional parties on the basis of three conventional dimensions of party institutionalization, this section seeks to evaluate some key political formations that have populated post-authoritarian period in Peru (post-2000). Electoral vehicles, inorganic and underinstitutionalized, became more prominent and electorally successful than traditional parties over the past three decades. Since 1990, among all the candidates contesting the second round of presidential elections, only one belonged to a traditional party (Alan Garcia). The other seven second round candidates aspiring to become President of the Republic (Mario Vargas Llosa, Javier Perez de Cuellar, Alejandro Toledo, Ollanta

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Humala, Keiko Fujimori, or Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, Pedro Castillo) ran atop newly created electoral vehicles. Since Ricardo Belmont successfully launched an electoral vehicle (Movimiento Obras ) which propelled him to the mayoralty of Lima in 1987, Peru’s political life has become a kingdom of diminished subtypes of political parties. This section delves into three important electoral vehicles of the post-1990 period: Fujimorismo (running under different party labels), the Partido Nacionalista Peruano, and the leftist Frente Amplio. The chapter devotes more extended coverage to Fujimorismo, given its greater political weight and relevance in the Peruvian landscape. 4.1

Fujimorismo

Most personalist political outfits or movements are unable to survive, or thrive after, the leader’s departure from the political scene. In the context of Latin America, none has escaped this fate more spectacularly than Peronism. Given the opprobrium thrust upon Alberto Fujimori in the wake of the rapid implosion of his decade-long regime in 2001—which uncovered an intricate web of deceit, bribery, large scale corruption, human rights violations, and other serious misdeeds—it would have seemed scarcely imaginable that Fujimorismo could enjoy a second political life. Confounding predictions, it did. Thus a new political cleavage appeared to further complicate an already complex political environment: Fujimorismo versus anti-Fujimorismo. During the 2010s, this divide emerged as the single most important political cleavage permeating society. Fujimorismo was virtually the only electoral vehicle in the 2010s with a claim to some (incipient) level of institutionalization in Peru, from the standpoint of both value-infusion and social rootedness. It possesses an ideology, a mystique, and militancy. These emanate from the characteristics and aura of Alberto Fujimori’s government alongside its perceived achievements in the fields of internal security and economic performance (Conaghan 2005; Murakami 2007). In terms of ideology, among the party’s main hallmarks are a hardliner approach to public security (mano dura), inclusion of the downtrodden or subaltern classes, neoliberal economics, and anti-establishment politics (Melendez 2014, 175). The mystique rests upon the well-rehearsed narrative that Fujimori led a government that stood above petty partisan politics to resolve the fundamental problems facing the country, showcasing a decisiveness and purpose lacking among traditional politicians and parties. For fujimoristas,

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April 5 of 1992 (date of the self-coup via the closing of Congress) signifies a defining rupture with the ineffective traditional political class and the end of hyperinflation and terrorism via the long overdue mano dura approach of the Fujimori government (Urrutia 2011). That narrative (however distorted and simplistic) maintains that the Armed Forces were the heroes in the anti-subversive battle against the Shining Path guerrillas, in contrast to the “ineffectual” and “feckless” Peruvian human rights organizations; it asserts that the Fujimori government single-handedly terminated with the terrorist threat by severely weakening the guerrillas and capturing Shining Path leader Abimael Guzman. Another essential part of the Fujimorista narrative centers upon the notion that the movement and its patriarch have been the victim of a relentless legal and political persecution. This has helped forge and solidify a sense of identity and cohesion among fujimorista elites (Navarro 2011). Whereas for democrats and progressives the year 2000 marks the recuperation of democracy, for fujimoristas it marks the onset of the politically motivated onslaught (both legal and reputational) against Alberto Fujimori and his associates, as well as a deliberate attempt to distort the memory of the 1990s. Such a narrative has helped forged a sense of identity and cohesion, important for party-building. Core Fujimoristas are those Peruvians who continued to view Alberto Fujimori favorably well after the most sordid aspects of his tenure (government-sponsored death squads responsible for killings; the widespread bribing of legislators, judges, and mass media bosses, and a long etc..) became public knowledge. Fujimorismo demonstrably mantained broad-based appeal after the 2001 transition to democracy without renouncing its illiberal character. Indeed, the movement’s illiberal political culture contributed to congeal its distinctive brand, a source of incipient partisan institutionalization in the realm of value infusion and societal linkage. A good part of its Fujimorismo’s popular appeal derived from its authoritarian inheritance (Levitsky and Loxton 2018). During his presidency, Alberto Fujimori came to be regarded as a redeemer in the eyes of many Peruvians because of his seeming ability to solve intractable problems (hyperinflation, terrorism), whose solution had eluded the political class who preceded him. To such voters, the imperative to find pragmatic, workable solutions to acute societal problems obviated the need to follow liberal democratic precepts. An instrumental “end justifies the means” political mentality (to use Linz’s term, denoting an orientation that falls short of an ideology) informed the Fujimorista political formation and its upper

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cadres. In addition, as explained in Chapter 2, Fujimori built an identity based upon the rejection tout court of the Peruvian political class, galvanizing and encapsulating the broad-based anti-party sentiment that became prevalent by the late 1980s and has never diminished since. These two elements of the Fujimorista identity made it attractive to many voters. Authoritarian successor parties compete in democratic settings with a distinct set of advantages vis-à-vis many other party rivals, as Loxton (2018) shows. Fujimorismo enjoyed an electoral floor of loyal voters who supported the authoritarian regime on the basis of its perceived legitimacy of performance. In line with other authoritarian successor parties, it also inherited societal linkages with corporatist groups built during the authoritarian period; and it counted with a ready-made array of financiers (many in the illegal economy). These invaluable inheritance-type assets that Fujimorismo wielded were simply not available to partisan rivals. The positive remembrance of Alberto Fujimori’s government in the eyes of many Peruvians would be seized upon by his family successors to good political effect. A 2006 Ipsos poll revealed that no less than 48% of Peruvians had a positive image of Alberto Fujimori’s government. A subsequent 2013 GfK poll showed that 42% regarded the Alberto Fujimori (1990–2000) government as “good” or “very good.” 4.1.1 Autonomy Fujimorimo entered the decade of the 2000s with a higher stock of political capital than its rivals in the political arena. This was particularly true of the Fujimorismo brand embodied in Keiko Fujimori. She entered the decade much less tarnished than her father in the public eye. For illustration, a 2000 poll conducted amidst the nadir of the movement’s public approval, soon after the Montesinos tapes had surfaced, only 8 percent of Peruvian respondents approved of Alberto Fujimori, while no less than 37 percent approved of Keiko Fujimori (Gestion 2000). However, Fujimorismo’s institutionalization along the axis of value-infusion proved not to be transferable beyond the Fujimori family name. At the height of Alberto Fujimori’s popularity, the unmitigated electoral failure visited upon Fujimori’s representative (Jaime Yoshiyama) in the 1995 mayoralty of Lima contest was revealing. It provided evidence for the importance of family lineage in activating Fujimorismo’s latent appeal. In the early years of the post-authoritarian era, another Fujimorista electoral candidate running without the benefit of blood ties also underperformed at the ballot box. When Martha Chavez, the former President of the Congress

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of Peru and one of the most visible and renowned Fujimorista figures, ran as the candidate for the only Fujimorista ticket (Alliance for the Future) in the 2006 Presidential campaign, she gathered little over 7 percent of the vote (Schmidt 2007). This level of support stands in sharp contrast to the historic vote total gathered by Keiko Fujimori that very same year as she ran for Congress. Alberto Fujimori’s youngest son, Kenji Furimori, emulated his sister’s achievement by becoming the most voted congressman (doubling his nearest rival) in the 2011 parliamentary elections. The evidence garnered from several electoral episodes reveals that only immediate family members could carry the aura and remembrance of the figure of Alberto Fujimori and fully benefit from the “thank you” vote (voto de agradecimiento) that his time in government generated.3 The political capital accruing to Fujimorismo proved not to be transferable beyond the family lineage. Murakami (2007, 19) reveals that Alberto Fujimori, cognizant of the centrality of the Fujimori brand name for electoral success, insisted that a family member carrying his name postulate himself for the 2006 presidential election, aggressively lobbying his brother Santiago (who declined). Fujimorismo constitutes a paradigmatic case of what Angelo Panebianco (1988, 143–62) calls a charismatic party (used as a synonym for prestige or authority). It is an organization “founded exclusively on personal ties, on the direct loyalty of the ‘disciples’ to the leader (ibid., 143).” Moreover, “a total overlap of the leader’s image and party identity is the sine qua non of charismatic power (ibid., 145).” To formulate the possibility that the Fujimorista party organizations (in their various iterations) enjoy significant autonomy from the lider natural (or cohort of family leaders) would be to deny their very essence. There is little evidence that Fujimorismo moved toward the routinization of charisma (bureaucratization) since it fell from executive power. Neither of the two routes towards routinization that Panebianco identifies transpired. Impersonal rules never replaced personal charisma or authority in regulating internal relations, nor did influential notables replace the charismatic force (incarnated by Fujimori family members). As Sosa Villagracia (2016,

3 Keiko Fujimori was clearly not drawing that vote share as a consequence of her performance as a congresswoman, which was very poor. She had an abysmal record of attendance to parliamentary sessions and the legislative visibility and activism of her party was very low. In four years, the party only presented six legislative bills which became law, all of minor importance (La Republica 2011a).

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31) maintains, “the organizational trajectory of Fujimorismo cannot be understood without the charismatic inheritance of Alberto Fujimori bequeathed in one of his daughters.” The National Executive Committee and its parliamentary caucus enjoy a monopoly on organizational decisions, and in turn, these bodies are highly subservient to Keiko Fujimori, in whose figure power is centralized. An additional important factor that aided the party’s continued personalization of power and a concomitant absence of a stable (and public-regarding) policy direction—beyond a broad embrace of neoliberalism—has been Fujimorismo’s inability to build technocracy into its party structures. The electoral vehicle was not able to attract a loyal cadre of technocrats and experts. To the extent that technocrats gain clout within a political party, the room for discretion by party leaders is constrained, and discipline in policy direction triumphs over off-the-cuff, improvised populist measures, thus aiding the process of programmatic organizational brand-building. The inability to recruit policy experts stems to a significant extent from the rejection Fujimorismo generates among large swaths of Peru’s technocracy. The most famous technocrat associated with Fujimorismo has been economist Hernando de Soto, who had collaborated with Alberto Fujimori government and its neoliberal turn. He also collaborated with Keiko Fujimori’s 2011 and 2016 campaigns. This internationally renown economist, well-known for his theories about hidden capital and popular capitalism, stood almost alone as the exception that proved the rule: experts’ generalized unwillingness to join the ranks of Fujimorismo. The 2016 campaign revealed once more Fujimorismo’s haphazard and chaotic approach to public policy, as Keiko Fujimori espoused piecemeal, targeted policies that appealed to the illegal mining workers, moto-taxi workers, policemen, and conservative religious groups (Torres 2020). Particularistic interests, including those of illegal corporate groups, triumphed over more broad-based and public-regarding interests. These policy stances contradicted some of Fujimorismo’s previously held policy positions. Indeed, policy coherence was sacrificed in order to curry favor with particular corporate groups which in some cases were also party financiers. After the defeat in the 2016 presidential elections, the personalization of power appeared to increase, as Keiko Fujimori, armed with a supermajority of seats in Congress personally took the reins of Fujimorismo. The undemocratic way Keiko commanded the party’s congressional caucus was revealed in a series of Wattsapp chats (the so-called La Botica chat)

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made public (Caballero 2019). These chat communications showed in no uncertain terms the vertical nature of power within the organization, wherein Keiko Fujimori micromanaged Fujimorista lawmakers in minute details of political behavior and actions—including when and how to applaud or when not to. While Keiko Fujimori did invest in some aspects of party-building during 2011 to 2016—chiefly in terms of enhancing the partisan social rootedness and nationalization—she did little to enhance the formation’s organizational autonomy. Rather, in line with most other Peruvian longstanding politicians and newer political entrepreneurs, she sought to increase her grip on the Fujimorista organization, as detailed below. In displaying behavioral personalism, she was following on the footsteps of her father, never endowing Fujimorismo with internal rules and practices that would depersonalize the organization and endow it with some operational and political autonomy. Keiko commanded Fuerza Popular with an iron grip. The quality she prized most among party members and lieutenants was loyalty (over competence). Many of Keiko’s pervasive control was mediated and personified by her trusted confidant Ana Vega, whose prerogatives included issuing “orders to Fujimorista caucus lawmakers, from changing congressional commissions to the nature of their vote” (Lira 2020, 88). Ana Vega, in her role as a transmission belt of Keiko Fujimori’s orders, was rated by insiders as the most powerful person of Fuerza Popular (ibid.). All of the available evidence points to personalism as the key governing logic inside the formation, to the detriment of organizational autonomy. 4.1.2 Coherence Fujimorismo’s internal coherence was undermined by the division between Albertistas and Keikistas, corresponding to those party cadres who owe their loyalty to Alberto Fujimori as the lider natural —including Kenji Fujimori, Santiago Fujimori, Carlos Raffo, Martha Chavez, and others—in contrast to those who follow his daughter—a grouping led by Jaime Yoshiyama and Ana Herz de Vega as Keiko Fujimori’s closest collaborators (Rejas 2019). (While Keiko Fujimori publicly denied that such a division existed, the evidence is unmistakable. Indeed, the terms Albertista and Keikista are openly used by many high-raking Fujimoristas). Factionalism was responsible for a welter of incongruous and contradictory statements emanating from Fuerza 2011 in the second round of the presidential campaign, incongruencies that proved electorally costly. Divisions besetting Fujimorismo were also manifested in

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differences of opinion surrounding the political costs of seeking a presidential pardon for Alberto Fujimori’s release (La Republica 2012). As of 2016, Keiko Fujimori continued to struggle to forge a political party of her own, that is, a political formation over which she commanded unswerving authority. The 2011 electoral cycle revealed that Alberto Fujimori (even while incarcerated) made many of the important decisions—including selection of candidates for congress, overall campaign strategy, etc. (Murakami and Barrenechea 2011, 79; Sanchez 2012). Many of the top candidates in the parliamentary list of the electoral vehicle concocted by Keiko Fujimori (Fuerza 2011), as well as shadow ministers and vice-presidential candidates, were leading figures from her father’s governments of the 1990s—including Jaime Yoshiyama, Rafael Rey, or Martha Chavez. Alberto Fujimori’s daughter never exerted moral or political authority over these Albertistas. Her ability to control the decision-making of the new fujimorista parliamentary slate (37 seats) over the length of the 2011–2016 legislative term was questionable. Keiko Fujimori was unable to forge independent political capital by transcending the long shadow of her father (Murakami and Barrenechea 2011). That shadow and inheritance, of course, carried a mix political assets and liabilities. The internal coherence of Fujimorismo in terms of its component groups was low. While Fujimorismo had as its nucleus the Fujimori family, it comprised a variegated amalgam of groups, including emerging entrepreneurs (some enriched by dint of dubious or illegal practices), members of the chambers of commerce, and former functionaries of Alberto Fujimori’s governments (Panfichi 2012, 176). The absence of party cadre formation during the decade of the 2000s was perhaps best evinced by the fact that upward of 80 percent of Fuerza 2011 congressional candidates were independents (Navarro 2011, 64). In the 2016 parliamentary elections, a similar dynamic took hold, revealing that the party had not cared to invest in the formation of party cadres. Rather, it was open to independents who could either contribute capital or some other political resources deemed politically or electorally valuable. Indubitably, many of them joined the political formation opportunistically, not out of a commitment to the “party” brand or program. Similarly, what held the various factions (including leading party cadres of Fujimorista 1990s electoral vehicles such as Cambio 90 or Si Cumple) within Fujimorismo together heading into the 2011 presidential election, and kept them united heading into 2016, was the prospect of access to power. Self-regarding pragmatism allowed the daughter of Alberto Fujimori

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to keep the party’s internal factions (somewhat) in check: Fujimorista cadres recognized Keiko Fujimori as the candidate within the movement with (by far) the best chance of winning a national election: her resounding 2006 Congressional victory announced this possibility, and her near-victories in the 2011 and 2016 presidential contests confirmed it. During the 2016 campaign, Keiko Fujimori sought to imprint her own stamp on the party while concurrently seeking to make it more mainstream and palatable to voters. This quest informed the attempted desfujimorizacion (de-Fujimoratizacion) of the organization, that is, the extirpation of the cadres and former government officials most closely associated with Alberto Fujimori as well as the public disavowal of the most abject and reprehensible aspects of the decade-long Fujimorato (1990–2000). Keiko Fujimori steadily altered the membership of the National Executive Committee party organ, going from 22 percent of keikistas in the 2010–2014 term, to 58 percent in the 2014–2018, and ratcheting it up to 88 percent in 2018–2022 term (Vergara and Augusto 2021). Via these and other purposeful actions, she steadily purged Albertistas from positions of institutional or de facto power. The quest toward democratic normalization, or the moderation of Fujimorismo’s most controversial programmatic stances, sought to reduce the strong rejection the party engenders among many Peruvians (i.e. its negative identity). Keiko had concluded from her 2011 electoral defeat that only thus could her movement win the presidency in a second round. In a speech made at Harvard University, she publicly supported the “diagnostics work” of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Peru’s transitional justice mechanism established in the early 2000s as the country sought to wean itself off the Fujimorato regime. She admitted that her father’s government had incurred in “mistakes” that she would not repeat (Lamula.Pe 2015). (However, she stopped short of calling those mistakes crimes, or admitting that human rights violations or massive corruption had transpired in the 1990s). The Harvard speech was intended as the main signaling device of a turn toward the political center. The speech prompted the criticism and party exit of two known Fujimoristas. In late December 2015, Keiko Fujimori made the momentous decision to exclude 18 sitting Fujimorista lawmakers from the party list contesting the 2016 Congressional elections. Among the excluded were three historic figures from the Albertista faction: Martha Chavez, Alejandro Aguinaga, and Luisa Maria Cuculiza. This maneuver

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sought to consolidate Keiko’s grip over the party and to soften its image, as part of her rebranding efforts to move the party away from its sordid inheritance and render Fuerza Popular more electable in 2016. The official party platform concocted for the 2016 election outlined the importance of upholding human rights, recognized the historical role of the Comission de la Verdad y Reparacion (the truth commission established to investigate crimes under the Fujimorato) and promised measures to return the bodies of the disappeared to their families (Plan Peru 2016). Keiko’s influence over the drafting of the party’s list of congressional and local office candidates—a role often directly undertaken or mediated by her confidant Ana Herz—was crucial in the quest for desfujimorizacion and political rebranding. The careful confection of party lists largely comprised independents and politicians borrowed from other political formations. The numerical weight of historical Fujimoristas was purposely reduced, with the aim of modernizing and softening the party image. In this sense, Fujimorismo came to increasingly resemble other electoral vehicles that can truly be described as “coalitions of independents” (see Zavaleta 2014). However, several events emerging during the 2016 campaign revealed that party factionalism between Keikistas and Albertistas remained. Albertistas, led by Kenji Fujimori, aimed to use Fujimorismo’s political and institutional power to free Alberto Fujimori from jail, contravening Keiko’s official stance on the matter. Kenji Fujimori also publicly voiced his intention to run for the presidency in 2021 “should my sister lose the 2016 election,” a declaration that both usurped her authority and revealed his conception of the organization as a family affair, one to further individual ambitions. In June 2017, Kenji Fujimori openly advocated a new method for selecting Fujimorista candidates for public office, favoring direct elections by party militants, rather than the prevailing indirect elections wherein party delegates select party candidates. This new selection method would allow him to challenge Keiko Fujimori’s dominance over the recruitment of future “party” officeholders, and thus enhance his power within the organization. Kenji also challenged her sister’s authority by criticizing the electoral vehicle’s unyielding opposition tactics to the PPK government, calling Fujimorista lawmakers “lions,” advocating for the “end of the [Fujimorista-driven] circus” and urging a more cooperative approach with the Executive branch (El Comercio, June 22, 2017). Such utterances were perhaps the most politically costly signs of discord, and convinced Keikismo to take up internal disciplinary measures against Kenji Fujimori. But

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these breaches of fealty to Keikismo were only the latest in a long string of examples that erupted throughout the decade of the 2010s. All in all, Kenji Fujimori, as leader of the Albertista faction, broke “party” discipline in increasingly significant and brazen ways, laying bare his own power ambitions. The personalism that haunts Peruvian political dynamics also afflicts the workings of familial political enterprises. The most momentous consequence stemming from the organization’s internal divisions occurred when Kenji Fujimori concocted an under-the-table arrangement with President Kuczynski to derail an impeachment motion attempt in December 2017 carried out by Fujimorismo’s congressional caucus. Kenji’s Albertista faction in Congress (comprised of twelve lawmakers) voted against the measure after the President Kuczynski had secretly agreed to free Alberto Fujimori from jail via a Presidential pardon. While personalist factionalism, its degree of parliamentary cohesion has been higher than that of most other Peruvian electoral vehicles, as shown by its voting record in Congress. Party indiscipline on the part of Fujimorista lawmakers has been rare. Crucially, unlike many other Peruvian electoral vehicle caucuses, prior to 2018 Fujimorismo had not lost parliamentarians to other political formations because of transfugismo. As alluded, this cohesion has been forged by the perceived legal and political persecution of the movement and delegitimation campaign against it, alongside the polarizing battle over defining the “correct” political narrative of 1990s. However, Fujimorismo did not invest in the recruitment and formation of party cadres in preparation for public office duties, following the short-term pragmatic tactics of other vehicles. Upward of 70 percent of its 2016 legislative caucus was comprised of “guests,” that is, individuals without any previous affiliation to Fujimorismo. These guests were opportunistically recruited or invited to join because they could provide the organization with usable political resources of some kind—chiefly political financing or otherwise personal brands that could be leveraged for votes in local elections. In this respect, Fujimorismo conforms with the broader pattern of Peruvian electoral vehicles constituting “coalitions of independents,” as Zavaleta (2014) has conceptualized them. This recruitment modus operandi obeyed Keiko’s attempt to enhance her grip on the organization, oblivious to party building norms. It also revealed her often-noted pragmatism, devoid of ideological commitments. Candidate selection was carried out with a view to enhancing short-term electoral fortunes.

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4.1.3 Societal Roots The reemergence of Fujimorismo is in no small part a clear manifestation of the failure of party system reconstruction in Peru: the many Peruvians who gave their support to Alberto Fujimori in the 1990s—whether in the country’s interior or Lima’s pueblos jovenes (shantytowns)—have not been socialized into new party attachments thereafter. In an ironic twist of fate, the very same parties such as APRA or the PPC that loudly denounced Fujimori’s crimes and abuses of power as the transition away from authoritarianism unfolded, diluted throughout the 2000s some of their differences with Fujimorismo in an attempt to capture that vote— to no avail, however. Other electoral vehicles reckoned that Fujimorismo enjoyed an identifiable partisan base, one substantial enough in size that it was worth courting. The first unmistakable sign that Fujimorismo’s popular appeal remained strong was the performance of Keiko Fujimori in the 2006 Congressional election. Contesting the district of Lima, she was elected with the largest number of votes of any parliamentary candidate in the history of the Republic, with more than 600,000 votes (Schmidt 2008; Nunez and Escobar 2006). In terms of militancy, the best evidence that can be deployed to make the case that Fujimorismo enjoyed a devoted following of hardcore loyal voters was the remarkable stability of voting intentions for Keiko Fujimori during months leading up to the 2011 presidential elections, in contrast to other political party options, whose polling numbers fluctuated markedly and often dramatically through time (Levitsky 2011; Sanchez-Sibony 2012). While it undoubtedly elicits strong negative reactions among many Peruvians, Fujimori’s party-movement was considered to enjoy an electoral floor of approximately 20% of Peruvian voters, on account of the 2011 presidential contest. In the months preceding the 2016 elections, support for Fujimorismo had risen, hovering around 30– 35% in various polls (Dargent and Munoz 2016), demonstrating that Keiko Fujimori’s work throughout the country in the intervening five years had borne fruit. The 2016 presidential and congressional elections showcased Fujimori’s successful territorial expansion to newly conquered regions, ones that it had failed to win in 2011: Madre de Dios, Cusco, Huncavelica, Monquegua, Tacna, and Arequipa. Moreover, its number of congressional seats increased in 18 other regions (Sosa Villagracia 2016). Operating in the context of what is predominantly an electoral market composed of floating voters, Fujimorismo’s high vote floor entailed an invaluable political asset. Moribund electoral vehicles such as Accion

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Popular, APRA, or Partido Popular Cristiano either lacked a devoted militancy or evinced one that was electorally small. The notion that the party-movement’s firm electoral floor stands at one-third of the electorate remained unproven, however. A real test of Fujimorismo’s social rootedness lies in its electoral performance when a candidate not carrying the family name (and thus devoid of dynastic legitimacy) is leading the party ticket for national elections. To be sure, the party’s social rootedness has been significantly enlarged since Martha Chavez attained a mere 6.2% of the vote in the 2006 presidential elections. But the differential performance in Congressional electoral support between Keiko and Kenji, on the one hand, versus other Fujimorista candidates suggests that Fujimorismo did not transcend personalism as a key form of linkage. Personalism pervades party-voter linkages across all parties in Peru, and Fujimorismo remained throughout the 2000s and 2010s, a personalistic, family-based movement. In any case, unlike all other Peruvian parties (with the partial exception of APRA), Fujimorismo could rely upon a significant group of loyal voters—a hard-core social base largely (but not exclusively) centered in the subaltern social sectors. One of Fujimorismo’s strengths was the territorial evenness of its electoral support; it was not concentrated in any one region, unlike what was true for other electoral vehicles in Peru—which are either Lima-centered, draw their support from the South, or are based mainly in one or a few provinces. Data from Ipsos Peru from December 2015 showed support for Fujimorismo to be rather even geographically when comparing voting intentions in Lima vis-à-vis the interior provinces, as well as in comparing the urban interior vis-à-vis the rural interior (Sosa Villagracia 2016, 18). Moreover, the same Ipsos Peru data showed that the degree of partisan nationalization for Keiko’s party had increased from 2011 to those from 2015. Since 2011, Keiko Fujimori worked assiduously to build party roots in the country’s southern provinces, where its support had historically been weaker. Electoral results segregated by province showed that such efforts bore fruitful results. At least in the short term, this accomplishment further separated the Fujimorista formation from other electoral vehicles in Peru, which did not engage in true party-building in-between elections—even as the electoral challenge posed by Fujimorismo grew throughout the 2011–2016 period. Much as Keiko sought to make Fujimorismo her personal instrument (the desfujimorizacion alluded to above), it is well to note that she could not escape the shadow of her father in the eyes of both supporters and

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detractors. A survey carried out in the wake of the 2016 elections showed that the second most important reason voters gave to justify casting a ballot for Keiko was that “her father did good things for the country” (Ipsos Apoyo 2016a). In a similar vein, a different CPI poll revealed that the number one factor voters adduced for trusting her with their vote was that “she is the daughter of Alberto Fujimori” (El Comercio 2016d). But that same political capital bequeathed by her father proved a liability with other sectors of the population. The single most frequent reason Peruvian respondents gave for denying Keiko their vote was “because of her father’s government”—a full 37 percent chose this answer (Ipsos Apoyo 2016b). Keiko Fujimori’s attempt to recraft her personal brand by dint of a rhetorical embrace of democracy and the rule of law faced important limitations. Despite her best efforts, she could not shake the entrenched negative identity that came attached to Fujimorismo. 4.1.4 The Recent Decay of Fujimorismo Fujimorismo underwent a rapid political descent in its social and voter appeal due to two key factors: the comprehensive mismanagement of the dominant legislative dominance it gained as a result of the 2016 congressional elections; and the burgeoning legal troubles of its two leaders. Keiko Fujimori appears never to have accepted her narrow 2016 defeat to PPK in the presidential elections (Caballero 2019). The party apparatchik publicly declared that fraud had occurred without providing any proof; it also argued that the country’s oligarchs had closed the door to Fujimorismo by backing PPK. The party never engaged in mea culpa or extracted lessons from the defeat. For example, when in the weeks prior to the 2016 election it became public that Fuerza Popular’s secretary general Joaquin Ramirez was investigated by the US Drug Enforcement Agency for narcotrafficking (El Pais 2016a), the electoral vehicle doctored tapes aimed at discrediting these credible accusations. Fujimorismo never gauged the political and electoral consequences stemming from the investigations, nor did it take active measures to clean the organization’s practices or public image. This lack of political adaptation or maneuvering did little to lower the high levels of anti-Fujimorismo in the electorate, that is to say, the negative partisanship that determined its electoral ceiling or upper limit (Cyr and Melendez 2017). Thereafter, Fuerza Popular used its overwhelming veto power during the 2016–2018 period to besiege and delegitimize the Executive branch, without putting forth a recognizable political project of its own. It

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utilized its majority control of Congress to censure PPK government ministers, including the internationally well-regarded education minister Jaime Saavedra (Sifuentes 2019). One key substantive reason for the fujimorista opposition to Saavedra stemmed from the minister’s decision to scrutinize and shut down low-quality, predatory for-profit universities, in many of which Fujimorista lawmakers had financial stakes. This was one of many examples showcasing how Fuerza Popular’s legislative behavior obeyed the particularistic interests of individual Fujimoristas, at the expense of all else. After Saavedra, the Fujimorista congressional caucus ousted three more ministers on specious grounds. Fuerza Popular also used its legislative clout to provide cover for corrupt, unsavory judges and public officials involved in the Los Cuellos Blancos del Puerto, a criminal organization that trafficked in corruption and influence-peddling, exchanging payments for lower judicial sentences. Most prominently, Fuerza Popular protected Attorney General Pedro Chavarry, strongly suspected of involvement with the Cuellos Blancos criminal group. In uncovered private chats, Fujimorismo deemed the political protection of, and impunity for Chavarry “to be a matter of party survival” (El Pais 2018c). Fujimorismo also derailed efforts undertaken by other political formations to fight corruption via institutional reforms. These efforts included the quest to strengthen the Financial Investigation Unit agency. Fuerza Social also opposed the regulation of Savings Cooperatives, long suspected of laundering money from narcotrafficking. Moreover, it opposed the root-and-branch reforms to the judicial system proposed by President Vizcarra, which enjoyed broadbased support from Peruvian society. Fujimorismo consistently used its parliamentary majority as a political weapon. It repeatedly modified the rules of the game to serve its short-term political interests. For example, it modified parliamentary rules to stifle the Executive’s constitutional prerogative to dissolve Congress, ushered in a law that blocked state publicity in private media so as to stifle media outlets it claimed were part of “conspiracy” against Fujimorismo. It also approved a tailor-made law for the benefit of Alberto Fujimori when he was ordered to return to jail—after having been pardoned by President Kucyznski. In short, after it gained a super-majority in Congress, Fujimorismo consolidated or reified the public image of a political movement in collusion with illegal organizations, corrupt in its modus operandi, disdainful of the rule of law, and prone to abuse its political power.

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Keiko Fujimori’s legal problems as of late 2018, and those of party associates, subsumed Fuerza Popular in an enormous crisis as an organization. Keiko was sent to preventive prison for 36 months, facing charges of illegal campaign contributions from Odebrecht, and money laundering. She stood accused of structuring her party as a criminal organization that fractionalized the bribes received from Oderbrecht for the 2011 election campaign to channel them to its treasury via ghost donors (El Pais 2018d). Jorge Yoshiyama, nephew of Jaime Yoshiyama— a vice-presidential candidate of Keiko Fujimori in 2011 and a former minister in the government of Alberto Fujimori—admitted that he had engineered said scheme to launder ill-gotten financing. A total of 19 other Fujimorista party bosses were arrested to face trial. The public image of Fujimorismo was thus seriously damaged, even among many of its supporters. Public outrage against Keiko Fujimori erupted in July 2018, when tapes made public revealed that judges and public prosecutors connected to the Cuellos Blancos criminal organization planed extraofficial meetings with “Senora K” (Keiko Fujimori). These public officials later reigned or were fired. They faced public pressure to demonstrate that they were not connected to Fujimorismo. The impact of these revelations on Keiko’s personal brand was large and measurable. No less than 75 percent of Peruvians believed Keiko to be guilty and ranked her as the most corrupt politician in the country. Polls carried out in October 2018 showed her with a sky-high disapproval rating of 83 percent, whereas only 11 percent of respondents approved of her (La Razon 2018). The sheer enormity of the decline in public approval suggests that the disaffection toward Fuerza Social included many erstwhile Fujimorista voters, an inference which would later be confirmed in the 2020 congressional elections. The inter-temporal evolution of “party” support, as seen in public opinion polls, suggests that much of Fujimorismo’s popular decline can be traced to unmistakable evidence of corruption, but also to its mismanagement of (congressional) power. Upon the news that Keiko Fujimori had received ill-gotten financing from Oderbrecht, her approval ratings stood at 38 percent in August of 2017. By January of 2018, after a public prosecutor opened a formal investigation for organized crime, Keiko Fujimori’s approval declined somewhat, but remained at 30 percent. Between January and April of 2018, after Fuerza Popular carried out a covert operation (Mamanivideos) to force the resignation of President Kuczynski and discredit Kenji Fujimori, Keiko Fujimori’s approval rating dwindled to 18 percent (Torres 2018). These actions were widely seen by the public

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as instances of self-dealing and mindless, self-interested obstructionism, at odds with opinion polls indicating that most voters desired political cooperation with the sitting president. By early 2019, no less than 81 percent of Peruvians disapproved of the performance of the Fujimorista caucus in Congress (Ipsos-Apoyo 2019). Keiko Fujimori’s strategic errors of political agency eroded support among her own social base of voters. By early 2019, the de facto legislative caucus of Fujimorismo had been reduced to 55 seats, down from the 73 seats it began the legislative term with. Some Fujimorista lawmakers disbanded, others asked for temporary leaves. The threat of a flight en masse from the electoral vehicle on the part of Fujimorista representatives and leaders hovered in the air as of late 2018. The almost certain prospect that the non-reelection rule (affecting lawmakers) would be approved in the public referendum Vizcarra sponsored, alongside the ongoing investigation by the public prosecutor into Fujimorismo’s corruption, incentivized the defection of Fuerza Popular’s lawmakers. With Keiko’s electoral prospects for 2021 very much undermined, the future coherence and unity of the caucus was in question, as the party entered times of great uncertainty. While writing the obituary of Fujimorismo was premature, its mismanagement of political power had placed the party in a great quandary. Fuerza Popular faced the dilemma of whether to support the substantive institutional reforms President Vizcarra espoused, which enjoyed the approval of 75 percent in society at large. These reforms would necessarily reduce Fujimorismo’s influence in the judicial system and state institutions writ large, undermining a fundamental source of its political power as well as a source of present and future impunity for its legal transgressions and corruption. However, and herein the dilemma, blocking the reforms would give President Vizcarra the opportunity to exercise his constitutional prerogative to dissolve Congress and call for new elections, a prospect that Fujimorismo feared because of its low standing in public opinion polls. Faced with this stark choice, Fujimorismo chose to (reluctantly) acquiesce to the popular referendum on the institutional reforms, thus paying a certain future cost as regards its institutional power resources and its ability to continue to patrimonialize the state. The subnational elections of October 2018 signified a good test of the organization’s new standing with voters. Fuerza Popular failed that test. Its candidate for the mayoralty of Lima, Diethel Colombus, obtained a meager 2.6 percent of the vote. While Keiko Fujimori electioneered alongside the candidate in the last weeks of the campaign, her coattails

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effect proved invisible. The party did not win any of the 43 districts in Lima, placing second only in San Juan de Miraflores (Aragon and Cruz 2018). Nor did the party achieve victory in any contest for regional governorships, losing the three regional governments it had commanded since 2014 (Ica, Pasco and San Martin). Fuerza Popular only won a handful of municipalities and mayoralties of minor importance. It only captured three out of the 190 provinces that were up for grabs. The widespread disrepute befalling the organization for the way it abused its legislative power, as well as the abundant episodes of corruption, took an enormous electoral toll. Alvaro Vargas Llosa’s (2018) verdict on the reasons behind Fujimorismo’s political discredit is worth quoting: The behaviour of Fujimorismo during this democratic period has been all too disloyal towards the values that Peruvian society today demands, tired as it is of corruption, traditional ways of doing politics, and authoritarianism. The greatest mistake of Fujimorismo in the new millennium has been its incapacity to read the new Peruvian sociology with the same sagacity that it was able to read, during the first years of redemocratization, the extended gratitude for the ‘achievements’ of the 1990s.

Public opinion polls revealed that corruption had risen to the top of Peruvian citizens’ concerns (Carrion et al. 2018); it was the foremost problem for 57 percent of the electorate (up from 36 percent in 2007) (La Rosa 2018). Further evidence confirming the notion that fighting corruption had become central to the Peruvian electorate came in the form of the relentless increase in public support for President Vizcarra as he took a very public stance against corruption. Indeed, he staked his presidency on political reforms that included a restructuring of the judicial system. Additional proof about the centrality of corruption in the public eye came from the new social stature that the judges who acted decisively against political corruption acquired (González-Ocampos and Baraybar 2019). Jose Domingo Perez and Richard Concepcion, the two most prominent judges prosecuting corruption cases involving Alan Garcia, Fujimorismo, and the network of cuellos blancos, came to be “elevated to the category of superheroes” (Fowks 2018). The emergency parliamentary elections of January 2020 delivered a devastating public verdict on Fujimorismo. Consequently, the party suffered a dramatic reduction of its institutional power. The party’s vote haul sank from first to sixth among all parties, gathering a mere

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7.3 percent of the vote. Its legislative caucus was reduced to 15 seats, such that its institutional leverage to fend off judicial investigations against the party or otherwise politically negotiate its way out of trouble, became minor. Fujimorismo’s electoral descent was a culmination of the trends described above, and one additional faux pas: Peruvian voters largely blamed Keiko’s party for the constitutional crisis between the Martin Vizcarra-led Executive and the Fujimorista-led Congress. As of May 2020, Keiko Fujimori polled a mere 4% of voting intentions for the 2021 presidential contest, while her legal woes did not abate (Peru 21, 2020). The future of the party was cloudy, insofar as both the Keiko and Kenji Fujimori personal brands were badly damaged in the public eye, quite possibly in irreparable fashion. Keiko Fujimori’s performance in the 2021 elections did not signal a resurgence of her electoral vehicle. Burdened by one of the most markedly negative political identities, she was catapulted to the second round on account of a small loyal social base, much diminished but invaluable in the context of extreme vote fragmentation. Fujimorismo gathered 14 percent of the nationwide vote in the first round, a far cry from Keiko’s 2016 performance. In polls carried out by El ComercioIpsos polling firm where respondents were forced to choose between two hypothetical second round opponents, showed Fujimorismo losing against virtually every individual adversary (El Comercio 2021d). Even though Peru’s complicated electoral dynamics delivered perhaps the only rival she could conceivably defeat in the second round, Fujimorismo was once more defeated by a candidate himself burdened with a very pronounced negative political identity (Pedro Castillo). Keiko Fujimori’s political track record during the 2010s only helped deepen and entrench the most powerful negative identity in post-2000 Peru: anti-Fujimorismo. Keiko Fujimori’s refusal, once again, to accept the outcome of an electoral outcome was in tune with the very short-term calculations that have animated her modus operandi and damaged the organization she leads. Under her command, Fujimorismo actively maneuvered in Congress and the court of public opinion to try to engineer the removal of recently elected President Pedro Castillo from office without an apparent constitutionally backed motive. In repeating her past disruptive, high stakes democracy-subverting behavior, Keiko Fujimori evinced little political learning, and giving the lie her carefully constructed narrative that she had emerged from jail a changed politician repentant of her past leadership style. In claiming fraud without any proof and subsuming the

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country in a period of extreme polarization and uncertainty, Keiko Fujimori probably ensured the further dilution of her personal brand and entrenchment of her negative political identity going forward. In the process, she continued to mortgage the political future of Fujimorismo. 4.2

Partido Nacionalista Peruano (PNP)

4.2.1 Autonomy Retired army lieutenant Ollanta Humala Tasso had cut his teeth battling the Shining Path guerrillas in the country’s interior provinces. Humala, a prototypical political outsider who gained some national recognition after leading or supporting two small-scale military uprisings, created the Partido Nacionalista Peruano (PNP, or Peruvian Nationalist Party) as a vehicle for his foray into Peruvian politics. Perhaps nothing illustrates better the inorganic origins of the PNP (and its hurried creation) than the fact that it had not fulfilled electoral law prerequisites in time for the 2006 presidential election, obliging Humala to forge an alliance and borrow the electoral registration of the small Union por el Peru (UPP) outfit, which did enjoy legal existence. The birth of the Nationalist party was a topdown affair, emerging as an electoral vehicle conceived to fulfill a personal quest for power, rather than as a bottom-up process emanating from civil society. Virtually every aspect of the electoral vehicle’s functioning showed that it lacked meaningful independence from Ollanta Humala and his wife Nadine Heredia, who co-founded the PNP. The outfit’s momentous turn away from the leftist policies that purportedly defined it was undertaken with no internal party deliberation. Similarly, the decision that the PNP would contest the 2014 local and the 2016 national elections on its own, without its erstwhile GANA leftist allies, was made by the party patriarch alone. Indeed, several cadre defectors cited the party’s caudillismo in decision-making as a key reason for their departure. As soon as PNP was installed in the national executive, First Lady Nadine Heredia came to exert enormous de facto power, deriving from her unofficial role of strategic adviser to the president. She exuded charisma and displayed professional communicational skills. She was widely recognized as the second most powerful individual within the ranks of nacionalismo, a dominant figure within the electoral vehicle and in relations with society. Amid increasing evidence of the outsized role played by his wife in shaping manifold key political decisions—among them, the PNP’s clear strategic shift away from its more radical leftist stance—President Ollanta

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Humala was forced to deny in public that his administration effectively entailed a co-government of two presidents (El Comercio 2012b). Nadine Heredia’s popularity in public opinion polls (exceeding her husband’s popularity) once catapulted her to be the expected PNP presidential candidate for the 2016 presidential elections. (While the Peruvian legal code does not allow a family member of the president to stand for immediate re-election, it was speculated that the PNP would seek to promote a legal change to allow her candidacy in 2016). Nadine Heredia’s political instincts and acumen were widely deemed to be much sharper than her husband’s. In sum, the PNP constituted little more than a tool for the political ambitions of the presidential couple. The nacionalista outfit was, in essence, a family affair—one that some leftist intellectuals and leftist formations with serious ideological convictions chose to join or associate with, out of expediency and opportunism. By the end of its tenure in presidential office (2011–2016), the PNP was a spent political force, in line with the “incumbency disadvantage” phenomenon that afflicts Peruvian democracy. Nadine Heredia, once hailed as the outfit’s greatest political asset, came to be beset by corruption accusations of money laundering and illicit transfers of funds (Munoz and Guibert 2016). In 2017, the confession by the president of Brazilian construction giant Odebrecht implicated both leaders of the PNP in the receipt of illicit campaign financing; it appeared to signal the dead-end of their political careers, and alongside it, that of their electoral vehicle. For the 2016 presidential elections, the PNP chose a political outsider (Daniel Urresti) over a vehicle insider who more faithfully reflected the nominally leftist PNP ideology (Ana Jara). Daniel Urresti, who had served a 9month stint as interior minister in the Humala government, was a former military official with a talent for denouncing the political opposition. His programmatic trademark was his a popular mano dura (hard-fist) lawand-order approach toward crime. The PNP’s selection of Urresti to lead the party ticket was motivated by his standing in the polls which, in turn, derived from the attributes comprising his personal brand. His vocal and hard-edged stance against Fujimorismo and Aprismo endowed him with negative legitimacy political capital. Notwishstanding his apparent electoral viability, there was little in common between Urresti’s programmatic platform and Ollanta Humala’s. In line with virtually all other Peruvian electoral vehicles, the Partido Nacionalista Peruano sacrificed the cause of party-building on the altar of electoral expediency. In its struggle to survive politically, leaders of the PNP deemed brand-building

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or ideological consistency luxuries the organization could not afford. In March 2016, the organization decided to withdraw its candidacy to the presidency (alongside the party’s congressional slate) because Urresti was polling little over 1 percent of voting intentions. Once more, a Peruvian incumbent electoral vehicle failed dismally in its attempt at reelection. The PNP fight was one for political survival; retiring from the 2016 contest allowed the organization to retain its legal inscription, as per the extant Law of Political Organizations. Not since the return of democracy in 1980 had a ruling “party” been left out of Congressional representation immediately after holding power. 4.2.2 Coherence The scant cohesiveness of the Nationalist party was evident from its early days. Shortly after the official results of the second round of the 2006 general election were announced, three Nacionalista legislators resigned their posts in protest of Humala’s decision to call his followers to form a Frente Nacionalista Democratico coalition that included radical leftist formations such as Patria Roja and Movimiento Nueva Izquierda. The avowed intent of the coalition was to hold Alan Garcia to account for his promises on social issues. Vice presidential candidate Carlos Torres Caro was among those resigning, whom Humala then branded a “traitor.” The affair revealed internal disloyalty. But it also revealed the non-deliberative and non-collegial way in which important decisions about strategy were made within the PNP. Further unmistakable signs of low intraparty loyalty were witnessed in the vast number of defections among PNP lawmaker ranks, diminishing the size of the electoral vehicle caucus in Congress. In 2006, the Nationalist party obtained a sizable 45 congressional seats; by 2011, its caucus had dwindled to a mere 21 seats, due to large-scale defections. The absence of a genuine ideological glue or alternative sources of cohesion facilitated such exodus en masse. The lack of internal cohesiveness, the obvious amateur nature of PNP legislators, and the general absence of directives and direction from the PNP patriarch, translated into a lackluster role for the presumed main “party of the opposition” to the APRA government during the 2006–2011 parliamentary term. As the Alan Garcia administration (2006–2011) unfolded, the Partido Nacionalista Peruano was little more than invisible in the political and public spheres. Its legislative action was largely reduced to acts of political gesturing, such as declaring Garcia “morally unfit” and demanding his resignation (after the Bagua incidents). What kept some

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nacionalista cadres tied to the organization was expediency, not least the prospect of future electoral success. Indeed, “the PNP [was] a party full of political operatives who came from previous political projects, who only [accepted] the leadership of Humala insofar as he [had] a real chance of becoming President of the Republic (Leon Moya 2019, 145).” The disloyalty PNP politicians exhibited did not cease after the organization accessed executive power in 2011. Only a few months after Humala became president, prominent nacionalista parliamentarians such as Veronika Mendoza exited, citing as reasons for their departure the betrayal of the original PNP programmatic identity, as well as the rampant caudillismo plaguing the electoral vehicle (El Comercio 2012a). 4.2.3 Societal Rootedness The PNP’s swift success in the 2006 election, where it competed against Alan Garcia in the second round, was nothing short of impressive (Cameron 2009). A perusal of the geographical distribution of Humala’s vote revealed the desire of many underprivileged Peruvians populating the interior regions to be included into state and nation (Vergara 2007). Years of fast economic growth since the early 1990s had failed to trickle down to Peruvians hailing from the very provinces that have been historically the poorest. Humala’s discourse of social inclusion and his personal brand (not least, his non-ladino ancestry) appealed to such voters (Madrid 2011). The personalist nature of the vote in Peru presaged political risks for the PNP, as for other electoral vehicles. The fragile societal adhesion to the Partido Nacionalista Peruano qua organization was starkly revealed in the regional and municipal elections of 2006, suffering a dramatic vote decline in the very same localities and regions where the PNP had won overwhelming majorities only a few months earlier (Panfichi 2007). The Nationalist “party” had fully expected that these regional and municipal elections would anoint it as the undisputed party of the opposition to the APRA government, but Peru’s floating voter electoral marketplace delivered a different outcome. Local Nacionalista (PNP) candidates failed ignominiously. The PNP did not win any regional presidencies; moreover, it only emerged victorious in 5.1 and 4.2 percent of provincial and district-level mayoralties across the nation, respectively (Panfichi 2007, 213; Vera 2010). The winners in these local elections were a variegated amalgam of local electoral vehicles with no organic links to any of the “national” parties, whether traditional (APRA, PPC, AP) or newer ones (Remy 2011). The very same poor southern regions where Humala’s

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presidential candidacy had been very successful proved altogether elusive for Nacionalista candidates only five months later. The inability of Ollanta Humala to transfer, even marginally, the substantial popular support his campaign had elicited towards the PNP qua institution, revealed the extent to which the PNP linkage to voters was personalistic. The Partido Nacionalista Peruano brand had little content in the eyes of voters in the interior and highland regions, where “national” political formations were increasingly distrusted. The fact that Humalismo obtained around 30 percent of the vote in both the 2006 and 2011 presidential contests has been interpreted as evidence that the Partido Nacionalista Peruano counted with a mass of loyal voters. Some analysts, including renowned Peruvian sociologist Sinesio Lopez, concluded from these results that the PNP was a party with social rootedness in Peru’s poor interior and southern highlands. This reasoning mistakenly inferred the degree of party institutionalization exclusively from selected electoral outcomes. Said conclusion was unwarranted on several counts. First, support for the PNP in regional and local elections was marginal in its presumed southern strongholds. Secondly, the PNP’s general election results were contingent on the identity of its party opponents (party supply); that is, Humalismo faced opponents who appealed to voters in the richer regions of Peru, the result of which was little real competition for votes in the country’s south and interior. Thirdly, public opinion polls in the months previous to the general election did not reveal stability in the inter-temporal support for Humala (Tanaka 2011b), whose candidacy hovered around a scant 10 percent of voting intentions for many months leading to election day—such that few observers expected the army lieutenant to enter the second round. The temptation to consider final electoral results as driven by unchanging structural forces partakes is, in the Peruvian context, to incur in retrospective determinism. While vote patterns are informed by structural forces (albeit not partisan), more short-term factors are predominant in Peru: electoral supply, contingency, campaign strategy, and strategic voting, are essential to come to grips with final electoral outcomes in the context of a free-floating electorate. The Humala candidacy was able to articulate the interests and aspirations of a large, excluded sector of Peru’s population, but only provisionally, at two distinct electoral junctures. A revealing and accurate diagnosis of the PNP’s (low) level of institutionalization came from none other than Ollanta Humala’s flamboyant father, Isaac Humala

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Nunez: “I don’t think that there exists in Peru a nationalist or ethnonationalist movement. The Humalas only represent themselves. The vote carried by Ollanta as revealed by polling data… [simply] reflects that there is a group of discontents with the political class (El Comercio, January 3, 2006).” Indeed, tracing voting patterns inter-temporally in Peru’s south and interior reveal that those historically neglected regions have consistently favored candidates with a message of inclusion into state and nation (Cotler 2011; Vergara 2007), as well as outsiders not pertaining to the Lima political establishment. In the 2006 and 2011 elections, Humala was the candidate within the available electoral party menu on offer that best met those criteria (Levitsky 2011; Sanchez-Sibony 2012), while concurrently facing little competition for votes from excluded Peruvians. But acknowledging this inescapable association—i.e. a personal brand representing inclusion earns votes in Peru’s south and interior—is not tantamount to party social rootedness. The available evidence clearly shows that Humala’s electoral vehicle was not rooted in those provinces. The organization’s own strategic political behavior also underscores this verity. Conscious of its scarce social rootedness, even in provinces where its discourse enjoys appeal, the PNP engaged in rampant “electoral franchising” (Panfichi 2012, 176), that is, pacts with actors of local and regional renown or personal financial resources. In accordance with these pacts, independent political entrepreneurs wielding their own political assets and resources would run under the PNP label in exchange for positions in the Congressional party list or posts in public bureaucracy. This modus operandi comported with behavior observed in the broader national political landscape. The PNP’s strategy of “electoral franchising” was (and continues to be) rampant among Peruvian electoral vehicles. Final confirmation that the nationwide electoral fate of the Partido Nacionalista rested on the personal brand of Ollanta Humala came in the 2021 presidential election. Humala campaigned emphasizing his government’s (2011–2016) achievements in social policy, reminding voters of pension, education, and pro-poverty programs jumpstarted or expanded under his administration (Beca 18, Pension 65, Cuna Mas, El Plan Esperanza). He also promised to combat corruption. But neither his attempts to extol the purported achievements of his administration, nor his aim to craft a serious, program-based campaign could possibly overcome the liability of a diluted personal brand. While Humala explained to reporters that his chief comparative advantage over his electoral rivals was the experience he had acquired as President of the Republic (El Diario 2021), for

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the purposes of gaining electoral traction past incumbency acts as a heavy burden amid an electorate that prizes newness. More damaging than past incumbency was the shadow of illicit campaign financing and money laundering that hovered above the Huamala couple, who had spent ten months in preventive detention at Barbadillo prison on orders of the Public Ministry and the judiciary. The judicial charges centered around purported illegal financing from Venezuela in the 2006 elections, and from the Brazilian giant Oderbretch in the very 2011 elections that won the PNP the presidency. He also faced accusations of bribery from Oderbretch for public works contracts while he was president. Ollanta Humala himself was well aware of crushing burden of a corruption-linked personal brand for his electoral prospects: “I face an electoral disadvantage, and it is not minor. It is the issue of the judicial processes I, my wife, and the Nationalist party, face.... there has been a media lynching in more than 3500 national newspapers... this lynching generates prejudices which are very difficult to erase” (El Diario 2021). Heading into the 2021 election, the former President carried one of the most pronounced negative political identities among all contenders, with 81 percent of prospective voters disinclined to vote for him, and only 12 percent open to voting for him (Ipsos Apoyo 2021b). In the event, his campaign never gained electoral traction, and on Election Day earned a paltry 1.6 percent of the nationwide vote, certifying that he was a spent political force. 4.3

The Fractured Left

The development of a mass-based leftist party in Peru in the twentieth century has been undermined, as in some other Latin American countries (i.e. Argentina), by the rise of a powerful, all-encompassing populist party. In Peru’s case, that populist party was APRA. The zenith of the Peruvian Left’s influence in the realm of electoral politics can easily be traced to the first half of the 1980s, which saw Izquierda Unida (United Left) place second in the 1980 presidential contest and then win the mayoralty of Lima in 1983. The second half of the decade witnessed United Left’s manifold internal divisions erupt into the open, thereby destroying its delicate internal cohesion (Tanaka 2008a; Van Dyck 2018a, b). This was, in part, a result of differences over political strategy and personalistic clashes. United Left was also a victim of the country’s growing polarization as Peru became more militarized (IDEA 2012). While Izquierda

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Unida’s leader Diez Canseco emerged as an honest defender of democratic governance in trying times, and a moral referent amidst a political class devoid of such referents, he failed to strategize a way to broaden the party’s appeal and make it electable. The centrifugal tendencies within the left’s ecosystem prevailed (Lynch 1999, chap 6) which, alongside country-wide changes in the social bases of political representation (the rise of the informal economy, diminished clout of labor unions, etc.), spelled the political left’s descent into irrelevance (Roberts 1998). After its 1980s rupture, Peru’s political left fielded a fragmented slew of presidential candidates, a testament to its continued self-defeating collective action problems. In the 2006 general elections, the parties of the left— Partido Socialista, Partido por la Democracia Social, Movimiento Nueva Izquierda, and Avanza Pais —obtained less than 2 percent of the vote collectively. Five years later, their electoral combined performance was similarly abysmal. Future electoral prospects for the organic, ideologically minded Peruvian left are poor for the same environmental reasons that afflict all parties, but also because Latin America’s history shows that where serial populism is prevalent, as in Peru, the organic Left is significantly crowded out. Throughout much of the twentieth century, the partisan Left in Peru was overshadowed by the populist APRA; in the post-Fujimori era it has failed to compete with assorted populist Independents, including the electoral vehicles led by Alejandro Toledo, Ollanta Humala, and Keiko Fujimori. At first blush, the left’s moribund political status is surprising. Structural conditions in Peru provide the Left with an enormous pool of potential voters. Ceteris paribus, the country’s enormous societal income inequities and regional wealth disparities between an enriched urban coast, and an impoverished and neglected interior are structural factors that, ceteris paribus, can play into the hands of leftist political formations that put redistribution at the core of its political agenda. The Left came to power in much of Latin America in the 2000s, but this pink wave largely bypassed Peru (with the partial exception of Humala’s administration). This historical divergence is due in no small part to a political trajectory at odds with the rest of South America over the past fifty years: Peru alone experienced a left-wing military regime during the 1970s, the rise of a Maoist guerrilla movement that became ever more powerful during the 1980s when guerrillas were extinct or on their way out (Colombia excepted), and the rise of a right-wing competitive authoritarian regime in the 1990s, when democracy was building roots

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elsewhere in the region. The Peruvian Marxists’ association, in public perceptions, with the murderous Shining Path guerrilla, hampered its future electoral prospects (Cameron 2011). Moreover, during the 1990s Alberto Fujimori successfully portrayed the institutional, law-abiding Left as an integral part of the discredited political class, further speeding up its descent. Changes in underlying structural conditions have also posed a steep electoral challenge for the Peruvian Left, because its traditional social bases are demographically much diminished: only 4 percent of its working population is unionized and the peasant population has also declined enormously as a result of rampant urbanization. The legal Left has failed to adapt its message and linkage strategies to the contemporary socioeconomic realities. A strident anti-capitalist discourse fails to attract electoral support in the urban Peru that has benefited economically from the Fujimori-engineered “capitalist revolution” (De Althaus 2007). By contrast, there is a large constituency of rural voters who are receptive to a discourse based on redistribution and the territorial expansion of public goods (Vergara 2007). The partisan Left has failed to consistently attract that constituency, let alone encapsulate non-urban voters. Consequently, the Left continues to be divorced from the popular classes, such that the kaleidoscope of minuscule leftist outfits (including Patria Roja or the Partido Comunista Peruano) appeal only to minority, niche sectors. In the post-Fujimori era, one of the most interesting developments was the advent of Fuerza Social, a self-styled Peruvian version of a socialdemocratic party. Cognizant of the Peruvian left’s historically damaging association with anti-democratic doctrines and actions, the aim of its creators was to concoct a politically liberal leftist organization that would become institutionalized and endowed with a clear party brand, avoiding the pervasive Peruvian malaise of short-term electoralism (Leon Moya 2019). Fuerza Social was thus born with the ambition to constitute something more than a personalistic electoral vehicle; it emerged as a proto-party aiming for full-fledged political party status on account of the presumed loyalty of its party militants and notables. The expectation that ideas would be taken seriously meant that ideology would purportedly act as a binding glue among its members. Notwithstanding the avowed ambitions of its architects, Fuerza Social ’s conditions of origin (or genetic makeup) were not auspicious. As a Lima-centered organization with select alliances in three or four regions, its level of party nationalization was highly limited; its social rootedness (even in Lima) was incipient at best. The 2010 victory of Fuerza Social candidate Susana

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Villaran for mayor of Lima (Lopez Ricci 2010), while politically noteworthy, was fortuitous, benefiting from a confluence of contextual factors and strategic voting (as detailed in Chapter 5). Yet, its conquest of the mayoralty of Lima situated this political formation as one that could use the political visibility newly afforded to it in order to build political capital and a party brand. Other Leftist political parties in Latin America have been built by first capturing important cities and capitals and thereafter building a track record of good management including Mexico’s PRD, Uruguay’s Frente Amplio, Brazil’s Workers Party, or El Salvador’s FMLN. The performance and fate of Fuerza Social followed that of other new political formations that had previously reached high office without an infrastructure of party cadres, such as Partido Nacionalista Peruano or Peru Posible. The leftist party’s “voluntarism, political inexperience in public and municipal management, and lacklustre political management” (Tanaka and Sosa 2014), rapidly eroded its political capital and doomed its electoral fate and viability as a political party. Fuerza Social fielded a presidential candidate for 2011, Jose Manuel Rodriguez Cuadros (former minister of foreign affairs in the Toledo presidency), who rather soon withdrew in view of the his abysmal standing in public opinion polls (El Comercio 2012a). In Congressional elections that year, the organization failed to surmount the 5 percent vote threshold legally needed for representation in the legislature. The outfit’s future was further doomed by the absence of networks of activists—a la APRA—to help ensure its survival. Its electoral decline enticed many of its most visible figures (Susana Villaran, Vladimiro Huaroc) to seek refuge in other electoral vehicles. Villaran joined Humala’s Partido Nacionalista Peruano as a vicepresidential contender to join a formula led by presidential candidate Daniel Urresti, a general far removed from leftist values and progressive causes. In a similar vein, Vladimiro Huaroc showed few qualms about joining Fujimorismo, an electoral formation anathema to the Left. Once more, the quest for personal political survival enticed once-leftist political entrepreneurs to jump to other electoral vehicles, however incongruous that switch in relation to their personal political trajectories and avowed ideologies. The Left in Peru has been hobbled by a Leninist modus operandi that curtails the rise of new leadership, new ideas, and internal political renovation. Its internal debates have often been delinked from societal demands and concerns, rendering a succession of left-wing partisan organizations self-referential and politically autistic. The fast rise of a middle

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class in Peru created a large constituency of materially satisfied voters who are risk-adverse and thus conservative in their voting patterns (mainly in Lima and the coastal regions) (Jaramillo and Zambrano 2013). The demographic weight of these conservative voters puts an upper cap on the electoral potential of leftist vehicles and candidates. However, there remains widespread dissatisfaction among large swathes of the Peruvian electorate. Dissatisfaction with the prevailing economic model and its distribution of benefits is substantial. According to the 2013 Latinobarometro, in the wake of fantastic GDP growth rates fueled by the commodity boom period, only 16 percent of Peruvians believed that governments in their country governed “for the benefit of all,” while only 17 percent believed that the distribution of wealth was fair. The organized Left has not been able to capitalize on, and channel, such discontent; it has not been able to appeal to (let alone encapsulate) an electoral space that is vacant (a space which is not so much ideological as it is one that comprises Peruvians dissatisfied with the unequal distribution of economic growth). For different reasons, Sendero Luminoso, Alan Garcia, and Alberto Fujimori, collectively bequeathed a nefarious legacy for the political viability and electoral prospects of the Peruvian Left. But its political failures have, in no small measure, been self-inflicted. The Left’s electoral foibles and marginal political status in the post2000 period can be attributed in part to its lack of political renovation, dysfunctional organizational dynamics, and self-referential tendencies. The support that the political left enjoys among the urban underclass, which from a material standpoint should be a natural constituency, has been residual. This further accentuates the Left’s electoral troubles in Lima—notwithstanding the confluence of contingent factors that led to the surprising victory of Susana Villaran as mayor of Lima in 2010, despite her leftist credentials (see Chapter 5). Whereas Peru has developed a sizable middle class, reduced poverty rates dramatically, and become more urbanized, (miniscule) organic parties and proto-parties of the Left have failed to adapt their rhetoric, programmatic agenda, or appeals strategy to a much-changed socioeconomic landscape. Rather, the rhetoric of parties such as Patria Roja or the PCP has become anachronistic, harkening back to bygone times. Not surprisingly, the Left has failed to thrive amid Peru’s contemporary environment. The Peruvian Left’s failure is even more striking when viewed from a comparative standpoint: while the Left gained ground— and remained prominent after losing elections—in much of Latin America

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in the 2000s, in Peru it remained adrift and marginal (Cameron 2011). A sense of desperation and gloomy future electoral prospects enticed many leftist politicians and intellectuals to opportunistically support the candidacy, and offer their services to, a military man (Ollanta Humala) who spouted leftist ideas, even though he had no party organization (leftist or otherwise) nor an ideological track record behind him that could reliably demonstrate his leftist bona fides. The independent left-wing figures who joined the Ollanta Humala bandwagon included scholar Sinesio Lopez, socialist Diez Canseco, economist Felix Jimenez, Carlos Tapia, and many others. The reversal of mandate Humala enacted during his presidency damaged the credibility of the left-wing intelligentsia who chose to jump onto the personalist Partido Nacionalista vehicle. The Peruvian historical record showed the risks of opportunistic behavior and the absence of shortcuts or viable alternatives to the slow, painstaking task of viable party-building strategies. That painful lesson once more came through in the travails and mandate reversal enacted during the Humala presidency (2011–2016).

5

Frente Amplio

The Frente Amplio (FA, or Broad Front), born in 2013, constitutes perhaps the most ambitious attempt in the post-2000 era at unifying the Peruvian Left and endowing it with a serious and clear programmatic agenda. The Frente aimed to formally consult with disparate left-wing groups and civil society in the search for a unified set of public policy goals and proposals that would transcend the electoral period (Bazan 2016). These policy goals included part of the programmatic agenda found in Ollanta Humala’s Gana Peru 2011 campaign—but neglected in practice during the 2011–2016 Humala administration. 5.1

Autonomy

There is little evidence that the Frente Amplio, despite its laudable public aspirations qua organization, achieved meaningful autonomy from its leader Marco Arana. Internal rules were circumvented or abused with regularity in the power struggles between Arana and rival party factions. The party notable who enjoyed the most external appeal, Veronika Mendoza, was frequently suppressed or side-lined, rather than bolstered. Arana’s personal ambitions and desire for unswerving command of the

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party seriously limited the formation’s electoral prospects post-2017. His imprint on the party impoverished its degree of internal pluralism given there was little room for voices and internal factions that would not submit to his authority. Arana never accepted the loss to Veronika Mendoza in the party’s 2016 primaries (Castro 2021), and reportedly soon came to resent her growing public prominence as the face representing Peru’s political left. As detailed below, Arana leveraged the legal registration belonging to his organization Tierra y Libertad—necessary to launch Frente Amplio—as a weapon to tighten access to key internal institutions of the Frente Amplio, chiefly the highest-ranking party organ, the Political Committee. He blocked entry to party notables linked to Mendoza and crafted self-serving personnel decisions (internal promotions, expulsions, or demotions) to transform the new political formation into an outfit that would answer only to him. While more socially rooted than its rivals, the FA converged toward the archetypical Peruvian electoral vehicle, on account of its growing degree of internal caudillismo, behavioral personalism, and attendant lack of institutional autonomy. Arana’s caudillismo predictably contributed to important, irreversible political errors. Organizations, as an ample scholarly literature has shown, are demonstrably better than personalist vehicles at processing information and reading the political landscape (Weyland 2014). The institutional personalization of organizations thus worsens the quality of decisionmaking. Arana subsumed the Frente Amplio in a damaging internal crisis by dint of a personal decision to jumpstart a parliamentary process seeking President Vizcarra’s vacancy—on account of corruption allegations dating to Vizcarra’s tenure as governor of Moquegua province. The decision also evinced an utter disconnect vis-à-vis public sentiment, or otherwise disregard for it. The attempt to oust the sitting President of the Republic ran afoul of a large majority of public opinion, as revealed by polls. Peruvian mass publics interpreted the rushed vacancy initiative as a selfserving maneuver concocted by corrupt parliamentary groups against a president who sought reforms aimed at fighting corruption and lowering impunity (Paredes and Encinas 2020). The legislative maneuver was also opposed by the Mendozista legislative faction of the FA, Nuevo Peru. Arana pushed forth with the vacancy attempt, knowingly risking the unity of the Frente Amplio caucus in the national Congress. The parliamentary gambit also had broader political repercussions, affecting system legitimacy. The maneuver successfully removed Vizcarra from power, thus

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manufacturing the ascent of Accion Popular’s Manuel Merino to the presidency. Mass protests directed at Congress ensued. In concocting the high stakes vacancy scheme, the FA collaborated with right-wing formations to oust what was then a highly popular President of the Republic. The political fallout for the leftist party were dire, as it was popularly held responsible for the presidential ouster and ensuing instability (La Republica 2020b). In the popular imaginary, the Frente Amplio came to be grouped with a corrupt, self-serving political class promoting its short-term interests. Arana carried out critical decisions without adequate deliberation within partisan structures, endangering the organizational future of the Frente Amplio. Besides his authoritarian modus operandi, the main liability stemming from Arana’s personalist command of the Frente Amplio was his doctrinaire approach to politics. In the famous dichotomy laid out by Max Weber between the ethics of conviction and the ethics of responsibility facing any politician, Arana mindlessly pursued the former, dismissive of the practical consequences thereof. As Tanaka (2015) presciently pointed out, mindlessly following the route of the ethics of conviction could lead the leftist outfit to political irrelevance or marginality. That is indeed the fate that befell the Frente Amplio post2016, confirmed in its dismal electoralperformance in the 2020 and 2021 parliamentary and presidential elections. Arana’s narrow pursuit of the politics of conviction thus came at a high political price. The leader’s decision-making evinced detachment from the broad national political context; it also showed disregard for the cause of unity of the political left, disregard for the dubious legal merits of the vacancy initiative, and indifference to public opinion at large. A party that presumably ambitioned to create an impersonal, rules-based organization came to be burdened by the same phenomena afflicting Peruvian electoral vehicles across the board: personalization of power and self-destructive decision-making. The other leader of the Frente Amplio Veronika Mendoza evinced a political personal brand much more appealing than Arana’s. Mendoza’s youth, intelligence, high level of formal education, visible authenticity, and personal dynamism, were key components of a personal brand endowed with political promise and electoral appeal. The New Sorbonneeducated and Quechua-speaking politician had broken free from the Partido Nacionalista in 2012 over her political opposition to the Humala government’s de facto mandate reversal and her opposition to the governmental repression of communities protesting extractive mining activity.

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Mendoza became a critic of Ollanta Humala’s putative leftist government, one that kept intact Peru’s neoliberal model and prioritized foreign investment over citizenship rights in its labor, tax, and environment reforms. She consistently defended large-scale reforms to the politicoinstitutional system and the reigning neoliberal economic model, in alignment with the 62 percent of Peruvians who similarly backed profound economic and politico-institutional change (El Pais 2016a). Mendoza’s proposals included a new Constitution that would unshackle Peru from the neoliberal fetters the 1993 Fujimori-drafted magna carta enshrined. Discarding the non-ideological approach to politics that many political entrepreneurs in Peru follow, Mendoza unapologetically defended the FA as an organization with a “clear progressive brand, environmentalist in orientation, and evincing the imprint of the campesino (peasant) movement” (El Pais 2016b). Under her leadership, the FA espoused the renegotiation of existing contracts of natural resource extraction so as to balance the public interest with the private interests of multinationals, and advocated the diversification of the economy away from its rentier orientation and toward tourism, agriculture, and other sectors. Mendoza also promoted a permanent increase in public investment, the creation of new pensions, the allocation of public loans to foment micro-credit entrepreneurship, and the promotion of industrialization writ large. 5.2

Coherence

The Frente Amplio was legally born in 2013, building upon the extant formal inscription of the organization Tierra y Libertad. It was explicitly conceived as an umbrella organization of the left, which aimed to attain electoral competitiveness vis-à-vis right-wing formations. It incorporated several small leftist outfits including Ciudadanos por el Cambio, Movimiento de Afirmacion Social (MAS), Tierra y Libertad, Fuerza Social, Partido Comunista Peruano and Partido Socialista, and others. While the umbrella organization was born with the intention of “uniting various leftists confluences with a view towards the long run” (Bazan 2016, 166), short-term considerations and personalist disputes led to the first important defections from Frente Amplio. In April 2015, a section called the Coalicion Progresista Union de Fuerzas de Izquierda (CPUFI, later called Unete por otra Democracia) split from the FA and coalesced around the legally registered electoral vehicle Partido Humanista, led by Yehude Simon. In his stint as prime minister during the

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second Alan Garcia government, Simon had been responsible for the high profile governmental repression episode known as El Baguazo, and his previous affiliation with non-leftist outfits generated resentment among leftist Peruvian circles. Figures of the left such as Susana Villaran, Lerner Ghitis (Ciudadanos por el Cambio) and Aida Garcia Naranjo (Partido Socialista) also split from the Frente Amplio and joined Unete por otra Democracia. This group would soon negotiate a broader alliance with Democracia Directa as well as Sergio Tejada’s Bloque Nacional Popular, and the resulting aggregation came to be called Unidad Democratica (Bazan 2016). There were strenuous efforts and ample talks aimed at merging Unidad Democratica with Frente Amplio to create a broader leftist front that would field one electoral vehicle for the 2016 elections. But these efforts proved fruitless, largely derailed because of “personal skirmishes and minor power turf battles” (Bazan 2016, 167). One of the distinctive elements of the Frente Amplio was the decision early on in its organizational life to eschew what was regarded as one of the historical defects of the political Left, namely, the imposition of candidaturas naturales on the part of party leaders (i.e. self-selection to lead the party ticket, without internal deliberation on leadership selection rules) as well as top-down candidate selection processes. To break free from those historical tendencies, the founders of the Tierra y Libertad electoral vehicle, and later Frente Amplio, promoted an open citizen consultation process to select the party ticket, in marked contrast with most other political formations in Peru at the time. The 2015 open citizen consultation to select the top of the FA party ticket for the 2016 elections involved 30,000 participants in twenty-six regions of the country (La Republica 2015). The process was not exempt of controversy. The ballot results coming from some regions (Lambayeque) were impugned by the eventual contest loser, Marco Arana. While Arana belatedly accepted the results, the apparent bonhomie between the leaders of the two most important organizations constitutive of the Frente Amplio, namely Sembrar (led by Mendoza) and Tierra y Libertad (led by Arana), would be short-lived. The factional disputes within the FA leadership were much in line with the Peruvian Left’s historical travails, but also comported with the internal divisions characteristic of most Peruvian political formations. Marco Arana led one of FA’s factions, in opposition to that led by Mendoza. Arana, who controlled party membership rolls, decided to close it, and foreclose the entry of new militants, thus pre-empting a

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shift in the balance of power that, a priori, favored Mendoza. This arbitrary closure of party rolls to newcomers generated a high-level crisis amid the organization, leading to the resignation of three leading militants from the Permanent Committee, namely economist Pedro Francke, sociologist Maritza Glave and activist Irma Pflucker. Beyond personalistic skirmishes, more substantive reasons surrounding political strategy undergirded this emergent factionalism amid FA. The Mendoza faction advocated a pragmatic and pluralistic political approach that welcomed into the organization elements of the traditional left as well as centrist forces, in a quest to move toward a less doctrinaire, more catch-all type of party and enhance its electoral appeal. The reasoning behind this approach rested on the notion that, because sectors of the traditional left still controlled some of the country’s main labor unions, the pluralistic approach would enhance the FA’s incorporation linkage capabilities. Additionally, the reasoning went, welcoming progressive intellectuals with organic access to mainstream mass media outlets would make Mendoza and the party more palatable to the business community, which distrusted the Frente Amplio. The more ideological Arana faction disavowed a pluralistic and pragmatic approach, dismissive of the presumed electoral price to pay for upholding a more staunchly leftist and sectarian modus operandi. If the FA adopted a more pragmatic political orientation, it would also make Mendoza the natural candidate of the Frente Amplio for the 2021 general election, derailing Arana’s personal power ambitions. The electoral performance of FA in the 2016 parliamentary elections was historic for the Peruvian political left, in good measure a coattails effect of Mendoza’s personal brand as well as a well-crafted presidential campaign. However, the good electoral results did not mollify internecine leadership struggles. The 20 elected Frente Amplio parliamentarians showcase little coherence or collective action capabilities. Instead, the Aranista faction and the Mendoza faction (called Nuevo Peru) struggled to reach binding collective decisions from the beginning of the parliamentary term. Arana sought to expel from the parliamentary caucus the most vocal Mendocista congressmen, such as Richard Arce, while internal party structures of decision-making such as the FA Consejo Directivo became gridlocked (El Comercio 2017). Congressman Richard Arce had sided with Fujimorismo in an underhanded maneuver to attempt to issue forth a disciplinary process to expel Arana from Congress. After only one year after the party primary, after a period of increasing internal tensions, the Nuevo Peru faction formally split from the Frente Amplio. This meant

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that the Frente Amplio ceased being the second largest caucus in the national parliament, crippling its political power and its status as a key parliamentary anti-Fujimorismo force. The organization’s internal conflict settlement mechanisms proved unable to mediate the Arana-Mendoza dispute and power struggle. Condemning Marco Arana of high-handed tactics to impose his will on the fledging political formation, the defectors wrote an open letter describing their grievances: “the dialogue you [Arana] pretend to initiate, after two months of excluding Nuevo Peru from the parliamentary decision-making process of Frente Amplio, excluding us from party meetings or ceasing from summoning meetings, is a farce we wish not to partake in” (El Comercio 2017). The legal limbo afflicting the 10 lawmakers from Nuevo Peru in the national parliament was resolved when the Ley Anti-Transfuga (Anti-party switching law) was declared unconstitutional. Nuevo Peru gained official recognition in Congress and the prerogative to be part of parliamentary commissions. The divisions between Frente Amplio and Nuevo Peru became most publicly and consequentially manifested in their different congressional voting stance vis-à-vis President Kuczynski’s impeachment process. The Frente Amplio backed it, while Nuevo Peru opposed the President of the Republic’s parliamentary ouster (Peru 21, 2017). The divisions within the Frente Amplio did not end with the exit of the Mendoza faction. The Marco Arana faction convoked a highlevel meeting to renovate the party’s 14-member Political Commission, naming Arana as general coordinator of this entity. A rival faction, led by former congressman Humberto Morales, claimed said maneuver contravened the party statutes. Morales’ faction also declared that it counted with majority support within the Political Commission (EL Comercio 2020g). This important dispute, involving shares of power and decision-making clout, would later be settled by the Jurado Nacional de Elecciones (the nation’s highest electoral entity), reflecting, again, the Frente Amplio’s inability to resolve its own internal disputes within party confines. In October of 2020, the party’s Ethics Committee expelled 55 party militants, including Humberto Morales, on charges of “separatist actions that aimed to fractionalize the party” (El Comercio 2020h). This was a move that aimed to neutralize Arana’s chief rival in the quest to become the Frente Amplio presidential candidate in the April 2021 elections. The two factions, the Aranista and Humbertista, also differed on political tactics. The second faction wanted to forge an alliance with Mendoza’s Juntos por el Peru, with the aim to unite the left;

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the Aranista wing wanted no such alliance. The division was profound enough that the FA held two separate party National Congresses in September of 2020 and each faction concocted its own Comision Political Nacional (or party Political Committee) (La Republica 2020c). Each faction accused the other of setting up illegitimate party structures. The Frente Amplio paraded two pre-candidacies for the 2021 presidential elections. Unable to resolve its differences internally, the FA punted the problem to the national Junta Electoral (electoral agency) as an external dispute settlement mechanism to decide which faction would prevail. Frente Amplio’s leader, Marco Arana, founded an organization that openly and proudly displayed its ambition to stand out from other formations in its degree of internal democracy, among other features. However, Arana’s authoritarian modus operandi paved the road to internal disenchantment, growing personalism, party factionalism, and party defections. The early defection of Mendoza and her faction from the party was a harbinger of continued internal malaise. In November 2020, with a few months before the 2021 election, a group of 700 Frente Amplio militants exited the party denouncing suffocation of internal pluralism, growing caudillismo, and impoverishment of internal deliberation. Their public letter read as follows: In the internal life of the organization, democracy was violated as a regular practice. The party negated the renovation of power, the opening to citizens; the presence of multiple leaderships became a death sentence and old fashioned caudillismo triumphed over party organization. (El Comercio 2020h)

Once more, as observed in other political formations in Peru, party organization bodies and rules were abused and weakened in a personalist quest for power accretion and to damage internal party rivals. Frente Amplio’s initial pretension to forge an exemplary formation that eschewed top-down decision-making and instituted internal democracy mechanisms did not materialize. Not unlike other Peruvian electoral vehicles with less lofty institution-building ambitions and lesser societal linkages, the Frente Amplio drifted into political disorder and electoral marginality in no small measure because of rampant behavioral personalism and dysfunctional internal dynamics.

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Social Rootedness

Frente Amplio’s architects soon found out that uniting disparate leftist forces in a coalition did not translate into electoral competitiveness, or even the sum of its parts, as revealed by public opinion polls. The party’s candidate in the 2016 presidential elections, Veronika Mendoza, polled no more than 2 percent of the vote during the initial stages of the campaign. However, the combination of an externally appealing personal brand, changes in the effective party menu, a well-ran campaign, negative partisanship, and strategic voting delivered an unexpectedly good result for the Frente Amplio in 2016. Mendoza battled against Pedro Pablo Kuczynski to enter the second round until the last day of the first round. In the context of fragmented voting patterns, she garnered a sizable 18.8 percent of the nationwide vote. This constituted the best electoral performance for a leftist outfit in many years—indeed, not since United Left had a leftist formation accrued a similar portion of the vote. In addition to the aforementioned factors, it was the purposeful and successful crafting of Veronika Mendoza’s personal brand (Richter 2017), and less so the incipient programmatic agenda of Frente Amplio, that made an electoral difference. A native of Cuzco and a fluent Quechua speaker, Mendoza’s personal brand held sway in the provinces pertaining to the neglected side of the estadonacional structural cleavage (i.e. those not effectively incorporated into nation and state). Mendoza also benefited from the novelty premium Peruvian voters grant to newcomers. Beyond the representational qualities encoded in her personal brand, Mendoza emphasized programmatic politics. The Mendoza-led FA (and now the Mendoza-led Juntos por el Peru) sought to rectify the participation deficits besetting Peruvian democracy by encouraging the political activism of indigenous communities, the young, women, and members of the LGTB community. It also aimed to further the public and political recognition of these groups’ political and civil rights, historically marginalized. The parliamentary activity of the FA during the 2013 to 2016 period saw a close collaboration between leading FA parliamentarians such as Mendoza, Rosa Mavila and Manuel Dammert and social organizations, NGOs and other members of civil society in the elaboration of legislative bills (Mosqueira 2017, 119). This is indicative of the Frente Amplio’s social commitments and organic party-society linkages, absent in most Peruvian electoral vehicles. Frente Amplio’s commitment to represent social collectivities and channel their demands via democratic institutions

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appeared genuine, as evidenced in the nature of its parliamentary activity, among other realms of political behavior. Frente Amplio also navigated Peru’s negative legitimacy environment to good effect. An important factor underpinning Mendoza’s good electoral performance was her steady and spirited anti-Fujimorista stance, which allowed her to derive political capital from opposing the most prominent negative identity in Peru in the post-1990 era (i.e. antiFujimorismo). During the campaign, she showed her bona fides as a vocal, consistent, and effective critic of Fujimorismo, which helped Frente Amplio obtain some of the anti-Fujimorista votes beyond the political left’s “natural” constituency in the southern regions. However, the leftist outfit failed to make it to the second round of the 2016 presidential election. Faced with the dilemma of how to position itself toward the second round, the FA could choose the “lesser evil” or choose to abstain from endorsing any candidate. The Frente Amplio’s decision to back a banker and representative of the neoliberal model such as Pedro Pablo Kuczynski was anathema to the leftist outfit’s programmatic identity, but it was congruent with its spirited anti-Fujimorismo and its defense of democratic governance. The dismal results FA obtained in the 2018 regional and local elections again underlined the extent to which its 2016 performance rested on an appealing personal brand, rather than on a programmatic or other durable linkage type. In the 2020 parliamentary elections, the organization barely surpassed the 5 percent nationwide vote threshold needed for congressional representation, earning 6.1 percent of the vote. Mendoza’s Nuevo Peru, in a move congruent with the aim of uniting the political left, decided in 2019 to join the Juntos por el Peru coalition, which had been in existence since 2017. This electoral vehicle of recent vintage included the Partido Humanista, Patria Roja, Partido Comunista del Peru, and Movimiento al Socialismo longtime small outfits that had little chance of surpassing the threshold needed to enter Congress. Veronika Mendoza led JP’s party ticket, and thus her personal brand emerged as essential in shaping the electoral prospects of the young political formation. In the snap 2020 congressional elections, Juntos por el Peru earned 710,000 votes, but failed to pass the 5 percent threshold needed to enter the national Congress. This result signaled continuity with the downward electoral performance trajectory of Mendoza-led vehicles in the post-2016 period. In any case, coattails effect of the Mendoza brand resulting from her high-profile presidential campaign

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helped Juntos por el Peru surpass the legal threshold in the concurrent 2021 congressional elections, where it earned 5 seats. Mendoza’s presidential campaign was true to the programmatic commitments she had espoused for many years—including progressive social stances in the context of a highly conservative political culture. She lost some of the voters in the southern highlands who had supported her in the 2016 general elections. These voters were enticed by a more contestatory personal brand (Castillo’s), once more underscoring the critical importance of electoral supply for shaping elections amid floating voter electorates. After a decade in the national political limelight, “many popular sectors in Peru saw [Mendoza] as part of the political establishment they wished to do away with” (Coronel 2021). Notwithstanding the many qualities she evinced, Mendoza could no longer sell a personal brand representing newness and embodying rupture with the status quo. Alongside other politicians showcasing a protracted political track record—by Peruvian standards—her personal brand inevitably suffered some dilution. Veronika Mendoza’s decision to concoct a formal agreement with president-in-waiting Pedro Castillo, contributed to governability and closed the gap on the technical know-how deficits afflicting Peru Libre. The accord between both electoral vehicles committed the new government to “fight against corruption, leave office in 2026, protect human rights, fortify institutions such as the Constitutional Tribunal and the Defensoria del Pueblo, as well to summon a constituent assembly to change the constitution” (El Comercio 2021a). The accord aimed to shore up democracy as well as assuage fears about the potential threats posed by a radical leftist outfit. It also gave Juntos por el Peru the opportunity to push forth constitutional changes congruent with its programmatic platform as well as the chance to influence public policy. Nevertheless, the move carried high risks going forward for Veronika Mendoza and her new organization. First, Mendoza was shoring up a candidate (and vehicle) who blatantly contravened Juntos por el Peru’s socially progressive programmatic agenda. Secondly, the association with an incumbent “party” and its sure-to-come governmental failures (stemming from Peru Libre’s amateur qualities, internal incoherence, as well as the “incumbency disadvantage” curse afflicting Peru) portended the further dilution of Mendoza’s personal brand. The danger of being tainted by association with a (failed) incumbent is one Nuevo Peru may not have carefully

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considered, in another manifestation of the phenomenon whereby electoral vehicles prioritize the very short term, thereby endangering their future political viability. Amid a negative legitimacy environment, associating with, and actively propping up a sitting government constitutes a particularly risky proposition. In the event, it only took Nuevo Peru six months to publicly part ways with the Pedro Castillo administration, naming among the reasons cited for this move, Mendoza’s formation cited the “many presidential mistakes that evidenced a lack of strategy.” It also disapproved of the new ministers brought into the cabinet in Castillo’s third cabinet overhaul, including “incompetent figures evincing questionable behaviors within the presidential inner circle” (La Republica 2022a). Mendoza admitted the costs Nuevo Peru (and her own personal brand) had incurred in by supporting the government: “unfortunately, we lost the battle... we recognize our own mistakes and weaknesses, but we leave with the conviction that the battle needed to be fought, even acknowledging the costs and risks therein to our organization, because we do not engage in politics looking to bolster our own prestige” (La Republica 2022b).

6

Conclusion

Peru is a country without bona fide political parties, showcasing a party universe most similar to Guatemala’s in the context of Latin America. Peru’s electoral and parliamentary politics are shaped and dominated by a cluster of political figures and their (changing) entourages, as opposed to political parties qua institutions. The evidence here presented shows Peruvian electoral vehicles to be socially uprooted; their linkage with society is essentially personalistic in nature. They are devoid of organizational strength, internal coherence, or autonomy from the party patriarch. There is also evidence of intertemporal convergence as regards electoral vehicles’s internal dynamics, form and function. In the post 2001 era, traditional “parties” have increasingly converged, in form and function, with the newer electoral entities. They have not recovered from the collapse of the 1980s (inchoate) party system, unable (and often unwilling) to reconstruct their organizations by way of building linkages with society, nor have their leaders been willing to invest in, and abide by, internal governing rules and processes. Factors endogenous to these organizations as well as a

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highly inauspicious environment for party-building have jointly produced a barren party landscape and perpetuated it through time. APRA’s return to the presidency in 2006 cannot be interpreted to be temporary revival of this historic party qua institution, but rather, the electoral return of an astute, silver-tongue populist with formidable campaigning skills (Alan Garcia). The partido de la estrella was exceedingly dependent for its electoral performance on the leadership of Haya de la Torre’s successor caudillo and there is little evidence that the party label ever recovered the value it once had. APRA converged with other unrooted diminished parties in its behavioral patterns. It retained horizontal coordination insofar as party notables continued to display loyalty, but its social roots shrunk dramatically—partly victim of broad changes in Peruvian social structure and partly victim of its own mistakes, corruption, and fecklessness as an organization. The party’s value infusion became neglibible, such that its electoral performance without Garcia (the true yardstick of the party’s social rootedness), revealed the APRA to be a marginal political formation—albeit one with an outsized influence in the public sphere, as Cyr (2017) documents. Other once-prominent traditional parties (notably Accion Democratica or Partido Popular Cristiano) also experienced marked deinstitutionalization, becoming, faint shadows of their past in their external appeal and voter linkage profiles, aiming merely to survive politically amidst a negative legitimacy environment that is particularly inimical for traditional “parties.” Throughout this new democratic period, both Accion Popular and Partido Popular Cristiano damaged their (already faint) party brands, suffered important defections, and became ever more reliant on attractive candidates (personal brands) to stem the hemorrhaging of votes. Throughout the 2010s, all three traditional (diminished) parties were enmeshed in a desperate struggle for political survival. Two of them failed in that quest. Fujimorismo showed little internal autonomy from the leader or internal cohesiveness. The legal prosecution of Alberto Fujimori and the relentless persecution of Fujimorismo on the court of public opinion since 2000 helped forge a stronger sense of identity and sprit de corps among Fujimorista ranks and party notables. Consequently, it appeared to enjoy for some time a significant level of value-infusion, both internal and external. Unlike other parties, this party-movement counted with a devoted and sizable militancy. But the evidence indicates that it was not able to routinize its electoral support beyond family blood ties. Whereas the patriarch’s descendants, Keiko and Kenji, were able to inherit much

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of the aura and political capital of their father, this transfer of capital did not apply to longtime Fujimorista party notables who do not carry the family name. Its performance legitimacy from the time it enjoyed an absolute majority in Congress was dismal, abusing its power and generating ungovernability. In addition, evidence of corruption involving Keiko Fujimori also emerged. As a result, the valence evaluation Peruvian voters made of Fujimorismo was dismal, also damaging Keiko’s personal brand, perhaps irreparably. The ensuing large-scale flight of voters away from this formation, disproved the notion that Keiko-led Fujimorismo had attained a significant level of partisanship—if true, the formation would have been much more immune to performance evaluations. Nonetheless, the modest level of partisanship it enjoyed (around 10 percent of Fujimorista hardcore voters) was invaluable in an extremely fragmented landscape, as the 2021 elections showed. In any case, the future of Fujimorismo looked cloudy as of 2021 because Keiko Fujimori had further diluted her personal brand, and because her electoral vehicle displayed less institutionally clout to fend off legal problems, among other factors. The three new electoral vehicles to have held the presidential office in the post-Fujimori era, Peru Posible, Partido Nacionalista Peruano, and Peruanos por el Kambio (PPK) were paradigmatic Independent electoral vehicles, lacking vertical aggregation or collective action capabilities. Alejandro Toledo, Ollanta Humala, and Pedro Pablo Kuczynski did not show any inclination to invest in party-building, in line with Peruvian free agent politicos. The personalistic vehicles they created perished in large measure due to malperformance in office as well as their personal legal problems (corruption), underscoring the high vulnerability of personalism as a party–voter linkage form. The personal brands of these leaders became permanently damaged, as their failed attempts at making an electoral-political comeback confirmed. In the post-1990 era, electoral vehicles have been led by political entrepreneurs not interested in grassroots party-building, nor interested in building a party brand. The Frente Amplio constitutes a partial exception. It emerged as a coalition of leftist groups and evinced some organic links with grassroots organizations. However, its history has been permeated by behavioral personalism, internal debilitating factionalism, mass defections, and worsening electoral performance. Despite Frente Amplio’s avowed ambition to depart from prevailing Peruvian non-party norms, it became a fairly typical personalistic outfit. The FA party cadre with the greatest external appeal, Veronika Mendoza, defected and continued

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to pursue the aim of building a real political party with programmatic content that would unify the left. Her efforts have been marred by the “vertiginous political consumption” of political capital afflicting Peru, and relatedly, the perils inherent to personal brand politics. The case study of Peru shows that electoral vehicles belonging to the low and medium-low end of the institutionalization continuum display an unmistakable tendency toward institutional decay. The upshot is that, beyond a certain threshold of under-institutionalization, electoral vehicles with somewhat different initial levels of organizational endowments or usable political resources converge toward institutional vacuity and electoral decay as time elapses. The reasons underpinning such decay are encoded in the very makeup of these vehicles at the time they are created: their personalism, internal incoherence, absence of conflict resolution structures, and short-term horizons, almost inexorably contribute to debilitating schisms, defections, and political decision-making mistakes that collectively foster deinstitutionalization—both in the internal and external variants of the process by which organizations can acquire stability and value-infusion. Debilitating factionalism runs rampant amid Peruvian electoral vehicles, most often the result of personalistic-driven battles for power rather than bona fide programmatic divergences. Leaders fighting for shares of power or total partisan control are often enmeshed in a two-level game: one that involves garnering support among militants and other notables; and a second game over the very internal rules and procedures by which decisions and conflicts are adjudicated. Losers’ consent in these internal battles is uncommon. Real or prospective losers in power struggles either defect from the electoral vehicle or impugn the rules by which the outcome was obtained, while entrenching incipient person-driven factions. In this fashion, internal procedures, rules, and institutions, which are born weak, are not given a chance to strengthen through time. The national context in which Peruvian electoral vehicles operate is clearly important (an electorate of floating voters, low articulation of civil society, large masses of informality, regime legacies, etc.) to comprehend electoral vehicles’ inter-temporal tendency toward deinstitutionalization across different dimensions. But to fully understand the reasons fuelling deinstitutionalization, it is important to incorporate factors constitutive of diminished subtypes of political parties (Independents, Uncoordinated parties, and Unrooted parties). Upon their creation, such electoral vehicles contain the drivers of their organizational

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decay, counter-productive decision-making, and electoral decline. Thus, the common observed trajectory toward entropy and political marginality besetting Peruvian electoral vehicles is, in good measure, endogenously driven.

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Rejas, Milagros. 2019. La Construccion Partidaria del Fujimorismo Revista Ideele no. 189, December. Available at: https://revistaideele.com/ideele/content/ construcci%C3%B3n-partidaria-del-fujimorismo. Remy, María Isabel. 2011. Un balance final de las elecciones municipales y provinciales: ¿en qué punto quedaron los partidos políticos?. En Revista Argumentos, año 5 n° 1, Marzo. Richter, Verónica Ayala. 2017. La construcción del candidato. Contraste de la estrategia de campaña de Verónika Mendoza con los encuadres periodísticos de El Comercio y La República durante las elecciones presidenciales 2016. Elecciones 16 (17): 105–137. Roberts, Kenneth M. 1998. Deepening Democracy?: The Modern Left and Social Movements in Chile and Peru. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Roberts, Kenneth. 2006. Do Parties Matter? Lessons from the Fujimori Experience. In The Fujimori Legacy: the Rise of Electoral Authoritarianism in Peru, ed. Julio Carrion. University of Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Roncal Hernandez, Carlos Javier. 2018. Que Existen detras de las Pugnas Internas? El Caso del Partido Popular Cristiano 2011–16. Tesis de Magister en Ciencia Politica, Pontificia Universidad Catolica del Peru. Salazar, Diego. 2011. La Antipolitica y el APRA: el partido de la estrella con un outsider a la cabeza? Revista Andina de Estudios Politicos no. 2, Enero 2011. Sanchez, Omar. 2009. Party Non-systems: A Conceptual Innovation. Party Politics 15 (4): 487–520. Sanchez-Sibony, Omar. 2012. The 2011 Presidential Election in Peru: A Thorny Moral and Political Dilemma. Contemporary Politics 18 (1). Sanchez-Sibony, Omar. 2014. Inter-Party Asymmetries and Democratic Erosion Presented at Latin American Studies Association international Conference. Sanborn, Cynthia. 1991. The Democratic Left and the Persistence of Populism in Peru: 1975–1990. PhD Dissertation, Harvard University. Sandborn, Cynthia. 2011. Por que la Derecha no ha Ganado Elecciones en Peru? La Brujula: Blog de Cynthia Sandborn, March 1. Saravia, Gerardo. 2010. Las Puntas de la Estrella. Revista Ideele, no. 199. Available at: https://revistaideele.com/ideele/revista/199. Seawright, Jason. 2012. Party System Collapse: The Roots of Crisis in Venezuela and Peru. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Schmidt, Gregory D. 2003a. The 2001 Presidential and Congressional elections in Peru. Electoral Studies 22: 325–395. Schmidt, Gregory D. 2003b. The Great Minority: Christian Democracy in Peru. In Christian Democracy in Latin America, ed. Scott Mainwaring and Timothy Scully. Stanford University Press. Schmidt, Gregory D. 2007. Back to the Future? The 2006 General Presidential election. Electoral Studies 6 (4): 813–819.

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CHAPTER 5

Electoral Dynamics in a Partyless Environment

1

Introduction

The evolution and results of Peruvian electoral contests are so recurrently puzzling and unexpected that they generate endless debates among journalists, political scientists and pundits as regards the main forces that shape them. Some analysts emphasize structural causal factors; others point to the centrality of contingency and agency—for a useful summary of these debates see: Tanaka et al. (2016, 259–263). Electoral dynamics and outcomes are obviously multifactorial, that is, they are influenced by many interactive factors. Ceteris paribus, where partisanship is extremely low and personalism reigns supreme, we can expect electoral dynamics to be more complex and volatile than would otherwise be the case. Structural factors matter less in shaping outcomes than in other environments, and their influence is filtered through, and emerge in interaction with, agential and contingency factors—however, structural variables cannot be extricated from electoral analyses. Parsing out which causal factors are most determinative of electoral outcomes is an intricate enterprise anywhere, but particularly in a partyless environment. This chapter will maintain that such settings are pervaded by a large dose of irreducible uncertainty, rendering presumably informed electoral predictions inherently worthless exercises. The empirical record shows that candidates anointed as favorites in the early, middle, and late stages of a campaign lose with regularity, while electoral campaign seasons repeatedly witness © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 O. Sanchez-Sibony, Democracy without Parties in Peru, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-87579-4_5

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large vote shifts that cannot be anticipated in advance. Polling trends are everchanging, propelled by voter reactions to fluctuations in the electoral prospects of candidates endowed with deep-seated negative identities, the timing of voter preference/candidate rank-order shifts and their impact upon strategic voting calculi, the alteration in the slate of personal brands on offer, campaign effects, and other factors. While these fickle, volatility-inducing causal factors can be said to affect elections everywhere to a larger or lesser degree, they are central in party non-system settings such as Peru’s. Structural variables provide a (feeble) baseline of a priori voting predilections that interact with electoral supply to provide an initial rank order of preferences. But because the configuration of interacting elements changes dramatically, structural elements provide little structuring power and stability to voting patterns. This is true of ideology as it is true of other structural variables that do exert influence across electoral cycles. The intellectual value of uncovering the electoral dynamics and regularities observed in a polity devoid of a party system supersedes the case of Peru. The electoral dynamics that obtain in party non-systems are qualitatively distinct from those of more institutionalized party settings. This elicits several queries. What forces shape electoral dynamics in partyless environments? Can such polities achieve programmatic structuration? Do the analytical concepts used to analyze elections in institutionalized party systems travel well to electoral landscapes that are very fluid? Are individual electoral contests amidst free-floating electorates sui generis or can we identify reoccurring patterns? This chapter seeks to offer some preliminary answers to these generic questions via a case study of Peru. Party non-systems are not simply different from other party constellations in terms of their constituent traits, but also in their electoral dynamics: elections in such polities are more unpredictable (assuming democratic standards are met) and are crucially shaped by factors that are less important in more institutionalized party universes. The recognition that democracies without parties obey a rather distinct politico-electoral logic underscores the importance of avoiding conceptual stretching by way of assuming that all democracies in the world contain party systems. Analytical precision in the labeling of party universes can thus act as an effective shortcut to better understand electoral processes across different types of polities. The chapter examines five important traits characterizing Peru’s (imperfect or perfect) party non-system: the importance of valence

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considerations in shaping voting preferences; the inexorable absence of programmatic structuration; the identification of personalism as the predominant party–voter linkage type; the primacy of effective “party” supply (over demand-side factors) in shaping elections; and finally, the high relevance of strategic voting for electoral dynamics. Incorporating all five elements and their interaction is essential to comprehend electoral processes and outcomes in partyless settings such as Peru’s. This configuration of elements also helps to explain why Peru’s unstructured voter–party interactions are self-sustaining, such that every election is pervaded by irreducible uncertainty and reoccurring high vote volatility patterns. Systematic anti-incumbency voting, ephemeral personalistic linkages, a negative legitimacy environment (see Chapter 4), and attendant high electoral supply changes, all work to foment high total electoral volatility across election cycles.

2

Understanding Voter Behavior with a Classic Funnel Approach

Understanding the factors that influence voting behavior and untangling their relative importance is a decidedly difficult affair. Context matters greatly. The rank order of factors influencing voting outcomes in one country may differ greatly from the rank order that obtains in another country. With the benefit of what scholars have learned over the past two decades about voting behavior, we know that the relative weight of independent variables responsible for an electoral outcome reflects the overall contours of a country’s party–voter linkage profile. Links between political parties or electoral vehicles, on the one hand, and voters, are comprised of a mix of group attachments (religious, ethnic, racial, but also partisanship), policy positions, clientelistic relations, valence evaluations, and personalistic considerations (such as candidates’ ascriptive and personality traits). Additionally, electoral outcomes in some settings can be regularly and significantly affected by campaign effects, including the framings of the mass media ecosystem. A country’s party–voter “linkage profile” is a term meant to summarize the most salient and predominant aspect of de facto multifaceted party–voter electoral interactions. Following the classic study of US vote choice, The American Voter, Lupu et al. (2019) provide a funnel of causality approach to understand voting determinants in underinstitutionalized party systems. We here insert the Peruvian case within that framework, which arranges causal

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factors in order of importance based on the nature of a national electorate and party-voter linkage profile. Because Peru displays the most underinstitutionalized party universe in Latin America (alongside Guatemala), evincing an electorate comprised of the highest percentage of free-floating voters (ascertained by Latinobarometro and Peruvian polling firms) as well as diminished electoral vehicles and very high rates of electoral volatility, we can infer the nature of its particular “funnel of causality.” It stands to reason that the rank order of importance of voter considerations in Peru can be theorized to be the inverted mirror of that which applies in the most institutionalized party system settings. Figure 1 shows an inverted triangle that reverses the order of importance of voting causal variables found in institutionalized party systems and adds the central variable of “personal brands,” which can be subsumed under the heading of personalism. It is well to remember that polls consistently show that Peruvian voters assert that they overwhelmingly prioritize the personal traits of candidates over other considerations (see Chapter 4), thus providing empirical support for placing it as the most decisive variable in the funnel

PERSONAL BRANDS CAMPAIGN EFFECTS VALENCE CONSIDERATIONS ISSUE POSITIONING GROUP ATTACHMENTS

Fig. 1

Funnel of causality in Peru: Voting considerations in order of importance

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of causality here delineated. Let us briefly examine each of the causal factors underlying voting choices in Peru over the past thirty years. 2.1

Group Attachments

In democracies where political parties successfully encapsulate sectors of society, group attachments greatly stabilize voting patterns intertemporally. Voters are remarkably consistent in their electoral behavior if social, socioeconomic, ethnic, and/or religious groups map clearly onto the available party system supply. Examples include indigenous support for Pachakutik in Ecuador or the MAS in Bolivia. Peru, despite its large indigenous population lacks a political party that reliably caters to indigenous concerns and represents its interests. However, indigenous identities have formed in Peru, pushed forward by dint of political agency. The trigger occurred when “political parties [came] to perceive indigenous voters as an electoral bloc that is sizable enough to be represented” (Raymond and Arce 2013, 561). As Madrid (2012) documents extensively, some candidates (namely Alberto Fujimori, Alejandro Toledo, and Ollanta Humala) have wielded ethnopopulist strategies to woo such voters, “presenting themselves as more ethnically proximate than their competitors.” Conjunctural electoral appeals tailored to certain groups has demonstrably yielded electoral rewards for some candidates, but this mechanism for gathering votes falls under the “campaign effects” category; it does not constitute a newfound alignment of cleavage based (ethnic) party politics. The absence of organic incorporation of indigenous groups into these leaders’ electoral vehicles translates into volatile indigenous voting patterns. In the eyes of indigenous voters, the personal brand of these candidates rose and declined as did those of other candidates, and their voting patterns were volatile through time. Indigenous voters have assessed the changing electoral supply on offer at every juncture and made very contextual voting decisions, without firm attachments, not unlike other voters. While Toledo’s 2000 campaign was a significant novelty in terms of the explicit use of ethnic appeals, it did not signal the organic incorporation of indigenous groups into his electoral vehicle Peru Posible. The same applies to post-2006 Peruvian candidates who have wielded the ethnopopulist strategy in electoral contests. Indigenous voters have been guided by valence considerations to appraise candidates they once supported, such as Toledo or Humala, and judged these individuals’ performance in office and out of office

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to be rather dismal. This voter group has deserted said Presidents of the Republic accordingly, much as in line with the rest of Peru’s voter population. The well-known organizational fragmentation and weakness of indigenous organizations in Peru certainly contributes to the difficulties entailed in preference aggregation and encapsulation of ethnic groups, both nationally and at the regional level. Consequently, leftist electoral vehicles in Peru have struggled to mobilize indigenous groups electorally (Yashar 2011), notwithstanding empirical evidence showing that, on average, indigenous communities are found to support leftist parties in Latin America (Carlin et al. 2015b). Indigenous groups have used personal brands as crucial informational shortcuts, and they have been enticed by ethnic-centered appeals to vote for some candidates over others. However, they have also been let down by the mandate reversals carried out by the very candidates they helped get elected to high office. Alongside other voters, these underserved groups have suffered the extreme deficits of vertical accountability that afflict Peruvian democracy writ large (see Chapter 6). The upshot is that personal brands and campaigns guide indigenous communities in Peru in the quest to obtain political cues, much like is true for the non-indigenous. Within-group loyalties have effortlessly crossed electoral vehicle lines through time. Indigenous communities found in the interior highlands have alternatively cast their electoral lot with Toledo, Humala, and Keiko Fujimori. They are not wedded to any vehicle or candidate. Another form of group attachment comes in the form of social class. While class was a significant predictor of the vote in the party system of the 1980s, it largely ceased being a political cleavage with (some) alignment to parties after that system collapsed. Chapter 2 outlined some of the factors that account for the decline of class-based politics, including the decline of labor unions, the dramatic rise in the size of the informal economy, and Fujimori’s economic liberalization reforms (Cameron 1991). The extremely high rate of informalization of the Peruvian economy (70 percent of workers) acts as a daunting limit to the (re)politicization of social class as a mobilizing strategy. Nor are middle and upper classes loyal to any electoral vehicle, traditional or newer. The limeno moneyed class has been inclined to vote for conservative outfits, the most solid of which has been the Partido Popular Cristiano. But the PPC’s limited electoral competitiveness hardly render it an effective vehicle of representation or bulwark against populist options; the upper classes, deprived of a programmatic electorally competitive vehicle, have

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behaved strategically election after election, choosing candidates perceived to best preserve the economic status quo or casting their vote for the perceived “lesser evil,” in situational fashion—again, as is true of Peruvian voters at large. In some cases, the weakness of class voting in Latin America has been attributed to “strong leftist parties that rely on multiclass coalition of support” as well as the moderation of “the policy stances of [leftist parties in office]” or the fact that the left has “governed from the right” in many cases (Singer and Tafoya 2020, 6). The second factor applies in Peru, as Garcia and Humala represented continuity with the neoliberal model (see Chapter 6). Moreover, few political entrepreneurs on the left in Peru have strongly emphasized leftist economic appeals in their campaigns, such that they have generally not primed voters to think of voting decisions in terms of choices among distinct economic orientations. The depoliticization of economic policy in the post-1990 era has helped preclude class-based voting along this axis of competition. In conclusion, few inter-temporal class-based connections between electoral vehicles and voters can be ascertained in post-2000 Peru. Another form of group attachment, although often treated as a separate analytical linkage type (Campbell et al. 1960), is partisanship or fealty to a political party. Partisanship can behave much like other group attachments (Donald et al. 2002; Greene 2004) and levels of partisanship vary significantly across Latin America. Chapter 4 outlined the exceedingly low levels of partisanship observed in the Peruvian political scene—albeit not altogether absent. Beginning from low levels and confined to a few formations, partisanship in Peru declined in the 2001 to 2021 period. APRA, Fujimorismo, the AP, and PPC increasingly witnessed, to their chagrin, that they could not rely on former voters to supply a floor of voting support, leaving them more exposed than hitherto to brittle personal brands, valence considerations, and the vagaries and high uncertainties of Peruvian electoral dynamics. Fujimorismo attained a degree of voter loyalty in the 2010s unmatched by other electoral vehicles, which was an inestimable asset for electoral competitiveness. However, that loyalty proved less solid than some analysts had theorized. In retrospect, less than a third of Fujimorista voters at the height of its electoral fortunes (when it gathered over 30 percent of first-round votes) demonstrated true fealty, sticking with Fujimorismo’s during its post-2016 precipitous political descent. Hard-core Fujimorista voters—true partisans—hover around 10 percent of the electorate, on account of the most recent electoral contests. That percentage of loyalists is certainly smaller if we measure

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partisanship (loyalty to party) rather than adherence to a Fujimori family brand (see Chapter 3). All in all, partisanship across the board accounts for a very small fraction of the vote in Peru, when properly measured. Vergara (2007, 71–101) makes a persuasive case emphasizing the importance of structural factors for understanding inter-temporal voting patterns in Peru, as explained in Chapter 2. There are important differences between the voter preferences of Peru’s poor interior and southern regions, on the one hand, and voter preferences in the richer coastal region and capital city of Lima, on the other hand. Vergara shows, via an examination of the 2006 presidential election and previous electoral contests, that voters who inhabit regions where the presence of the state is low, yearn to be politically incorporated into the Peruvian state and nation, as revealed by their voting behavior—i.e. they vote for candidates whose personal brand represents the non-included. This framework holds well for the elections that have transpired since he conceptualized this cleavage. Candidates who successfully make an appeals strategy incorporating demands for inclusion in state and nation are bound to curry electoral favor with regions of the country that have been historically excluded from the (elite-crafted) national demos (relevant political community) and neglected by the central state in the provision of public goods. Even more importantly, there are candidates who are perceived to embody these demands in their personal brands, by virtue of their ethnicity or regional provenance, for example. Vergara’s paradigm thus puts the accent on substantive structural divisions with a measurably greater impact on voting behavior than the ideological divides political scientists regularly emphasize (but which in Peru guide only a minoritarian subset of voters). Geographical voting divides, a form of group-based attachment by proxy, hinge on the entrenched unevenness in the territorial presence of the state, a structural element traceable to Peru’s historically unfinished project of state and nation-building (Soifer 2015; Kurtz 2013, chap. 5). These societal divides are more deeply rooted than ideological distinctions that in Peru have been blunted by the catch-all nature of assorted populist movements (Aprismo, Belaundismo, Fujimorismo, etc.) and other historical factors. While the size of Peru’s middle class has famously grown substantively in the post-2000 period, the trickle-down benefits of economic growth have been geographically very uneven. Greater state capacity built up during the super-commodity boom did not translate into greater stateness (Dargent et al. 2017). Moreover, stateness continues to be geographically very uneven as well. Nor has

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Peru overcome its racialized and regional fractures to develop anything approaching a truly national identity, as the late sociologist Julio Cotler was prone to remind his readers (see: Cotler and Cuenca 2011). These structural divides provide a potential foundation upon which to attain greater electoral stability—if electoral vehicles were to be anchored upon these cleavages. Candidates have benefited from nation-incorporating and state-incorporating appeals at given electoral junctures (notably Alejandro Toledo, Ollanta Humala, Veronika Mendoza, and Keiko Fujimori), but Peruvian electoral vehicles have not developed party–voter ties based on such substantive content. Because neither Peru’s electoral vehicles nor its traditional parties have been willing or able to develop partisan identities centerd on the estado-nacional dimension (on either side of the divide), this socio-structural cleavage has failed to help rationalize and streamline Peru’s party universe through time. Voters, nonetheless, can see such content in some candidates’ personal brands (see Chapter 3). Vergara’s emphasis on this cleavage can shed light on voting patterns once the supply of candidates is known and remains unaltered. It can also provide clues about the possible direction of ongoing electoral realignments during a campaign. This structural cleavage’s enduring relevance means that, ceteris paribus, when vote-switching occurs, it is more likely to happen between candidates whose personal brands or appeals (campaign) strategy satisfy the same side of the divide—whether integrated voters (in state and nation) or excluded ones. However, interchangeable candidates along this dimension may or may not be on offer (or seen as electorally viable) in the final stages of an election. It is also well to note that political agency mediates the electoral consequences of this divide. Some candidates have been able to straddle this regionally manifested structural factor. For example, Keiko Fujimori in the 2016 election obtained rather even support across regions; in a similar vein, Ollanta Humala in 2011 was able to obtain a significant level of support in Lima to complement his southern regions-centered political backing. In any case, it is relevant to note that the estadonacional structural cleavage has not helped move Peru toward increased party universe stabilization or institutionalization. Indeed, no structural cleavage could work to stabilize the party universe so long as short-term factors such as valence, campaign effects, and personal brands dominate Peruvian electoral dynamics. While personalism remains the dominant linkage type in the country’s party–voter linkage profile, there is little prospect of stabilizing the electoral landscape.

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2.2

Issue-Based Voting

Issue-based voting constitutes a different analytical category for understanding voting behavior. In Peru, economic and security-related issues have been the most prominent themes permeating electoral campaigns— a reflection of mass level priorities. Nevertheless, electoral vehicles have not duly politicized or built an identity around these issues. On the economic front, the low degree of state involvement in the economy, including in terms of social protection provisions, has hindered the politicization of, and social mobilization around, these issues, because the constituent groups that benefit from state largess are small. In some countries, the mobilization of class cleavages has been undergirded by social programs. For example, the sizable expansion of Conditional Cash Transfer programs (Bolsa Familia) created new constituencies and reliable voting support among the poor for the Worker’s Party in Brazil (Zucco and Power 2013). No such analogy can be made for the case of Peru. The exceedingly small size of Peru’s “welfare state” as well as salutary recent inroads towards social policy professionalization, militate against the politicization of social policy and attendant building of party brands on such a basis. Nor has economic policy been a source of structured issue-based political competition. Peru has undergone a depoliticization of economic policy writ large over the past three decades, that is, since Alberto Fujimori set the country on a far-reaching neoliberal agenda and enshrined some of its key tenets in the reigning 1993 Constitution. Free market economic policies have become entrenched at the level of policy and in terms of acceptable political discourse, a policy orientation that has become the national sentido comun (common sense)—and thus largely unexamined and unpacked by most candidates and electoral vehicles. While issue-based voting exists in Peru, it is in good measure subsumed in personal brands: voters assess how the issueareas they deem most relevant are embodied by candidates based on their ascriptive traits and socializing experiences. Section 3 below lays out the general absence of inter-temporal programmatic linkages in Peru, for reasons related to inconsistent issue-based cues from electoral vehicles, electoral supply changes, and mandate reversals, among others. Social and moral issues are in recent years gaining increasing relevance, such that feminism, free choice, environmentalism, LGTB concerns, modern school curricula on gender issues, and others are more openly voiced in Peru. Voters across Latin America differ on these issues, guided

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by left–right ideological orientations (Wiesehomeier and Doyle 2012) and also guided by their value system (survival versus self-expression values)— in turn shaped by income and education levels (Abramson and Inglehart 1995). Only recently has the occasional electoral vehicle taken up these post-materialist themes in Peru. More specifically, Nuevo Peru (and Frente Amplio before it) is a political formation that has explicitly incorporated a socially progressive agenda as a central component of its political platform (see Chapter 4). In turn, it has elicited a virulent conservative reaction, in what remains a country with a very conservative political culture writ large. Again, because politicians and electoral vehicles in Peru largely obviate these issues, post-materialist concerns do not have a substantial effect on voting behavior; rather, they are marginal in electoral relevance. In sum, group attachments, partisanship, and issue-based voting are limited amidst Peru’s unattached electorate. In consequence, valence considerations, electoral campaigns and the mass media are more determinative of electoral choices. It is short-term factors that overwhelmingly shape electoral outcomes in Peru. Let us briefly delve into these factors. 2.3

Valence Considerations

Very unstable electoral markets “diminish the heuristic value of standard shortcuts for ideological decision making” (Bustikova and Zeichmeister 2017, 3), as does a highly fragmented political party scene. Peru displays both characteristics. When party brands, partisanship, and issue-based voting are scant, voters privilege simple retrospective decision rules. That is to say, in such environments, valence considerations are preponderant in how voters go about their decision-making calculus. Because voters evaluate performance through partisan and ideological lenses—thus conditioning the effective level of valence voting—in the absence of partisanship or ideological structuring, valence acquires a higher overall impact on voting outcomes. Donald Stokes was the first scholar to theorize about issues around which there is widespread voter agreement and thus political competition does not revolve around taking positional stances (Stokes 1963, 1992). Position issues are those on which voters disagree; valence issues are those on which voters concur. The term valence was used to refer to “bonds between the candidates and some desirable qualities in the public’s mind” (Stokes 1992, 143). As regards valence issues, competition is framed in terms of competence, that is, what candidates can perform

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best in tackling widely agreed-upon problems facing a polity? Valence or performance-based voting is generally prominent in Latin America (Carlin et al. 2015b), but there are significant variations across countries regarding valence’s centrality, in rough inverse relationship to the import of programmatic voting and partisanship. Three dimensions of policy performance stand out in importance in the minds of the region’s voters: economic performance, security performance (crime), and corruption control. Public polling in Peru shows these three issues are situated at the top of voter concerns. To be sure, valence voting levels also vary across time within a country, in accordance with the volatility of output performance as well as the political salience that politicians grant to valence-type policies. Peru displays one of the highest levels of economic voting in the region (Gelineau and Singer 2015, 290) for the 1995 to 2012 period. Yet the data shows, in line with theory, that levels of economic voting declined in the post-Fujimorato era (post 2000) because the salience of the economy as an issue declined. Alberto Fujimori drew much political capital from “fixing” hyperinflation as well as spearheading fast economic growth. His successors in the presidency, by contrast, did not resolve an existing macroeconomic malaise; they lacked the political opportunity to solve an economic crisis because they were handed down a much healthier and stable macroeconomic picture. This is part of the reason that sitting Presidents in Peru have not benefited politically from presiding over some of the highest levels of GDP growth in the region, nor have they been able to garner political capital from that performance in their electoral forays thereafter. That is, once macroeconomic performance (economic growth, low inflation, etc.) became steady and predictable, its political profile diminished substantially. Following the “paradox of success” logic, voter concerns shifted to other areas. In this same vein, researchers find that levels of economic voting are lower during “good time” periods of economic prosperity (Echegaray 2005). If theory is a reliable guide, then, economic performance voting in Peru can be expected to rise alongside the end of the commodity boom and the economic havoc brought about by the Covid-19 pandemic. Another reason Presidents such as Toledo, Garcia, or Humala were not rewarded for high macroeconomic performance during their tenures lies in the uneven geographic distribution of economic growth, such that interior provinces benefited much less than Lima and the coastal provinces. Partly for this reason, the south and the interior provinces have exhibited greater anti-establishment patterns of voting, plucking for candidates who

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promised, and whose personal brands represented, more radical change. Public goods provision in these regions remain inadequate, and insufficiently correlated with nationwide GDP growth, for underserved voters to endorse the economic policy status quo. The Inter-American Development Bank has provided an additional explanation for what it calls “the paradox of unhappy growth”: the rise in living standards can generate a revolution of rising expectations, such that objective improvements in welfare fall short of heightened expectations (IADB 2008). Moreover, well-being is subjective. Citizens compare their living standards with that of their reference group, such that evaluations of betterment are relational, not absolute, as economist Graham and Pettinato (2002) find in their empirical research—what they call “frustrated achievers.” The two most electorally consequential issue-areas in Peru over the post-2000 period have been corruption and common crime (Torres 2020, 102–104). Polls have shown a generally increasing preoccupation with corruption among Peruvian voters. Along with Venezuelans, Peruvians regard their governments’ anti-corruption efforts as the most ineffective in the region (73 percent), according to the Global Corruption Barometer (2017). Heightened public preoccupation with corruption aligns with the evolution of reputable indicators of the scope of the phenomenon: between 2010 and 2016, Peru descended from place 72 to 101 in the Transparency International rankings (Dammert and Sarmiento 2019). The examples of politicians who have been electorally rendered unviable largely because of their implication in corruption scandals are aplenty. Some politicians have lived and died by the sword of valence issues. For example, Luis Castaneda Lossio derived much political capital from his years as mayor of Lima on account of the many public works erected in the metropolis, which endowed him with a “political image” as a capable public administrator who delivered (Melendez 2011c), only for his personal brand to be fatally damaged when he was implicated in the Comunicore corruption case and numerous other illicit schemes during his tenure in office. The academic literature has established that the effect of corruption on electoral behavior is activated when economic conditions are poor (Carlin et al. 2015a; Zeichmeister and ZizumboColunga 2013). This helps explain why the revelations of the Odebrecht scandal have been so consequential politically (Durand 2018, chap 9), given that the corruption disclosures emerged during a period of a marked economic slowdown—again, in a country where (scant) partisanship or ideological attachments do not lessen the electoral punishment meted

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out because of corruption. The key figures in post-2000 Peruvian politics have seen their electoral viability obliterated because of their direct participation in the illegal financing of their electoral vehicles, illicit personal enrichment, or otherwise in their corrupt, discretional awarding of public works in exchange for bribes. These figures include Alejandro Toledo, Alan Garcia, Keiko Fujimori, Ollanta Humala, Pedro Pablo Kucyznski, and others. Insofar as Odebrecht constitutes an inflexion point in Peruvian politics—in that it spawned the electoral downfall of the extant Lima political establishment—it is a momentous event that belongs to the realm of valence politics. All in all, the self-destruction of Peru’s most important politicians has not come about as a result of the extremism of their ideological positions or the violations of their programmatic platforms, but rather, because of malperformance as regards probity and publicregarding behavior—well documented by Peruvian courts (Ioris 2016). Valence politics has consumed and downed many of the key political figures in Peru—and it also downed the powerful Alberto Fujimori. In what constitutes an information miser-predominant electorate, publicized corruption makes scant informational demands upon Peruvian voters. It is easy to evaluate—and punish. To the limited extent that (thin) vertical accountability obtains in Peru’s polity, it has in good measure involved the electoral punishment of corrupt politicians. Perceptions of high levels of common crime have also shaped electoral preferences. Peruvian public perceptions match objective indicators in this valence issue area as well. Notably, rates of crime victimization were the highest in Peru among all of the Latin American countries polled by Latinobarometro firm (2019). Prominent electoral candidates have garnered political capital from the public perception that they were professionally predisposed and well placed to tackle crime successfully, including Ollanta Humala, Keiko Fujimori, or Daniel Urresti. In Lima and other major cities, crime has often been the uppermost issue in the ranking of citizen concerns (Torres 2020, 103). The regional distribution of crime perception levels correlates significantly with electoral support for candidates perceived as strong crime fighters, and the correlation also exists as regards corruption—as Vergara (2019, 194) documents for the 2016 presidential elections in his statistical work. These subnational findings corroborate the import of valence considerations for Peruvian voters. Because no national government has been successful in delivering higher security on a sustainable basis, crime remains a perennial voter priority. It is a key issue contributing to systemic anti-incumbency voting at all levels

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of government. Much as in the case of inter-temporal failures in battling corruption, failure to reduce crime stems in good measure from severe state weakness, both in absolute and relational terms. To further underscore the central importance of valence for Peruvian voting behavior, it is well to remember that the great popularity Alberto Fujimori attained in office rested on performance considerations (defeat of hyperinflation and terrorism), while what was responsible for his fall in public preferences was valence-centered: economic slowdown, and especially corruption (Weyland 2005; Conaghan 2005). Given the enormous failures of performance hobbling the party-based governments of the 1980s, it is only logical that valence considerations would have taken center-stage as a lens to evaluate incumbents and candidates. Whilst the traditional parties wobbled and crumbled, so did the political leverage that ideological appeals could muster among a skeptical and pragmatic Peruvian electorate. 2.4

Campaign Effects

Scholars of electoral politics have long found campaign effects to be marginal in advanced, established democracies where partisanship is high. Only in exceptional junctures, are campaigns decisive in shaping electoral outcomes. By contrast, it is not surprising to find that campaigns are of high electoral consequence in the more fluid party systems of Latin America democracies, as recent studies have shown (Boas 2016; Greene 2015). Campaigns have been theorized to move votes via two causal mechanisms: priming, that is, the granting of visibility and importance to certain issues to the detriment of others; and persuasion, that is, changing voters’ attitudes about issues. Campaigns are more impactful in contexts where partisanship is low and where issue-positioning cannot be mapped onto party options. Scholars have only produced a handful of empirical case studies that calculate the marginal effects of campaigns on electoral outcomes in the Latin American context—that is, holding other determinants constant. These studies are revealing in that even polities exhibiting medium-level party system institutionalization display significant, election-altering, campaign effects. Argentina’s 2015 presidential election illustrates it. Greene’s (2019, 175) careful regression-style empirical study concludes that “without campaigns… [Peronist candidate Daniel] Scioli would have won 4.5 percent more of the vote,” and the Peronist party would have retained the presidency. Studies of Mexican

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presidential elections, another country with medium levels of institutionalization in the 2000–2018 period, also evince significant campaign effects (see: Dominguez and Lawson 2004; Dominguez, Lawson and Moreno 2009). Ceteris paribus, controlling for the effect of polarization and other factors, we can expect the importance of campaign effects in countries with more underinstitutionalized party systems to be greater still. Democracies showcasing party non-systems or close to that predicament, can be expected to showcase the largest campaign effects, including Peru. Contra Greene (2019, 166–167), however, the length of a country’s democratic past does not constitute today an adequate explanatory proxy variable to accurately infer levels of partisanship and, by extension, infer the (inversely correlated) relative importance of campaigns effects. Instead, as cross-country party system dealignment proceeds in many Latin American countries, short-term factors become more central, and national democratic histories increasingly less relevant. More and more countries in Latin America are coming to display the traits of democracies that “start from scratch” as regards levels of (low) partisanship. Consequently, we can infer that campaign effects are generally becoming more determinative of electoral outcomes across the region. An electoral marketplace displaying such a large domain of competition inevitably renders campaign strategies and the vicissitudes of campaign season more relevant than in more institutionalized party settings. The Peruvian electoral marketplace, where large majorities of voters are available for political socialization and incumbents do not retain the loyalty of erstwhile supporters, political marketing stands as a short-term variable of importance in shaping electoral outcomes. Candidates’ missteps during campaigns, or information that damages their personal brands, are particularly costly electorally where there is no partisan loyalty, or loyalties are otherwise very feeble. Campaign effects certainly alter the rank order of voter preferences. The specific causal mechanism through which the nature of campaigns can alter the fortunes of a particular election is, however, an intricate puzzle. Political scientists have yet to systematize what campaign strategies are most effective in very underinstitutionalized party universes—to the extent that this very contextual phenomenon is amenable to systematization. Only a few tentative observations can be given here about the Peruvian case. Ad hoc explanations that attribute gains or losses in popular support to campaign effects are easy to conjure up post-facto, after final electoral results are known.

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There is a common post-facto explanation of election results that is especially vulnerable to the fallacy of retrospective determinism: the (false) attribution of good results to good campaigning—for example, message discipline, a policy-content focused strategy, and others. In the context of a negative legitimacy environment such as Peru’s, it stands to reason that negative campaigning constitutes a more influential component of campaign effects. Peruvian citizens showcase some of the lowest levels of inter-personal trust in the Latin American region, and thus are already primed for evaluating political candidates in a negative, cynical light. In that socio-political context, well-run negative campaigning strategies to stigmatize political rivals can be particularly effective. Presidential candidates such as Lourdes Flores, Keiko Fujimori, Veronika Mendoza, or Pedro Pablo Kuczynski (in 2011), have been constrained by the inherent scope of appeal limitations enshrined in their personal brands, but also by the successful efforts of rivals to refashion or tweak those brands in the eyes of the still-undecideds—which, in the weeks leading up to election day, are known to constitute very large pockets of the voting public, a feature intrinsic to floating electorates. This logic is manifested in the shifts witnessed during the course of a campaign in the percentage of voters who would “never” vote for particular candidates. Neatly assessing the electoral impact of campaign effects vis-à-vis the impact of other short-term variables is difficult. That is why the independent weight of campaign effects on electoral results is easy to exaggerate when other factors are obviated or underplayed—such as strategic voting, for instance. In Peruvian elections, the massive shifts in voter preferences cannot be attributed to campaign effects alone. Candidates who triple their poll numbers in a timespan of two or three or four weeks, do not benefit from a large upsurge of support simply because of better campaigning; individual candidates and electoral vehicles are generally not the masters of such radically improved electoral prospects. Rather, they are the beneficiaries of strategic voting. A contender’s improving poll numbers enhance his or her political visibility, as proxied by enhanced mass media coverage coupled with informational clientelism (Munoz 2021). Increased mass media coverage of a particular candidate also enhances the public perception of his or her electoral viability, thus enhancing that candidate’s poll numbers, generating selfreinforcing dynamics. This logic contains more explanatory purchase than the substantive content of campaigns alone. Past electoral history in Peru

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suggests that well-run campaigns per se do not elevate individual candidates to victory or to the second round. Rather, they do so in tandem with voters’ instrumental calculus. The influence of Peruvian campaigns on electoral outcomes comes via a circuitous and indirect route: by damaging certain candidacies and propping up others, campaigns can alter the viable party supply in the eyes of voters and therefore substantially realign electoral preferences via strategic behavior dynamics. It stands to reason that these complex interactive dynamics have greater influence on outcomes in democracies comprised of free-floating electorates and negative legitimacy environments. Boas (2016) provides a laudable effort to systematize how and why specific campaign strategies diffuse across some countries—such that strategies are copied by candidates across elections and ideological stripes—but not across others. Peru is a country where campaign strategies have not converged upon a single model of electioneering, because there are no obvious winning campaign models to pattern a campaign after. Some candidates benefited from neopopulist strategies (Toledo in 2001), others from more professional, policy-focused campaigning (Humala in 2011), others from unity appeals and catchall strategies (Garcia in 2006); and yet others from (unsincere) negative legitimacy strategies (Kuczynski in 2016). However, Boas’ arguments may obviate a powerful reason why Peru lacks a ready-made successful model of campaigning, and witnesses pervasive candidate zigzagging in campaign strategy, both across elections and within the course of a electoral season (see: Boas, chap 4): namely, electoral supply volatility as well as strategic voting highly condition how campaign strategies map onto electoral outcomes, rendering political learning about campaigning much more difficult, given the importance of these other short-term factors. In other words, because of the interactive effects responsible for withinelectoral period vote volatility, drawing clear lessons about what works in campaigning can be fraught with baffling complexity. Some candidates, such as Humala, drew lessons from a previous failed campaign. Political learning did contribute to his eventual electoral success (Leon 2011). Candidates such as Toledo, Garcia, Acuna, and many others, could not repeat their previous electoral performances almost regardless of campaign strategy, burdened as they were by a much-damaged political personal brand. Keiko Fujimori tried distinct campaign tactics (in 2011, 2016, and 2021) but failed to win because of powerful forces beyond electioneering—namely, entrenched negative political identities fostering strategic

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voting. These mixed experiences point to the limitations of campaign strategy per se as an explanatory variable to understand the electoral fortunes of any given candidate. These experiences also underscore that searching for “what works” in Peruvian electioneering is a rather elusive enterprise. Individual electoral fortunes and final election outcomes in Peru are exceedingly contextual—but not unintelligible. What is clear is that Peruvian politicos and newcomers, bereft of a strong partisan base or a solid party organization endowed with institutional memory that can prevent or attenuate campaign errors, face elections in naked fashion. Campaigns are bound to be error-prone and without a (partisanship) cushion to mitigate the consequences thereof. For the same reasons, candidates are also highly vulnerable to the machinations of an astute electoral opponent who, via effective negative campaigning, can derail their electoral prospects.

3

The Inevitable Absence of Inter-Temporal Programmatic Structuration

The role ideology plays in Peruvian politics to account for how parties and voters behave and respond to one another has been overestimated by journalists, pundits, and political scientists alike. Claims that country embarked on a “left turn” in the 2011 general elections, or that Peru joined a region-wide trend toward the ideological center (Shifter 2011), or that in the 2016 election Peru partook in the end of the leftist regional tide, or that in the 2021 election “Peru signals a leftist revival in Latin America” (Bloomberg 2021), are misleading. These general assessments can convey the impression that the Peruvian electorate is making consciously ideological choices; or they can otherwise convey the notion that Peru’s elected governments can reliably be placed on a Left– Right continuum. Another way in which such assertions obfuscate is in their assumption that similar ideological electoral mandates can be read into results across country units with different electorates and partyvoter linkage profiles. While certainly some Peruvian voters are being informed by the classic ideological cleavage, these voters constitute a minority of the electorate—namely, a subset of the small 24 percent sector of the electorate (in the year 2021) empirically found to be cognizant of the left–right political concept (El Comercio 2021a). Moreover, even ideology-minded voters are very often faced with powerful incentives to ditch or downplay ideological considerations in favor of the electoral

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imperatives of strategic voting and anti-identity politics. While using the Left–Right schema in order to make sense of political life is a convenient heuristic, and in some national contexts indispensable, it is not one that travels effortlessly across countries. Indeed, there are powerful reasons to conclude that ideology does not possess much explanatory purchase to make sense of political behavior and outcomes in partyless democracies. Surely, it is a much less useful guide to understand Peruvian politicoelectoral phenomena than standard commentary on the Andean country assumes. Framing electoral behavior in post-party system collapse Peru in terms of left–right distinctions is highly misleading. If the Peruvian inchoate party system of the 1980s was somewhat structured by ideological cleavages and class-based voting (Tuesta Soldevilla 1995; Cameron 1994; Roberts 1998; Tanaka 1998), the electoral landscape that emerged post-1990 is clearly not structured along such lines. Mainwaring and Torcal (2006) show empirically that cross-national differences in ideological voting are enormous. In the case of Peru, the predictability of electoral choices based on voters’ self-placement on the Left–Right scale is found to be nonexistent to negligible, placing its party universe among the least shaped by ideological behavior in the developing world. The correlation scores of Peruvian respondents’ left–right ideological selfplacement and their evaluation of Alejandro Toledo (PP), Alan Garcia (APRA), and Lourdes Flores (PPC) was found to be statistically insignificant for the first two politicians and very small for the leader of the PPC (a 0.13 correlation coefficient) (Mainwaring and Torcal 2006, 220). It is difficult to find a candidate in Peru’s fluid political world who has been as consistent in terms of his or her ideological positioning as Lourdes Flores (i.e. squarely on the political Right pole of the spectrum). Yet the evaluation voters made of her was scarcely based on programmatic principles. What is more, a large majority of the Peruvian electorate does not understand the concepts “left” and “right” qua political orientations. A Ipsos-Apoyo poll from March 2016 showed that only 29 percent of respondents were familiar with such terms, while no less than 66% of respondents did not know what they represented (IpsosApoyo 2021). The same poll was carried out in January 2021, revealing an increase in the percentage of respondents (69 percent) ignorant of the left–right distinction. Only 24 percent of Peruvians were knowledgeable about these central political concepts, that is, less than a quarter of the population (El Comercio 2021a). (The poll covered 47 provinces

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and 54 localities across the national territory.) At least two implications arise from this hard data. One is that perusing Peruvian politics based on left–right ideological heuristics faces important limitations— and can lead analysis astray—when three quarters of the population does not explicitly think of political affairs in such terms. The second lesson corroborates a tenet of the cross-national literature on programmatic and ideological voting: citizens’ political worldviews are in good measure a reflection of electoral supply. If electoral vehicles do not explicitly offer coherent ideological programs and outlooks, but rather offer valence and personalistic appeals strategies, voters move in tandem, and their political calculus will mirror the way in which electoral supply and political entrepreneurs structure political thinking. The inter-temporal decline in the number of voters who understand the left–right distinction appears to reflect the ongoing decline of programmatic offerings in the Peruvian scene—to the benefit of personalistic and valence type conceptualization of politics. Furthermore, the Peruvian voters’ alignment between issue preferences normatively associated with the political right and the political left, and their self-placement on the right–left ideological spectrum, is low. A careful statistical study of the 2016 presidential elections illustrates this disconnect between issue positioning and left–right positioning on the part of voters (Sulmont 2018). Pearson correlation coefficients between the public preference for statism (state intervention in the economy) and ideological positioning are found to be null. The same applies with respect to attitudes toward the discretionality in the exercise of power, found to be uncorrelated with Peruvians’ left–right placements. The study concludes that voter attitudes on a range of issues are not aligned with a programmatic-ideological dimension. This evidence shows that the bulk of voters enter elections without a priori standard programmatic commitments to guide them in selecting candidates; rather, endogeneity is at work, that is, personalistic considerations are central in shaping electoral preferences, resulting in voters positioning themselves on issues so as to be aligned with the positions espoused by their candidate. The only point where electoral supply and demand meet along an ideological dimension is indirect and mediated by personalism. It is found “in the sympathy for the electoral candidates: if the candidate a voter prefers is right-wing, the voter self-identifies himself or herself in those terms, and vice-versa” (Sulmont 2018, 453). It is important to draw the distinction between what Luna (2007) aptly calls estructuracion programatica puntual (conjunctural issue-based

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structuration) and true inter-temporal programmatic structuration. The electoral supply and outcome of a particular election may offer an opportunity to situate (some) candidates on a left–right spectrum and to ascertain which socioeconomic groups or geographical regions voted for those candidates, but that exercise does not demonstrate that the political system or party universe obeys a programmatic logic through time. Static, synchronic analyses such as Alcantara’s (2004), grossly overstate the degree of programmatic structuration in Peru and elsewhere in the region. Peru’s post-1990 party menu has provided ideological differentiation to Peruvian voters at some electoral junctures. But true inter-temporal programmatic structuration requires that three conditions be met concurrently: 1. The adoption by parties of coherent stands on salient issues, 2. Meaningful policy differences among the major party competitors, 3. A reasonable degree of correspondence between the platforms and policy orientation of parties that reach office. None of these conditions obtains in Peru—with the partial exception of the second. Let us delve into each of them in order. 3.1

Coherent Issue-Based Stands

As a rule, Peruvian political elites and political entrepreneurs have largely shunned party-building efforts, not least providing their parties with clear programmatic profiles. Peru’s parties have the makings of catch-allism in that their masters are interested in power, not substantive ideological content. Virtually all presidents since 1990 (Fujimori, Toledo, Garcia, Humala, Kuczynski) and their rivals have made of personalistic appeals the bread and butter of their campaigns (Barr 2003; Roberts 2006; Madrid 2012), with a few exceptions (Boas 2010). This is crucial to note because the dynamics of party supply supersede in importance those of party demand: voters are forced to choose what is on offer, not what they would (programmatically or otherwise) prefer to be on offer. If parties are not staking out clear programmatic platforms on the classic Left– Right model, become increasingly diffused in ideological content, and focus their electoral appeals elsewhere, voters can hardly make ideologically consistent choices. The adoption of coherent stands is undermined

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by the prevalence of ideologically feckless diminished parties, and functionally equivalent traditional parties, whose policy stance changes in response to strategic calculations. Where parties are reasonably institutionalized, they tend to be consistent in their ideological positions, for sudden moves to the right or the left are punished by their constituencies. In Peru’s party universe, such constraints do not exist, for its Peruvian electoral vehicles do not possess what Panebianco (1988) calls “electorates of belonging” or loyal voters. Even the one Peruvian electoral vehicle that for a time enjoyed a loyal constituency, Fujimorismo, did not draw its support primarily from its (loose) right-wing ideological stance, but from other (performance-related and affective) factors (Urrutia 2011; Navarro 2011). The upshot is that Peruvian candidate-centered electoral vehicles enjoy enormous strategic autonomy to utilize whatever appeals strategy they perceive as beneficial for their electoral objectives at any given conjuncture.1 This is demonstrably true even of the purportedly ideas-based APRA. It is well to note how strikingly different the ideological appeal strategy used by APRA was in the 2001 presidential campaign (Left-of-center) versus the one followed in the 2006 campaign (Right-ofcenter), entirely contingent on contextual party menu factors (namely, the electoral rivals Garcia was facing). Equally worthy of note are the strategic maneuverings of the nominally leftist Partido Nacionalista (PNP), which became much more centrist in the 2011 presidential election as compared to its much more leftist and radical 2006 campaign (Tanaka et al. 2011). Most of Peru’s parties eschew ideological placements, describing themselves as “centrist,” “pragmatic,” or simply “independent” (Melendez 2007, 236–237), an admission of their lack of concern with staking an ideological position. This state of affairs, in turn, is reflected in voters’ average placement of most candidates around the middle of the left– right ideological continuum. For example, in the weeks leading to the 2021 general elections surveys revealingly showed that voters situated most candidates (namely, George Forsyth, Keiko Fujimori, Julio Guzman, Daniel Urresti, Yonhy Lescano, Hernando de Soto, Cesar Acuna, Daniel

1 In this limited respect, the Downsian model, which assumes political parties’ place-

ment decisions are exogenous, does have something to say about an important aspect of Peruvian party dynamics. Downs assumes that parties are unitary actors devoid of internal dynamics (bureaucracies, internal rules) affecting their strategic decision-making. This turns out to be a good approximation to the Peruvian world of personalist electoral vehicles, whose leaders enjoy enormous strategic leeway.

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Salaverri, and Alberto Beingolea) across the entire left–right continuum, yielding an average score of 5 or 6 on a 1 to 10 left–right scale. While on average, then, voters scored these candidates as centrist, what is telling is that the range of answers provided was well distributed across the ideological spectrum—these results, it is well to note, pertain to the 24 percent subset of sophisticated voters who declared they understood the left–right distinction. Only Veronika Mendoza and Ollanta Humala were rather consistently rated as belonging to a defined ideological space (left-of-center) (El Comercio 2021b). Sophisticated voters’ generalized inability to agree on the ideological placement of most candidates reflects Peruvian candidates’ ideologically nebulous self-definition and appeals strategy; rather, the emphasis is on personalistic-centered appeals and valence issues. Another manifestation of electoral vehicle leaders’ lackadaisical attitude toward staking a reliable ideological position can be ascertained in the ideological incoherence of many political alliances. It can also be seen in the frequency of ideologically incongruous party-switching among individual politicians. For example, the APRA and the PPC, long-time ideological foes (one the standard bearer of populism, the other a representative of the upper class), forged an alliance to face the 2016 elections united. Susana Villaran, a human rights lawyer who headed the Leftist Fuerza Social, was willing to serve as a Vice-Presidential candidate in the 2016 Partido Nacionalista presidential ticket alongside Daniel Urresti, a former military general accused of human rights violations. Likewise, during the 2016 campaign Vladimiro Huaroc, from the leftist Fuerza Social, was willing to accept the invitation to join the great enemy of the left, Fujimorismo. Donning different party jackets, however ideologically incongruous, is common in Peru, for it allows free agents to survive politically in a polity with a high party death rate (Levitsky 2018). Many Peruvian politicians have belonged to three or four or five political formations over time. 3.2

Meaningful Policy Differences Among Candidates

Regarding the second necessary element for programmatic structuration, the Peruvian political elite does evince a non-trivial level of programmatic divisions, as shown by the Parliamentary Elites in Latin America survey (PELA) of legislators. The Singer (2016) measure of left–right polarization, which looks at how members of the legislature described their own

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party, yields a score (1.17) for Peru that is only slightly lower than the Latin American average (1.37) for the 2006–2010 period. An alternative issue-based measure of issue polarization, which comes from the Democratic Accountability and Linkage Project (DALP) also yields a score (0.40) very similar to the Latin American average (0.37) (Carlin et al. 2015b, 15). A third measure, crafted by Kitschelt and Freeze (2010), which captures the degree to which parties present a cohesive policy vision (cohesiveness) and clear stance on key policy issues (salience), also yields a score for the Peruvian party universe (0.19) that is similar to the regional average (0.17). In summation, the degree to which party universe in Peru contains programmatic profiles that can be differentiated, appears to be on par with the region. The Partido Popular Cristiano and Fujimorismo can be situated on the Right, while the contemporary ideological location of parties such as APRA appears more ambiguous. However, the abovementioned measures provide snapshots of polarization at specific points in time. The party menu’s overall level of programmatic polarization varies significantly across electoral cycles, depending on the degree of prominence of political outsiders vis-à-vis traditional parties, the presence of electorally competitive leftist candidates, the degree to which the electoral supply is cleaved by candidates with a track record of ideological consistency, and other factors. Because the Peruvian party system evinces such high levels of extra-systemic volatility, including high supply-side volatility, each electoral cycle is fated to showcase distinct levels of polarization. For example, the level of party universe polarization rose with the appearance of a left-of-center electoral vehicle (Partido Nacionalista Peruano) in 2006; however, by 2011 the PNP had moderated substantially; the 2016 presidential campaign began with an electorally irrelevant PNP, reducing drastically the party universe’s overall polarization… only to increase (at the eleventh hour) when the left-wing Frente Amplio rose in the polls and gathered 20 seats in the 2016 congressional elections. Before the 2016 performance of the Frente Amplio, organic leftist parties (the PNP cannot be included in that category) had not been prominent enough at the national level to make a significant impact on the party universe’s ideological contours. Similarly, the last-minute rise of Pedro Castillo’s Peru Libre (a radical leftist outfit) in the 2021 general election, enhanced the political system’s level of polarization unexpectedly, given that Peru Libre had barely registered in electoral preferences before. In addition to frequent changes in the identity of the major parties at succeeding electoral cycles,

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there is another factor inhibiting inter-temporal programmatic structuration in Peru: individual electoral vehicles often change their ideological stripes (or dilute them). In consequence, if the analyst assumes that each “political party” can be placed into a fixed position in the ideological spectrum, accounting for the nominal party menu is not a reliable guide to assess levels of party universe polarization. For example, the 2006 leftist version of the Humala’s Partido Nacionalista Peruano party differed significantly in its ideological placement from the 2011 PNP more conservative version. The APRA also mutated in its ideological stance post 2001, in accordance with Alan Garcia’s strategic calculus. Feckless and insubstantial electoral vehicles, and traditional parties that have become their functional equivalents, populate the landscape. Placing these entities on a Left–Right spectrum is a perilous exercise for at least three reasons: there often is little past trajectory to draw upon in order to ideologically position such vehicles; secondly, electoral vehicles’ programmatic profiles change in salience and content in accordance with the desires of their creators or caudillos at different time periods; and thirdly, electoral vehicles are often catch-all in nature, that is, diffuse in their programmatic content—by default or design. 3.3

Correspondence Between Campaign Platforms and Enacted Policies

The third element necessary for inter-temporal programmatic structuration is largely absent, namely, correspondence between electoral mandates and enacted policy. Mandate reversals constitute the norm in Peruvian politics, as witnessed in the incongruence between Left-of-center or centrist campaign platforms, on the one hand, and the executed neoliberal policy orientation in the various administrations (Alberto Fujimori, Toledo, Garcia, and Humala). This phenomenon is typical of severely under-institutionalized party universes, for diminished parties lack internal checks-and-balances to restrain their patriarchs or leaders from blatantly violating electoral mandates or enacting wild policy swings mid-term, and moreover, diminished parties tend not to be seriously committed to identifiable policy stances. More fundamentally, when party constellations are constantly changing—as occurs in party non-systems or “democracies without parties” by definition—a sine qua non condition for intertemporal programmatic structuration is simply absent. Constant changes

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in party menu supply render the development and consolidation of a programmatic linkage with voters unattainable. Assessing conditions for programmatic structuration also necessitates an evaluation of the demand side. Peruvians are not highly ideological or issue-based voters. In this respect, they are in line with the regional norm. In a region-wide study, Colomer and Escatel (2005, 127) show that 71 percent of Peruvian voters offer responses on the Left–Right identification question, a figure nearly identical to the Latin American average (72 percent). Non-response rates—which scholars attribute to either cognitive constraints, dissatisfaction with politics, or disengagement from the political process—in Peru are therefore not out of tune with the rest of Latin America. Zechmeister (2015) finds similar results, with Peruvian non-response rates close to the regional median, and a population sociologically tilted somewhat to the Right. The distribution is as follows: 10.7 percent self-identify as leftists; 15.1 percent as right-wing; 14.3 percent do not respond; and the remaining voters situate themselves somewhere in the centrist camp. Zechmeister’s (2015) study shows that left–right placements are “minimally connected to voter choice in many Latin American countries.” Peru is not one of the five countries where left–right self-placements are wholly unrelated to vote choice (these are Argentina, Brazil, Costa Rica, Ecuador, and Panama). But empirically it is among those countries where the connection is found to be very weak. The link between ideological positioning and vote choice is rather strong only in Bolivia, Chile, El Salvador, Mexico, Uruguay, and Venezuela. There is also weak correspondence between policy stances and Left–Right identifications for Latin America in general. For three countries (Brazil, El Salvador, and Ecuador) there is no discernible issue basis for left–right semantics. The study focuses on seven policy stances: government ownership, welfare, the belief that democracy is best, the belief that democracy is preferred, toughness on crime, level of religiosity, and trust in the United States. For Peru (alongside countries such as Colombia and Guatemala) the correspondence between voters’ issue positions and left–right self-placement, is barely discernible in statistical terms. Attitudes toward the welfare state and democracy as the best system of governance are the only two variables that correlate with Peruvian voters’ self-assessed left–right placements. These findings are consistent with other recent scholarly work on the political relevance of Left–Right semantics in Latin America (Zechmeister

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and Corral 2013; Kitschelt and Freeze 2010; Jones 2010). These scholarly studies concur that there are few party universes in Latin America that are highly structured along programmatic lines. Peru is certainly not one of them. Enormous (party) supply-side and (voter) demand-side volatility preclude such structuration. Analyses of Peruvian electoral politics via the lens of a Downsian spatial model (Downs 1957), whereby parties move to capture ideological spaces that have been unoccupied by rivals or to capture a presumed “median voter,” are of limited value— notwithstanding the widespread use of Downsian logic by many analysts of Peruvian politics. The mammoth volatility levels observed in Peruvian voting intentions (polls) within a timeframe of days and weeks cannot be well-explained by the apparent movements of candidates along a presumed Left–Right ideological space. In the final analysis, the exceedingly low levels of partisanship in Peru and the persistently high level of electoral volatility preclude programmatic structuration. While Peruvians of left-wing inclinations may indeed be more likely to vote for Alejandro Toledo or Humala than for Pedro Pablo Kuczynski or Luis Castaneda, we can hardly infer that these candidates or their vehicles have built programmatic ties with “leftist” voters, such that their future electoral loyalty can be counted upon. At the next electoral cycle, the effective party supply is bound to be quite different, changing the strategic electoral calculations of candidates and thus their policy stances. Both factors, particularly the first, will necessarily alter the strategic calculation of voters. Moreover, the political capital and public image (personal brands) of those candidates who run for public office again may well have changed, in turn altering party demand dynamics (voting intentions). Additionally, where personalistic linkage is key most voters are guided by political personal brands, which for some candidates may correlate with ideological leanings, but the prime driver of voter choice cannot be said to be ideology per se. Conflating personal brands with ideology (conceived in classic Left–Right terms) leads to an overestimation of the latter as a determinant of electoral behavior. It is in the interaction between ideological placement and levels of partisanship that one must gauge the structuring capacity of the demandside on the party universe, that is, the electorate’s potential disciplining supply-side effect upon the party universe. In Peru, a very high proportion of what may generously be called “ideological voters” declares no preference for any given political party. This low level of partisanship during the post-2001 democratic era (30 percent at the high point, but

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10 percent in the most recent period), effectively mutes the political impact of voters’ ideological distinctions on party politics and electoral outcomes. While Left–Right semantics constitute a useful heuristic that allow for comparisons across countries and continents, its usefulness for understanding political dynamics in certain country contexts is very limited. Indeed, insistence on using this classic ideological lens can distort understanding. Dimensions other than the classic Left–Right ideological spectrum better capture what shapes Peruvians’ electoral preferences.

4 The Primacy of Electoral Supply over Electoral Demand Electoral volatility is a relational measure. Much like prices in an economic system, the volatility of the vote as measured by the Pedersen index quantifies the relation between supply and demand (Pedersen 1983). In countries with extremely high levels of overall volatility, the fickle voter is often blamed for preventing the development of a stable party system. A good many Peruvian journalists, analysts, and scholars have (wrongly) accused Peruvian voters of being erratic, unpredictable, and even irrational. In truth, voters have behaved strategically in reaction to an ever-changing effective party menu. Political scientists recognize that party system stabilization is a product of both voter demand and elite supply (Kitschelt et al. 1999; Rose and Munro 2003). However, is the endemic, self-sustaining instability that is a defining trait of party nonsystems a result of voters who switch their votes or of elites who change the supply of parties? If voters coordinate on their choice of a few viable parties, then elites have strong incentives to try to anticipate which parties will be selected by voters and decide on entry or exit from the electoral arena accordingly (Cox 1997: 157–178). This process shall contribute, after a few electoral cycles, to the streamlining and rationalization of the party system. But where no such voter coordination occurs and voters are volatile, elites are not incentivized to refrain from creating new parties. In such settings, party supply is highly variable from election to election, in good part because an electoral marketplace that has not closed off electoral spaces provides a powerful incentive for political entrepreneurs and outsiders of all walks of life to try their luck and run candidacies whose prospects of victory cannot be discounted (Bielasiak 1997; Mair 1997). In Peru, new electoral vehicles can and do achieve instant or nearly instant success, as witnessed in the presidential races won by Cambio 90 (1990),

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Peru Posible (2001), Partido Nacionalista Peruano (2011), Peruanos por el Kambio (2016), and Peru Libre (2021)—this is also the norm in a plethora of races at the mayoral or regional level. Because of this same logic, seemingly defunct parties can “resurrect from the dead” and stage unlikely electoral comebacks—such as APRA did 2001 and 2006 after its catastrophic performance in office in the 1985–1990 period and subsequent marginalization during the 1990s, or as Fujimorismo did in the 2011 and 2016 elections after a decade in which it was moribund. In the 2011 presidential election, no less than five candidates entered the race with a very realistic chance of becoming President of the Republic, underlining the large individual incentives for any neophyte or political outsider to try a hand at Peru’s political casino. In the 2016 presidential race, no less than six candidates were deemed to enjoy realistic options of becoming the next President of the Republic at different stages of the electoral campaign (Tuesta Soldevilla 2017). The causal relationship between the supply of parties and electoral volatility may run in the opposite direction. Elites may behave in a manner quite autonomous from voter behavior, deciding to split or merge their electoral vehicles, exit or enter the partisan arena, for reasons of individual power ambitions, intra-party clashes, instant electoral gratification, and other narrow motivations. Elites can consciously decide to eschew the building of party organizations for any number of reasons—including short-term horizons, the cost of party-building, and the uncertain electoral payoffs associated with it. In short, the dynamics of change in party system supply may be quite divorced from voter demands, grievances, or a reading of voter behavior. In this scenario, electoral volatility is an effect (rather than a cause) of party supply change: political elites are constantly on the move and voters are literally precluded from displaying consistent behavior because of constant changes in the party menu. In an analysis of 13 new democracies of Central and Eastern Europe, Tavits (2008) provides robust empirical evidence that it is elite behavior that dominates party system stability or instability (as opposed to mass-level behavior). There is much to commend this conclusion in terms of its ability to describe faithfully the Peruvian case—and party non-system polities more generally. There are powerful theoretical reasons to expect Tavits’ findings to be applicable to Latin America’s least institutionalized party universes (such as Guatemala, Ecuador, and others) and much empirical evidence to infer that, indeed, in such polities autonomous elite behavior is of

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paramount importance as a driver of instability in inter-party competition. In a polity populated by taxi parties the links with voters are flimsy and ephemeral, and the divorce between party leaders and popular preferences unmistakable. The weaker party-citizen linkages are (i.e. the more transient, the more instrumental), the greater the level of elite autonomy. In such contexts of high elite autonomy, elite behavior should be analyzed via a self-referential framework: whether political entrepreneurs decide to launch a campaign, split from their electoral vehicle, exit the electoral arena, etc., obey factors generally unrelated to societal demands—such as filling untapped programmatic niches, voicing the grievances of the voiceless in a partisan setting, or pursuing substantive policy objectives as ends in themselves. In summation, “party” supply volatility and demand volatility are mutually reinforcing. The ever-changing behavior of both elites and voters perpetuates Peru’s “democracy without parties.” In a universe composed of electoral vehicles (and older but functionally equivalent parties), individual political ambitions can be expected to drive aggregate elite behavior to an inordinate degree. Many examples gathered from post-1990 Peruvian electoral history can be used to illustrate this phenomenon. The 2011 presidential elections provide a prominent case in point: as public opinion polls revealed that the two candidates with anti-democratic credentials were likely to make it to the runoff, none of the three so-called “centrist” democratic candidates (Toledo, PPK, and Castaneda) proved willing to join forces to coordinate the vote to defend democracy, manifesting the extent to which individual ambition motives trumped any other consideration (Sanchez-Sibony 2012). The episode concurrently confirmed, once more, that Peru showcases a political society populated by “precarious democrats” to use Eduardo Dargent’s apt term (Dargent 2009). In this case, as in many others, “party” supply did not respond to “party” demand (voter behavior). AntiFujimoristas as well as democracy-minded voters would have wanted such streamlining of the party supply to better confront the looming electoral “threats” haunting Peruvian democracy (Ollanta Humala and Keiko Fujimori). Peru’s partyless universe is characterized by a structural disequilibrium between electoral supply and demand. Successive elections since 1990 have not streamlined the supply of parties and vehicles since 1990 and future elections are unlikely to do so—lest we observe the unlikely prospect that some electoral vehicles become socially rooted in the foreseeable future, thus becoming bona fide parties. The future contours of

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the Peruvian “party” universe are inherently unknowable, guided by irreducible uncertainty, except for the reasonable expectation that it shall remain highly fragmented. In addition, the de facto “party” supply is more variable and capricious than it appears at face value. Peru’s electoral menu can be disaggregated into a nominal component and an effective component. The effective electoral menu is determined by the individuals who lead the electoral vehicles on offer at election time, rather than the observable supply of vehicle and party labels itself. An election that features APRA without Alan Garcia, the PPC without Lourdes Flores, Peru Posible without Alejandro Toledo, the Nationalist party without Ollanta Humala, or Fujimorismo without Keiko Fujimori, changes the effective “party” supply, even if the electoral vehicles on offer with respect to the previous electoral cycle were to remain the same. Table 1 shows how the effective electoral menu has differed from the nominal “party” menu across four presidential elections. The effective “party” menu is more variable across elections than the nominal menu. Fujimorismo and Peru Posible have, in nominal terms, contested all elections; but due to personalistic voting, the effective party supply differed according to whether Toledo and Keiko Fujimori were on the ballot or not. In 2011, the absence of Garcia on the ballot “forced” his sympathizers to shop for other options. This outcome would have obtained even if the APRA had managed not to provoke the exit of the candidate it put forward, Mercedes Araoz, and had managed to field a presidential candidate. Table 1 Difference between nominal and effective electoral supply across Peruvian Presidential Elections 2001

2006

2011

2016

Nominal Party Supply

APRA Fujimorismo Peru Posible –

Effective Party Supply

PopularCristiano Garcia – Toledo – Flores

APRA Fujimorismo Peru Posible Partido Nacionalista PopularCristiano Garcia – – Humala Flores

– Fujimorismo Peru Posible Partido Nacionalista – – Keiko Fujimori Toledo Humala –

APRA-PPC Fujimorismo Peru Posible Partido Nacionalista APRA-PPC Garcia Keiko Fujimori Toledo – –

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(Indeed, voting intentions for Araoz registered at a meager 4% before she withdrew). In 2016, Ollanta Humala was not on the ballot, enticing many of his former voters to consider other choices in the menu. Had the Peruvian Nationalist party been on the ballot (it withdrew its candidacy), the same logic would have ensued, as the effective electoral menu would have changed. The greater variability of effective electoral supply promotes a greater degree of demand volatility than would be the case if party labels were of intrinsic value (or otherwise stated, if effective and nominal supply were the same). Because of the ever-changing effective “party” menu at each electoral cycle, Peruvian voters are denied the opportunity to show any semblance of voter consistency, nor the possibility of political learning. The textbook process of mutual learning and adjustment between parties and voters, such that volatility is reduced through time and the party universe is streamlined, is rendered literally unattainable. Therefore, in political environments where personalism is the driving form of voter-party linkage, it is pertinent to distinguish between nominal and effective electoral supply. On the demand side, the culprits responsible for the absence of voter loyalties are well known, including the performance-related massive partisan dealignment of the late 1980s (Kenney 2004; chap 3; Seawright 2012), widespread distrust in democratic institutions (Tanaka 2005), the increased atomization of Peruvian society (Panfichi and Coronel 2009), the historical paucity of partisan traditions (Pease and Sommer 2013), errors of agency on the part of traditional parties (Tanaka 1998), and other causal factors (Roberts 1998; Planas 2000). One reoccurring phenomenon that has contributed to demand volatility is the punishment voters make of incumbent parties at every electoral cycle. The turnover rate of governing parties has been 100% since 1980—with the predictable exception of Alberto Fujimori’s authoritarian interlude.2 This raises the question of why Peruvian political parties are unable to capitalize on the good economic performance posted during their tenure in office, as witnessed in the massive re-election failures of Peru Posible, APRA, the

2 Unsurprisingly, such turnover was not observed during Fujimori’s time, because elec-

tions were unfree and unfair. Whether Fujimori would have been re-elected under strictly democratic conditions is quite possible, but not certain. Elections during the 1990s Peru were conducted in the context of uneven political playing fields and thus the real distribution of voter preferences, as in all competitive authoritarian regimes, was inherently unknowable.

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Peruvian Nationalist Party–and predictably, had Kuczynski not resigned, Peruanos por el Kambio (PPK). Peru contravenes the political science literature that finds a strong link between economic performance and incumbent parties’ re-election chances (Murillo and Visconti 2017). This query can be answered in multiple ways, and many sensible explanations have been proffered. The phenomenon is doubtless multi-causal. Infrastructural state weakness plays a strong causal role, as it predisposes governments to malperformance in office (Levitsky 2018, 345–347). But electoral vehicle-centered explanations are also highly relevant. At least three such causal factors to explain the non-reelection phenomenon can be identified. First, the non-representative character of diminished electoral vehicles renders ruling “parties” unable to mediate state–society conflict and to act as a transmission belt of societal grievances; secondly, the very internal nature of diminished electoral vehicles (incoherent, internally divided, lacking government experience and political cadres) necessarily contributes to ungovernability when they are catapulted to high office; thirdly, because Peru’s electoral vehicles lack substantive value-infusion (internal and external), they are inherently unable amass and bestow political capital, which is exclusively vested on party creators and patriarchs. (Peru’s Constitution does not allow for the immediate reelection of presidents). Political capital is transferable between politicians when they belong to a party endowed with intrinsic value in the eyes of voters, not when what politicians share is a diminished electoral vehicle. In an electoral market composed of floating voters without partisan attachments, as in the Peruvian case, “party” labels by themselves carry little independent worth. They are, much like weak currencies, poor stores of value. Moreover, their flimsy, inorganic character endows them with selfdestructive tendencies: in the absence of the party leader, the internal incoherence, political pettiness, scuffles for power, programmatic vacuity, and overall internal disarray characteristic of diminished electoral vehicles, become much more visible, an unedifying spectacle for voters to see and punish at the voting booth. These dynamics have afflicted all Peruvian vehicles, from Peru Posible to the Partido Nacionalista Peruano and Fujimorismo, as well as traditional parties (such as APRA, AP, and PPC) that have regressed in levels of institutionalization. The party politics literature has uncovered much evidence that the public perception of internal divisions within parties translates into an electoral cost (Greene and Haber 2015). Whenever, at given junctures, electoral vehicle caudillos have not imposed order from above, these entities open a pandora’s box

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of unpleasant internal realities that inhibit the appeal of electoral vehicles for future contests. Rampant indiscipline and person-driven factionalism have tarnished the image of virtually every individual party and electoral vehicle in Peru. These internal scuffles are prominent not only at the time of elections, but also in-between electoral cycles. The nature of Peruvian vehicles as “coalitions of independents,” to borrow Zavaleta’s (2014) apt term, is thus revealed in naked fashion. Supply volatility during the course of an electoral campaign is also greater in a partyless settings and low-quality electoral democracies. At least three reasons underpin the phenomenon of high campaign volatility. First, the low support inherent to negative legitimacy environments is bound to convince some candidates and vehicles to exit the campaign when their polling numbers lag or fall precipitously. While for bona fide parties the fielding of candidates for elections stands as a raison d’etre justifying their existence, electoral vehicles, by contrast, are prone to be more instrumental in this regard, deciding to enter or exit an election based on contingency and pragmatism. It is well to note that as Peruvian traditional parties have undergone a process of involution and growing uprootedness, their modus operandi has increasingly mirrored those of newer electoral vehicles against which they compete (see Chapter 4). For illustration, the APRA decided to withdraw from the 2011 general elections when its chosen presidential candidate (Mercedes Araoz) polled extremely low numbers and the historic organization thus appeared to be uncompetitive in that contest, a move that mirrored the modus operandi (i.e. the naked pragmatism and short-termism) of newer electoral vehicles. A second reason to expect supply-side changes during electoral campaigns lies in that diminished electoral vehicles, showcasing their status as uprooted, artificial entities, often resort to fake signature collection strategies and other shenanigans that violate electoral law, and thus can rightfully be disqualified from electoral contests. The very constitutive deficiencies of electoral vehicles—in terms of sources of finance, partisanship levels, etc.—incentivize them to try to cheat their way to electoral eligibility as a way to overcome such deficits, for example by seeking illegal financing, forged signature drives, or incurring in innumerable administrative irregularities. A third reason for expecting within-campaign supply volatility relates to a problem inherent to many unconsolidated democracies, namely, feeble electoral management bodies. Electoral agencies that are institutionally weak, such that they enforce electoral rules with little consistency or are otherwise politicized (Hartlyn et al. 2008), can throw

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candidates out of the running for specious reasons. The 2016 general election provides a prominent case of such an event, when two candidates with good chances of entering the second round, Cesar Acuna and Jaime Guzman, were controversially declared by the Tribunal Supremo Electoral (TSE) to have violated electoral law based on highly specious reasoning—rendering the election less than free (Levitsky 2016). To summarize this section, the nature (and frequent variability) of electoral supply necessarily explains an important degree of voter demand-side volatility in party non-systems. In regards to the nature of party supply, a political society populated by diminished parties is unable to faithfully reproduce voting patterns from election to election because such electoral vehicles lack valuable institutional brands and depend on a (personalistic) linkage type bereft of durable ties to voters. With regard to the volatility of effective supply, a changing electoral menu necessarily forces voters who prefer a (person-centered) option that is not on the ballot to change their vote with respect to the previous election. High supply volatility also reduces the degree of political learning on the part of voters. Accounting for the nature and variability of the party menu is thus essential to understand why party system consolidation proves elusive—above and beyond the causal role of important societal demand-side factors inimical for party building (explained in Chapter 2).

5 The Importance of Strategic Voting: Expecting the Unexpected Strategic voting (also called tactical) can be defined as a vote for a party or a candidate that is not the preferred one with the intent of influencing the outcome of an election. A strategic voter’s decision-making process involves “weighting the anticipated benefits from voting for each option by the expected likelihood that these benefits will be realized via an electoral victory” (Gschwend and Meffert 2017). In short, these voters’ decisions are a product of both preferences and expectations (of election outcomes). Expectations are crucial because “only they can turn a defection from a preferred party [or candidate] into a strategic voting decision” (ibid.). Politically engaged voters form expectations about the probabilities of candidates’ electoral success from mass media coverage, most notably based on pre-election polls. As “cognitive misers,” voters less politically engaged make use of heuristics (informational shortcuts)

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to form expectations, such as past electoral history or informational clientelism. Maurice Duverger famously observed that there is a psychological effect that entices voters to avoid wasting their vote on a party unlikely to win or obtain legislative representation. Strategic voting requires both the recognition of a “wasted vote” opportunity and the decision to act on that opportunity (Duch and Palmer 2002). In institutionalized party systems, strategic voters are found in greater quantities in socalled “third” and “fourth” parties, that is, in the medium-sized and small parties competing against larger ones. The logic is straightforward: because “third” and “fourth” party voters are liable to waste their votes on parties unlikely to win (or unlikely to make it to the second round in ballotage electoral systems), they face a greater incentive than other voters to defect to one of the large parties (Abramson et al. 2010). In severely under-institutionalized party universes, however, systemic large political parties which can be regularly expected to vie for victory across electoral cycles are absent. Rather, most elections offer a virtual “clean slate,” whereby any number of parties or political entrepreneurs can realistically achieve electoral victory. In such settings, public opinion polls divulged by television and newspapers that inform on the relative standing (rank-order) of parties/candidates, constitute a key informational device shaping voters’ perceptions of electoral viability. Public polls tell voters which contenders entail “wasted votes” and which contenders entail “useful votes,” particularly during the last stages of an electoral campaign. Thus, politicians whose public opinion poll numbers edge steadily downward often fall victims to a crowing-out effect. As the perception that a candidate entails a “wasted vote” becomes more widespread, his or her political fate becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. The opposite dynamics obtain for candidates whose poll numbers edge up, as a crowding-in effect takes hold. Candidates once thought marginal can thus come to be perceived as electorally viable, and such perceptions become real in their consequences. An obvious feature of democratic party non-systems that makes insincere voting more prevalent is the fact that voter preferences are hardly fixed to begin with (due to meager overall levels of partisanship), lowering the psychological cost of defection. Consequently, many Peruvian voters are rationally inclined to deviate from sincere voting— in much greater numbers than is true in party universes with stronger partisan attachments. The remarkably high volatility of voting intentions within the timeframe of a campaign strongly suggests that Peruvian voters engage in a rational calculus to assess which acceptable candidate has the

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best chance of defeating an undesirable opponent—choosing a competitive “lesser evil.” A second feature that facilitates strategic behavior is a high level of party menu fragmentation, such that more than one electoral vehicle may be an acceptable option (Arian and Shamir 2001; Gschwend and Hoogue 2008). In ideologically structured party system settings, defecting voters settle for the large party closest to their ideological preference. By contrast, in settings where personalistic voting is predominant, the calculus of many strategic voters obeys more idiosyncratic and practical concerns—choosing a perceived “lesser evil” candidate or band-wagoning on an electorally rising candidate, that is, betting on the prospective winner. Ceteris paribus, they are also more likely to switch toward a viable candidate with a personal brand not too dissimilar to that of their sincere first (or second) preference. Because of the absence of systemic parties, in (democratic) party non-systems the identity of the candidates that will benefit from candidates’ defectors cannot be predicted at the outset of a campaign. Only the evolving dynamics of the campaign (and attendant electoral realignments) reveal which candidates entail “wasted votes,” and which candidates become electorally viable. As many as three or more important rank-order changes are common during the course of a single campaign season. Because first or second realignments may well not be decisive, a numerically decisive sector of strategic voters is constantly re-evaluating the electoral viability of different options in the party menu. There is a marked dearth of empirical studies of strategic voting in Latin America. One exception is a recent study by Weitz-Shapiro and Winters (2019) that estimates the level of strategic voting in the 2015 Argentine presidential elections won by Mauricio Macri to be between 6 and 10 percent of the electorate. This is a country that showcased a level of partisanship between 26 and 39 percent of the electorate in 2014, depending on the dataset used (Zeichmeister 2019, 243). Given that Peruvian electorate displays a significantly lower degree of overall partisanship, the percentage of potential strategic voters can be expected to be significantly higher in Peru than in Argentina. But what are the correlates of actual (rather than potential) strategic behavior? WeitzShapiro and Winters (2019, 210) find that “the only significant predictor that distinguishes actual from potential strategic voters is the difference in the feeling thermometers towards the two major candidates.” This constitutes one prominent theoretical determinant of actual strategic voting in the relevant literature (Blais and Nadeau 1996). Peru displays a

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more pronounced “negative legitimacy environment,”—such that politicians are more widely derided, negative identities more entrenched, and newcomers rewarded more—than Argentina. Many Peruvian voters are motivated by “lesser evil” considerations, a correlate of their deep-seated distrust toward the political system writ large. It therefore stands to reason that the level of actual strategic voters as a percentage of the voting electorate can be fully expected to be significantly more prominent in Peru. (The ceteris paribus condition applies because levels of strategic voting can vary from election to election in any given country, reflecting differences in the gap in public perceptions between leading candidates as well as other contextual factors). Even in the absence of studies measuring directly strategic voting in Peru (which requires individual-level data), the perusal of aggregate level inter-temporal electoral trends and fluctuations indicates that it is large in magnitude. This inference stems from the observed large vote shifts in brief timespans, often no more than mere days. In Peru, the incidence of electoral “tsunamis” is empirically so frequent that it constitutes a normal voting phenomenon—the Spanish term voto aluvional is often used, whereby parties with very low initial polling numbers experience a colossal surge of voter support in lightingspeed fashion (no more than days or few weeks). To measure the scope of strategic voting directly, analysts can utilize individual-level voting data either by calibrating respondents’ own characterization of their vote or in a two-step procedure, using voters’ rank-order of preferences as well as their perceptions of political parties’ prospective performance (Blais and Nadeau 1996). Data pertaining to the first kind of direct measurement of strategic voting in Peru is available. A poll conducted by GfK in March of 2016, in the vicinity of the first round of the 2016 presidential elections, asked voters whether they were voting for the candidate they liked best or the one who had the most possibilities of winning in the second round—in hopes of defeating a candidate the voter truly disliked. The poll revealed that, on average, about 50 percent of respondents intended to vote for their sincere choice, while a sizable 33 percent signaled they would vote for the candidate who had the best chance to win in the second round; that is, one-third of voters opted for a strategic decision (GfK Opinion 2016). When the data is disaggregated into the voters of each individual candidate, the phenomenon of strategic voting is revealed as one of even greater proportions. As many as 46 percent of Alan Garcia voters, 41 percent of Keiko Fujimori voters, 40 percent of PPK voters, 37 percent of Veronika Mendoza voters, and 35 percent of

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Alfredo Barnechea voters, declared they voted in the first round based on that candidate’s electoral prospects in the second round—that is, they were making a strategic choice rather than a sincere one (GfK Opinion 2016). The empirically observed phenomenon of widespread strategic voting can only be understood in the context of an electoral marketplace comprised mainly of floating voters, and an attendant vast domain of competition, a constitutive trait of democratic party non-systems. Where party attachments are largely inexistent, voting patterns will predictably be extremely volatile not only between electoral cycles, but also within the timeframe of an electoral campaign. Almost any recent Peruvian election serves to illustrate the phenomenon of radical swings in voter preferences and unexpected outcomes. The following examination of electoral processes throughout the 1990 to 2021 period illustrate these constitutive traits of electoral politics in Peru. 5.1

The 1990 Presidential Election

The electoral 1990 tsunami that took unknown university professor Alberto Fujimori to the pinnacle of power has become legendary. The agronomist professor began his campaign barely registering in public opinion poll radar screens, standing at 3 percent. Despite the lack of campaign resources or initial voter recognition, his populist anti-party message and the dynamics of strategic voting propelled him to the second round, where the widespread anti-Vargas Llosa sentiment—the writer was perceived as elitist and in cahoots with some of the discredited traditional parties—catapulted Fujimori to the presidency. In the final stage of the campaign Fujimori’s poll numbers increased as much as 1 percentage point a day, in what became known as the “Fujimori tsunami” (Schmidt 1996a; Kenney 2004, 39–41). Schmidt (1996b) makes use of ticketsplitting voters to assess the degree of strategic voting that benefited Alberto Fujimori in the first round. Some Aprista voters who prioritized defeating Mario Vargas Llosa voted for Fujimori in the first round, as it became clear that the obscure university professor was the candidate with the best chance to defeat the neoliberal-minded novelist in the second round (Schmidt 1996b, 212). On their part, voters of Henry Pease and Alfonso Barrantes knew by March 1990 that “no left-wing

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candidate could win the electoral contest, even in the improbable case that one of them would survive the first round (ibid., 209).” Schmidt calculates, after analyzing the presidential vote along with the simultaneous vote for senate lists, that Alberto Fujimori gained a total of more than 487,000 additional votes because of the strategic voting behavior on the part of APRA voters, leftists, and supporters of minor parties (out of a total vote count of 1,931,988 in the first round). Without such widespread strategic behavior, he concludes that the following outcome would have transpired: the Aprista “Alva Castro would have edged Fujimori for second place in the first round by approximately 208,000 votes, and the Cambio 90 candidate [Alberto Fujimori] would have not been elected president (ibid., 227).” In a real sense, the shocking 1990 election became a forerunner of the volatile post-partisan politics that came to characterize Peru ever since. Pervasive strategic voting, alongside some of the elements outlined in this chapter, have rendered elections in Peru a domain where observers should expect the unexpected. 5.2

The 2006 Presidential Election

The April 2006 presidential election provides a second illuminating example of strategic dynamics at work. Polls gave a political outsider, lieutenant-colonel Ollanta Humala, a mere 9 percent of voting intentions in October of 2005, far from what was needed to enter the second round as one of the two most voted candidates. However, Humala’s electoral growth was meteoric: two months later (December 2005) his support had surged to as much as 25 percent. A populist campaign strategy characterized by stern criticism of both the political class and neoliberal economic policies, helped his prospects, as many analysts have duly pointed out. But this post-facto reading of his electoral performance is insufficient: it does not explain the exponential growth Humala experimented in the polls in the final stages of the first-round contest. The once marginal candidate was catapulted to the second round via a combination of campaign strategy, personal branding, and contingent factors that reshuffled the rank-order of candidates’ poll numbers (Melendez 2006; Schmidt 2007). Accion Popular’s flag-bearer Valentin Paniagua, who had successfully shepherded Peru’s transition from the authoritarian Fujimorato to democratic governance as interim president, emerged at the outset as a leading candidate for the 2006 election, polling 18 percent of the vote in October 2005. However, his uninspired campaign and misguided alliance

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decisions contributed to a drastic plunge in his voting total, to a mere 6 percent on Election Day, as voters deserted him en masse to support other candidacies (Ipsos-Apoyo, 24 March 2006). The campaign period had yet more surprises, in line with other electoral periods in Peru’s post-1980s era. Even though Alan Garcia had been leading the polls in voting intentions for the 2006 general election for months and years, voter realignments as the election neared seemingly changed his fate. He was written off by pundits as highly unlikely to enter the second round with only weeks to go to election day. By March 2006, “it appeared that Humala and Flores would be the two candidates to emerge from the April 6 first round” (McClintock 2006, 160). However, as late as mid-March “a whopping 40 percent of voters remained undecided (ibid., 159),” a predicament in keeping with a political marketplace of floating voters. Flores’ candidacy was successfully undermined by both Garcia and Humala, who described her as the “candidate of the rich,” a claim that she inexplicably failed to rebut. The negative identity aspects of her personal brand were thus successfully crafted, highlighted and cast in stone by her adversaries. In addition, she was damaged by revelations about unsavory links with the Fujimori government on the part of key players in her inner circle. The PPC’s meager level of loyal partisans provided no cushion for Flores’ mistakes of omission and commission, which contributed to seal her rapid electoral descent. Her campaign was riddled with “a series of mistakes,” including her abandonment of popular, underprivileged urban sectors, neighborhoods where she barely campaigned, opting instead to focus on provincial voters (Melendez 2006, 59). The decline in her support among the two lowest quintiles of the socioeconomic ladder (sectors D and E) dwindled. As her polling numbers dwindled, many of her supporters switched their support to Garcia as the remaining viable candidate who could best preserve the economic policy and political status quo against Humala’s perceived radical option. Garcia’s renowned campaign skills were fully on display in 2006, as he also managed to paint Humala as a dangerous choice, an option that represented a “salto al vacio” (a jump into a precipice) (Torres 2010, 155). In sum, Garcia was able to somewhat damage the personal brand of both of his main opponents, while successfully rebranding himself as a safe pair of hands (quite a feat given his presidential legacy of economic mayhem) and someone not beholden to elites. Many “undecideds” who regarded, and those who came to perceive Ollanta Humala as a threat by dint of campaign effects also converged upon Alan Garcia in the first round. Garcia came to be

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seen by the middle class and much of the urban electorate as the candidate most likely to prevent a Humala victory—that is, the smart choice among strategic voters. Such “lesser evil” dynamics, reproduced again in the second round, partly help to explain the seemingly unexplainable: how a former President who had wrecked the Peruvian economy in the 1980s and presided over the growth of the Shining Path guerrilla, could win a contest for the presidency again. (In addition, the young demographic profile of Peru meant that the 2006 electorate comprised many new voters who had not lived through his catastrophic presidency of the 1980s). In a political world of personalistic-driven voter behavior, Garcia’s renowned talent for populist campaigning also played an important part. He charted a course of “moderate populism,” criticizing aspects of the extant neoliberal market model in place since Fujimori’s 1990s economic reforms but steering clear of proposing statism or radical economic changes. His chameleonic capacity to readjust and market his personal brand to counterpoise it to that of his foremost rivals was important in a setting where strategic voting is so prevalent. The 2006 campaign demonstrated the extraordinary political abilities of Alan Garcia, as he positioned himself between the “image of relative weakness perceived in [the brand of] Lourdes Flores and the authoritarianism that Humala transmitted” (Torres 2010, 155). Garcia astutely positioned his candidacy as one of cambio responsable (responsible change), a strategy of moderation that helped propel him to the second position in the rank order of public preferences with only one week left in the first round of the campaign. In sum, to paint the second-round contest in any way as a structurally semi-determined outcome by virtue of the segmented geographic and socieoconomic provenance of the vote, or to depict it as a predictable contest between populism and the party establishment, is to attribute an order and a logic to the outcome post facto that aligns better with the standard analytical toolkit used to elucidate elections in more institutionalized party environments. It is to ignore the crucial role that campaign effects and strategic voting played to propel two candidates who were initially, and for long time stretches, struggling to find electoral traction with voters. 5.3

The 2010 Lima Mayoralty Election

The 2010 election for the mayoralty of Lima provides another prominent example of strategic voting dynamics at work (see Table 2). It was

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Table 2

Voting intentions during the 2010 mayoralty of lima election campaign Lourdes Flores

June 2010 July 2010 August 2010 September 2010 October 2010 October 3 ELECTION RESULTS

35% 36% 32% 31% 36.4% 37.5%

Alex Kouri 24% 23% 24% – – –

Susana Villaran 4% 4% 9% 33% 37.1% 38.3%

Humberto Lay Fernando Andrade 6% 6% 9% 8% 8.4% 8.6%

3% 5% 3% 3% 5.7% 4.2%

Source Polling company Ipsos-Apoyo, Lima, Peru

expected to be a two-way horse race between Alex Kouri and PPC’s Lourdes Flores (Lopez Ricci 2010). Yet, center-left party Fuerza Social candidate Susana Villaran, who stood at a mere 3 percent of voting intentions for many months, went on to capture what was deemed to be an extremely improbable victory on Election Day. In less than four weeks (from August to September of 2010), Villaran’s polling numbers jumped from 9 to 33 percent. Her electoral ascent continued until election day, garnering a final tally of 38.4 percent of the votes. This initially unimaginable outcome was made possible by a confluence of contingency and strategic voting en masse. The contingent event was the unexpected exit of Alex Kouri from the race, who retired in August 2010 at a time when he enjoyed 24 percent of voting intentions. This event inexorably freed up prospective Kouri voters to look for alternatives. By September 2010, Villaran had unexpectedly shot up to first place in the rank order of voting preferences, while other mayoralty contenders (Andrade, Lay, and Flores) saw stagnation in their poll numbers. The large pool of freed-up voters disproportionally converged on Villaran, and did so in decentralized fashion, not because of the endorsement of other politicians—who lack the ability to direct free-floating voters in any direction. Establishment candidate Lourdes Flores also benefited from the strategic behavior that transpired during the final weeks of the campaign, as voters concluded that there were only two pragmatic voting options. Some voters flocked to Flores in the final days of the campaigning, seeking to prevent the victory of what they regarded as a dangerous leftist candidate. The massive confluence of voters toward the Villaran candidacy in a

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brief timespan, coupled with the well-timed realignment of electoral preferences as Election Day neared, evinced the strategic coordination of the vote en masse (see Table 2). Much of Villaran’s voto aluvional or wavelike upsurge of support came from the popular classes in Lima’s conos (poor outskirt neighborhoods). The observed decentralized voter coordination on the part of many underprivileged limenos aimed at preventing the victory of Lourdes Flores, who was successfully portrayed as elitist by her opponents via a simple and devastating slogan: “the candidate of the rich.” Strategic behavior was the hidden force that defeated a traditional party (PPC) that far outstripped in experience, organization, and finances the eventual winner. These voters were intent on defeating a well-known candidate endowed with a personal brand that distilled elitism and attendant popular distrust and rejection. By contrast, Susana Villaran was perceived as a corruption-free political outsider, with “a social profile closer to the popular sectors” (Tanaka and Villagracia 2014). While “the triumph of Villaran was the unexpected result that came as a product of campaign-specific contingencies (ibid., 2014),” this was not enough to deliver the outcome. Simply put, the outcome could not have materialized in the absence of large-scale strategic voting. As the campaign wore on, Villaran became, in the eyes of many limenos, the most viable option to defeat Flores, and thus the best alternative to prevent the result they feared most. 5.4

The 2011 Presidential Election

In the 2011 presidential election five seemingly viable contenders vied for the presidency. The top spot in voting intentions shifted from Lima mayor Luis Castaneda, to former President Alejandro Toledo and finally to Ollanta Humala. Poorly run campaigns doomed the candidacies of Toledo and Castaneda, both of whom steadily saw their poll numbers decline, thus becoming marginal contenders with little option of accessing the second round (Levitsky 2011; Sanchez-Sibony 2012). Toledo ran a famously disastrous campaign, lacking organization and a central message. The large pool of strategic-minded voters in Peru’s electoral marketplace took note. Toledo’s voter defections transferred largely to his former finance minister Pedro Pablo Kuczynski and, in the south and interior, to Ollanta Humala (Leon 2011). Many of Castaneda’s Lima-based supporters defected to candidates on the rise. Within the timeframe of only the last four weeks of the presidential campaign, the inter-temporal

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voting intentions of four of the major five contenders changed drastically. Former Lima mayor Luis Castaneda saw his support dwindle from a campaign season high of 19 to 9.2 percentage points when votes were officially tallied, and Toledo suffered a similarly precipitous decline from a high of 28 percent to 15 percent on Election Day. On the other side of the coin stood the beneficiaries of these voter defections: candidate Ollanta Humala, whose tally almost tripled from less than 10% to 28%; and economist Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, who started his campaign polling 2 percentage points but multiplied his tally by a factor of nine, capturing 18.4 percent of votes on Election Day (see Table 3). Only Keiko Fujimori saw inter-temporal stability in her levels of support throughout the campaign season (Sanchez-Sibony 2012). Rather than reflecting social rootedness, however, the steadiness in that support reflected the yearslong organizational efforts and nationwide party presence that Keiko had engineered leading up to 2011. Indeed, Fujimorismo reaped the fruits of possessing the most developed party organizations among all electoral contenders (Urrutia 2011). Therefore, campaign strategy was somewhat less important for Fujimorismo than for its opponents. Kuczynski defied electoral expectations by running a well-crafted campaign that marketed his personal brand as that of a successful professional, coupled with a sleek presence in social networks that generated surprising levels of enthusiasm. The upshot is that he garnered a sizable portion of the middle-class vote, Table 3 round

Voting intentions during the 2011 presidential election campaign, first

Date January 2010 June 2010 December 2010 27 Feb 2011 13 March 2011 27 March 2011 ELECTION RESULTS April 4 2011

Keiko Fujimori

Ollanta Humala

18 22 20 22 19 19 23.5

15 13 11 12 15 21 27.8

Alejandro Toledo 9 12 23 28 26 20 15.6

Luis Castaneda 23 21 23 18 17 14 9.8

Pedro Pablo Kuczynski 3 2 5 6 9 15 18.5

Source Ipsos Apoyo, Resumen de Encuestas a la Opinion Publica, April 2, 2011. http://www.ipsosapoyo.com.pe/sites/default/files/opinion_data/Humala-en-la-segunda-vuelta.pdf

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as well as the anti-Fujimorista vote based in Lima. As the campaign season entered the final stages, opinion polls configured the set of electorally viable contenders in voters’ eyes, generating a crowding-in effect in favor of such contenders. Those same public polls concurrently rendered other candidates less electorally viable, accelerating the hemorrhaging of votes away from them. Strategic voting calculations reinforced and accelerated the ongoing electoral realignment. The candidates that benefited more from the decentralized coordination of voters motivated by their antiFujimorismo made gains in the final stages of the campaign. In the end, that candidate turned out to be Ollanta Humala. No candidate elicited much passion or fervor, much in line with recent past elections, but many voters were moved by a desire to pick a candidate who could best defeat Fujimorismo, given its newfound electoral competitiveness. While Humala did enjoy a following in the interior provinces due to his message of inclusion into state and nation (also embodied in his personal brand), Humala’s final victory in the first round was hard to predict throughout the campaign season. His decision to ditch the more radical personal brand he had exhibited in the 2006 campaign paid off, enabling him to benefit from some strategic voting toward his candidacy. While a Pearson’s correlation index of the regional distribution of his 2006 and his 2011 vote is high (0.80) (Tanaka et al. 2011, 3), it also indicates that he won the first round with a somewhat different voter mix: a less rural-heavy contingent of supporters, catching more votes in urban Peru because of his moderation. Humala’s strong support in the southern regions did not materialize, however, “until the last weeks of the campaign,” further underscoring the contingency of voter patterns and the limitations of a structuralist interpretation. The vote for Keiko Fujimori was not shaped by structural factors, insofar as social class or geography did not correlate strongly with her vote. The vote for Fujimorismo was post-clasista (i.e. it cut across social classes) (Tanaka et al. 2011, 4). Humala’s victory was largely the result of other candidates’ fumbles, a re-crafting of his 2006 radical discourse and personal brand that allowed him to attract more middle-class voters, and relatedly, strategic voting. The “lack of coordination among right-wing voters” in the first round (Dargent and Muñoz 2012), reflected, once more, the centrality of personalism and personal brands in shaping voter decision-making, and the concomitant marginality of ideological motivations. Strategic voting calculations were strongly driven by the negative identity embodied in anti-Fujimorista societal fervor. However, the direction of those votes was hardly set in stone,

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contingent upon campaign effects, and the shifting rank-order of candidates, an element that foments crowding-in dynamics, especially toward the tail-end of campaign season. 5.5

The 2016 Presidential Election

The 2016 presidential elections witnessed the rise of a new political outsider, Julio Guzman, an obscure economist who failed to create his own political formation for lack of access to financing. Instead, he “borrowed” a languishing political party which possessed legal registration: Peru por Todos (PPT). He had no previous partisan affiliation or political experience. Guzman jumpstarted his political project two years before the election. He had studied polls showing a public demand for a young candidate with a technical background and roots in the underclass, and he reasoned that he fit that profile (Melendez 2016a). Guzman’s candidacy appeared to be doomed with only three months left before Election Day, registering a negligible 0.4 percent of voting intentions as of December 2015. By mid-February 2016, however, his candidacy had altered the presidential contest as it surged, wave-like, to no less than 17 percent of voter preferences. In a highly fragmented field, this placed him second behind Keiko Fujimori in voting intentions. Post-facto, Guzman expressed his own surprise about this turnaround, as well as his inability to explain it with any confidence: “it is difficult to explain our rapid growth in the polls during those weeks. Various things occurred in parallel that could have altered the vote in our favour” (my emphasis, Guzman 2016, 140). Amid a lineup of discredited known politicos evincing only residual political capital (Toledo, Alan Garcia), beset by scandal (Cesar Acuna) or who failed to inspire (PPK), Guzman benefited from the logic of negative legitimacy—that is, Guzman was not a spent personal brand, unlike most of his rivals. Crucially, as the campaigns of said politicians faltered, Guzman profited from the strategic calculations of voters, who came to see his candidacy as more viable, generating a self-sustaining momentum. As many times in previous elections, a large crowding-in effect was produced which benefited Guzman, among other candidates—additional beneficiaries included Alfredo Barnechea and Veronika Mendoza. This, in turn, augmented Guzman’s Todos por el Peru campaign media coverage and exposure. Supplementary factors that aided his campaign included a welldesigned presence in the social networks and an aggressive effort to make

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the Guzman brand known in Peru’s interior provinces. His personal brand was one centered on his biography of upward mobility: someone from fairly humble origins, a lower-middle social class Peruvian who had scaled up the social ladder through hard work and become a respected technocrat and researcher working for an international development bank (not unlike Alejandro Toledo’s personal brand). But most of all, Guzman benefited from being novel. As in previous Peruvian contests, the quality of being a newcomer or the public perception thereof, proved to be a political asset. Both businessman Cesar Acuna and Julio Guzman were “positioned as fresh and distinct, which favored their [electoral] growth, as well as benefiting from Alan Garcia and Alejandro Toledo’s decline in polling numbers” (Tuesta Soldevilla 2017, 20). It is difficult to exaggerate the importance of strategic voting to account for Guzman’s remarkable electoral turnaround: voters wary of the old politicos and desirous of an alternative to Keiko Fujimori, flocked to the most electorally viable political neophyte. Only an ill-considered and very controversial decision by the national electoral management body eliminated him from the race, keeping Guzman from contesting the second round. It is quite likely that, had he reached the second round, Guzman would have become President of the Republic, given that his non-ideological candidacy was not nearly as polarizing as Kuczynski’s and would have benefited from the same antiFujimorista negative partisanship that was decisive for Kuczynski’s victory. Indeed, polls showed Guzman enjoying a sizable lead in a hypothetical second round vis-à-vis Keiko Fujimori. Julio Guzman’s rise and fall during the 2016 contest exemplified in stark fashion the phenomenon of negative legitimacy dynamics that permeates all Peruvian electoral cycles (see Chapter 3). That his remarkable electoral growth was underpinned by the ephemeral capital of negative legitimacy and voter strategic calculi came into public view when he diligently concocted a campaign to mobilize his presumed social base to bring pressure to bear on the authorities with the objective of reversing his unfair exclusion. In the event, he was embarrassingly unable to fill up plazas and stadiums at anything more than half capacity (Agencia EFE 2016), an unmistakable sign that he had few true, loyal supporters to speak of. Once Guzman was out of the race, his instrumental would-be voters moved on rapidly to the task of searching for other electorally viable “lesser evils.” Keiko’s remarkable stability in voting intentions throughout the first round—hovering around 30 percent—was highly unusual in Peru’s recent electoral history and suggested that Fujimorismo had gained an incipient loyal social base, partly reflecting the

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party-building work Alberto Fujimori’s daughter had undertaken since her stinging 2011 electoral defeat (Table 4). With a month left on the campaign, three candidates vied to enter the second round: Kuczynski, Mendoza, and Barnechea. The latter failed to gain support among independents, such that polls increasingly pointed to a two-way race between Kuczynski and Mendoza. The former finance minister under the Toledo administration did not run a particularly enlightened campaign, but his hired spin-masters were able to concoct an effective negative campaign to discredit Mendoza by way of “associating her with the Humala government and with Chavismo, which created fears among sectors of the electorate, particularly in Lima” (Tuesta Soldevilla 2017, 21). Kuczynski is notable for his utter lack of charisma, and committed important campaign gaffes, such as uttering racist and misogynistic remarks in the campaign that were widely publicized, further accentuating the damaging pituco (detached uppity upper class) aspect of his personal brand. In many respects, his increase in the polling numbers and final electoral fate—both his passage to the second round and eventual victory—were propelled by forces beyond his own doing. The banker and former finance minister was elevated by winds not of his own making; Table 4 round

Voting intentions during the 2016 presidential election campaign, first Keiko F

December 2015 January 2016 February 2016 March 13, 2016 April 3, 2016 ELECTION RESULTS April 10

Guzman PPK

Acuna

Garcia Mendoza

Barnechea

Toledo

33

–

15

4

11

–

–

8

33

5

13

13

8

2

–

3

30

18

9

6

5

4

4

2

32

Barred

14

Barred

6

9

9

2

33

Barred

16

Barred

5

15

8

2

39.8

Barred

5.8

18.7

6.9

1.3

21.0 Barred

Source Ipsos Apoyo poll, Rural–Urban sample, 2016. Available at: https://www.ipsos.com/sites/def ault/files/publication/2016-04/OpinionData030416.pdf

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instead, changes in electoral supply, contingencies, and strategic voter calculations were the forces that carried his candidacy forward. Kuczynski benefited from eliciting lower levels of voter rejection (his anti-voto) than some of his latter-day rivals in the contest, not least Veronika Mendoza, who was portrayed in much of the (conservative dominated) mainstream mass media as a menace to the allegedly successful economic model. The Frente Amplio candidate was severely limited in her potential vote by the entrenched negative identities that continue to be attached to and harm leftist candidates in Peru. As Mendoza grew in the polls and “threatened” to make it to the second round, some Barnechea and Alan Garcia voters likely changed their vote to Kuczynski, evincing a more sophisticated calculus than sincere-only voters. Polls carried out in the first round also showed Kuczynski as a significantly more competitive opponent vis a vis Fujimori in a hypothetical second presidential round, presumably motivating some potential strategic voters to become actual first round strategic voters in favor of the wealthy economist. Among the candidates who could potentially act as a vessel for anti-Fujimorismo, Kuczynski came to be regarded as the lesser evil by greater numbers of Peruvian voters than other competitors did. Those voters who, given the fully expected presence of Keiko Fujimori in the runoff, deemed the defense of democracy to be a greater priority than other considerations (for example, enhancing state presence, redistribution, or changes in the economic model) also chose Kuczynski as a contingent carrier of antiFujimorismo—notwithstanding his previous electoral flirtations with, and support for, Keiko Fujimori in the second round of the 2011 presidential elections. 5.6

The 2021 Presidential Election

faded“With less than three weeks to go before Peru’s [2016] presidential election, opinion polls suggest a clear winner: a nihilist rejection of all 18 candidates,” wrote The Economist (2021) British weekly. The enormous fragmentation of electoral preferences, whereby no single candidate gathered more than 13 percent of voting intentions, reflected the heightened dealignment of the electorate since the implosion of Fujimorismo and the decay of the PPC and APRA in the post-2016 period. It was an electorate comprised of the highest percentage of floating voters ever since Peru recovered its lost democracy in 2001. Thus, the sky-high fragmentation of preferences, as well as the higher percentages of “undecideds” were not

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surprising, but a logical consequence of an even more pronounced partyunattached and politically alienated electorate. A Datum poll carried out in February, with two months left before Election Day, revealed that a mere 18 percent of Peruvians had settled on who to vote for, 46 percent was thinking about whom to support, while 34 percent had not given any thought to the election yet (Gestion 2021). The rank-order of voting intentions had been led by former goalkeeper and municipal mayor of the La Victoria district in Lima, George Forsyth. His lead lasted for many months before the calendar 2021 year, hovering around the 20 percent mark, far above the rest of a fragmented field. Starting in January 2021, Jonhy Lescano of Accion Popular began to stage an upward swing in the polls, while Forsyth witnessed a precipitous decline in voting preferences. Forsyth’s decline was widely attributed to a fatal campaign strategy: based on the assumption that he could maintain his polling lead by not getting into the fray with his electoral opponents, he deliberately eschewed an active presence in the mass media, thus rendering his candidacy virtually invisible, until it was too late (Lira 2021). The fact that Forsyth led the polls throughout the better part of a two-year period, often by hefty margins, proved irrelevant in a marketplace of floating voters. During the months of February and March, Lopez Aliaga, a new candidate who had not hitherto registered in the electoral radar irrupted with unexpected force and battled for the top stop. Lopez Aliaga was an ultra-conservative candidate who borrowed Luis Castaneda’s former electoral vehicle (now called Renovacion Nacional ). However, Aliaga faded in support in the final stretches of the campaign, partly damaged by an abysmal performance in the presidential debates. During the months of February and March, some undecideds migrated to Veronika Mendoza, putting her in real contention for the second round (Torres 2021). The Daniel Urresti, a former minister of the interior with a law and order political platform and populist overtones, who had been in a second-tier group of candidates in the rank order of voter preferences, faded (Table 5). With one week left before the April 11 general election, five candidates found themselves in a virtual statistical tie, each commanding a small portion of voting preferences: Johny Lescano (10%); Veronica Mendoza (9%); Hernando de Soto (9%); George Forsyth (8%); and Keiko Fujimori (8%). In a space of 15 days, renown economist Hernando de Soto climbed from 4 to 9%, confounding analysts who had not factored him among the likely contenders to be catapulted into second round (El Comercio

Source Ipsos-Apoyo. Urban–Rural Sample, 2021

– – 1 2 3 6 6.6 18.6

Pedro Castillo 7 7 8 8 7 8 9.8 13.4

Keiko Fujimori 0.2 0.3 0.5 3 8 6 8.4 11.8

2 3 5 4 4 9 9.8 11.7

Rafael Hernando Aliaga De Soto

Voting intentions during the 2021 presidential election campaign

September 2020 December 2020 January 2021 February 10, 2021 March 10, 2021 March 31, 2021 April 1–2, 2021 ELECTION RESULTS April 11, 2021

Table 5

3 3 6 10 15 10 8.2 9.1

Yohny Lescano 4 5 7 8 6 9 7.3 7.9

Veronika Mendoza

3 4 4 3 2 4 4.1 6.0

23 19 17 11 10 8 5.7 5.7

Cesar George Acuna Forsyth

4 5 7 4 3 2 2.3 2.3

Julio Guzman

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2021a). His candidacy was propelled forward by the highest socioeconomic sectors in Lima (A and B strata) and by the young. De Soto benefited from high media exposure on the latter stages of the campaign. Some voters migrated from Aliaga to De Soto, inter-changeable only in that both were pro-business, conservative candidates, but the latter endowed with much greater intellectual gravitas and ability to articulate ideas. The extreme fragmentation of the vote made predictions even more perilous than in previous Peruvian electoral contests. This was, indeed, the most fragmented distribution of preferences in a general election in Peru’s history (Torres 2021). Besides the leading five candidates embroiled in a statistical tie, the chances of two other candidates (Lopez Aliaga and Pedro Castillo) to make it to the second round could not be discarded. Pedro Castillo was a primary school teacher who acquired transient name recognition in 2017 by leading the street opposition to teacher evaluation and accountability reforms, coupled with the demand for higher wages. Castillo had barely registered in preference polls for most of the campaign season but surged in unexpected fashion in the very final days of the contest, garnering growing favor in the underprivileged southern regions. A particularity of the 2021 presidential election was that the virtual statistical tie that emerged among the five leading candidates because it removed the informational value of the public polls for strategic-minded voters, precisely at a juncture (one week left before Election Day) after which public polls are not allowed and when strategic decision-making among voters becomes more massive in its dimensions. With no clear leaders, it became practically impossible for voters to coordinate their vote around the most electorally viable candidates. Too many candidacies were electorally viable. Another factor that made strategic voting behavior more difficult was the pandemic, which foreclosed the possibility of informational clientelism as a source of information for voters to make strategic choices. Social network campaigning proved no substitute for direct candidate–voter linkages, especially among the lower socioeconomic classes, as candidates were bereft of large-scale voter mobilization opportunities due to the pandemic (Munoz 2021). Voters wishing not to “waste” their vote on an unviable candidate were thrust into something of an informational void. While “the number of voters who declared they were undecided and those who said they would cast a null or blank vote declined, the share of the vote accruing to the polling leader [in the rank order of preferences] did not increase” (El Pais 2021). Quite to the

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contrary, Johny Lescano’s voting preference lead decreased. In short, the razor-thin margins among the top seven candidates in the race, rendered betting on a winning candidate a guessing game for voters. Therefore, it was not altogether surprising that the dispersion in voting preferences did not subside. The last week of the election held a surprise in the evolution of voting preferences. The candidacy of a virtual unknown, Pedro Castillo, surged wave-like, from 7.9 percent support a mere week before Election Day to 19% when votes were tallied. With a month left of campaigning, Castillo had barely registered in the voter preference radar, standing at 3 percent of nationwide support. Perhaps the closest precedent for such rapid growth was the original 1990 candidacy of Alberto Fujimori—the famous “Fuji-tsunami.” Castillo’s surge was the result of the decentralized coordination of the southern and interior provincial voters, who suddenly were offered, as revealed by polls, a radical candidate with a chance at electoral success. With a week left of campaigning, Castillo’s candidacy had become electorally viable for voters that are not incorporated into state and nation—i.e. among those situated on one side of Peru’s keystone structural cleavage. Those underprivileged and non-incorporated voters, comprising both sections of the large pool of undecideds as well as some of those leaning toward Lescano (on the same side of the structural divide), picked Pedro Castillo in the very final days of the campaign. (Veronika Mendoza’s socioeconomic and geographical support was revealed to be significantly different from Castillo’s, given that she drew votes from more educated and higher income voters; see Sosa Mendoza 2021). Additionally, there were conjunctural campaign effects that aided the primary school teacher from Cajamarca. Unlike most other candidates, Castillo engaged in nonstop face-to-face traditional campaigning during the Covid-19 pandemic, gathering masses of supporters in town plazas, the size of which revealed burgeoning enthusiasm for the Peru Libre candidate outside of Lima (Uceda 2021; Rendon 2021). There are also important underlying conjunctural reasons for why a radical leftist candidate who promised to change the Constitution, eviscerate the Constitutional Tribunal, change the contracts governing FDI investment, and upend the economic policy status quo, won a plurality of the vote. Peruvians had suffered five years of economic underperformance, a string of high-profile corruption cases as a result of the Lava Jato investigations, a deepened delegitimation of the “political establishment,” a non-stop crisis in Executive–legislative relations,

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and governmental mishandling of the Covid pandemic response. During the 2000–2021 period citizen disenchantment had never reached such heights, as measured by standard polls on citizen trust in democratic institutions. The upshot is that the political environment was even more fertile for populism than it had been in previous elections. (The 2020 parliamentary results already intimated voter demand for populist options in the unexpectedly good performance of two populist outfits, FREPAP and Union por el Peru). Castillo was by far the most anti-systemic candidate on offer. Until his irruption on the electoral map, a non-limeno personal brand highly contestatory of the status quo was largely absent from the electoral supply, a niche that Castillo filled much better than any of his adversaries (most notably, better than Lescano). Among the viable pool of candidates, Castillo best incarnated the image of an antiestablishment political outsider—notwithstanding his previous affiliation with Peru Posible—, the candidate whose personal brand best embodied a rejection of “politics as usual.” More than his specific policy and political reform proposals, “probably unknown to most of his voters” (Pasara 2021), it was this personal brand that propelled him to the second round. Support for Castillo in the first round of the 2021 elections cannot be called strategic in the traditional sense of an insincere vote motivated by the electoral unviability of voters’ first preference; to the contrary, Castillo’s backers cast a sincere (anti-establishment), first-choice vote. But it was strategic in the broader sense that disgruntled voters coordinated their efforts around a candidacy they learned was viable and on the upswing. The teacher union leader’s final electoral surge only occurred once he joined the electorally viable slate of candidates… and kept rising as unofficial polling tracked his upward progress. With three days to go until Election Day, unofficial polls that “circulated in social media situated Castillo’s party not only surpassing the threshold for representation in Congress, but also placed him in the second round [of the presidential election]” (Rendon 2021). Many of his potential voters were thus aware that Castillo did not constitute a wasted vote. Those unofficial but trustworthy polls gave Castillo more than 30 percent of the vote in the southern provinces, which are historically the most contestatory in voting patterns. Keiko Fujimori could not have entered the second round without the extreme fragmentation of voter preferences. The hardcore of Fujimorista voters underpinned the stability in her voting intentions, especially as she purposely shifted toward an Albertista stance in the campaign, upholding the political legacy of her father and promising his release from

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jail. Toward the tail-end of the campaign she benefited from strategic voting. Indeed, the leader of Fujimorismo received an unexpected gift: the “weakness of Hernando de Soto and Lopez Aliaga [partly spurred on by presidential debate gaffes] enticed strategic voters and undecideds to give Fujimori the [voting] push she needed to make it to the second round” (Dargent 2021). As in previous elections, polling data, attendant mass media attention, and informational clientelism (albeit in favor of Castillo only) were important. Once more, short-term factors drove the electoral outcome, namely, campaign effects and the last-minute coordination of undecideds—this time around a personal brand that captured their antipolitical sentiment. 5.7

Explaining Peruvian Strategic Voting

What underlies the enormous electoral volatility seen in Peruvian elections is a marketplace of floating voters, or as Juan Carlos Torre (2003) has aptly called such voters, “political orphans.” The upshot is the existence of a very large domain of competition, such that many candidates and their electoral vehicles are potentially competitive. When electoral vehicles do not possess a significant reservoir of loyal voters, several realignments of electoral preferences become possible within a single election campaign. An electorally significant segment of voters “shop” for candidates several times, choosing one and then discarding him or her for another, as new information about the rank-order of candidates is revealed, and informational shortcuts are used by comparatively less informed voters. Ongoing campaign developments doom certain candidacies, freeing up voters to look for viable alternatives. The occurrence of several significant electoral realignments constitutes a pattern observed in every Peruvian election. In the context of a large domain of competition and a fragmented field, missteps of candidates become greatly magnified electorally and rivals can benefit from capturing large numbers of disgruntled floating voters. An additional factor accentuating the importance of strategic voting is the prevalence of what Munoz (2014) has labeled “informational clientelism.” This form of clientelism occurs when election candidates seek to concoct and galvanize large crowds to attend their election rallies. Aware of the high volatility of voting intentions, and of the crucial need to sell to the public the image of an electorally viable candidacy, “politicians consciously use campaign clientelism in order to influence electoral preferences throughout the campaign. During the

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initial stages of the race, crowded campaign events can be crucial in prompting surges in voting intention (Munoz 2014, 92).” Moreover, “turnout at campaign activities also signals to…strategic voters which candidates are in the lead… Final rallies are particularly important since they represent the last piece of information voters receive to judge the viability of a candidate before casting their votes (ibid., 93).” Campaigns that manage to grow in electoral strength generate a crowd-in effect not only among voters, but also attract herds of political brokers and operators, volunteers, and financiers, all of whom seek to extract benefits by working for a potentially winning candidate. Insofar as turnout at rallies becomes a proxy for popularity, this visual information accelerates the speed with which electoral realignments occur within the timespan of a campaign. Campaigns unable to showcase visual demonstrations of popular support and momentum can lose rapid support as voters switch their electoral preferences to those campaigns that demonstrate strength, particularly toward the rear end of an electoral contest. Crucially, large campaign turnouts also increase candidates’ appearances in the mass media, an industry that has every material incentive to devote more air time and printed space to leading (or surging) candidates. In summation, electorally growing candidacies generate a confluence of forces that give them self-propelling momentum, while the opposite dynamics also obtain. Contingent events and political agency (the actions, strategies, and public utterances of contenders) are factors of much importance in political environments bereft of partisanship. As political races get underway, candidates’ errors or ill-considered utterances, for instance, can change electoral fortunes. But on their own, agency and contingency cannot explain very large realignments of support, whereby some candidates triple or quadruple the percentage of their intended voters. Only largescale strategic voting can explain this phenomenon. Strategic voting— benefiting some candidates and concurrently damaging others—greatly enhances the volatility of voting intentions: when public opinion polls reveal that a certain candidate is losing public support, a crowding-out effect is produced, as voters look for a more electorally viable candidate whose personal brand is acceptable to them; similarly, when a candidate edges up in the polls, a crowding-in effect is often produced such that support for him or her acquires a self-sustaining momentum. Large swaths of voters switch preferences with remarkable speed. Such dynamics accelerate in the closing weeks and days of a campaign season. The decentralized coordination of votes can be particularly pronounced when a

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candidate who generates strong popular rejection “threatens” to win or move to the second round, prompting voters to coalesce en masse into the opponent perceived to be most capable of defeating the undesirable option. Sophisticated voters (as opposed to sincere ones) take into consideration their (subjective) evaluation of the electoral viability of each candidate, and act in consequence. Engaging in this electoral calculus, such voters are ready to discard their first or second or even third-preferred option, in order to avert what they regard as an undesirable outcome. Notwithstanding some characterizations of Peruvian voters as irrational or thoughtless, strategic behavior constitutes a more sophisticated form of voting than sincere voting. Peruvian electoral politics operates within what we have here labeled a negative legitimacy environment (see Chapter 3): candidates derive legitimacy from what they are not. In a negative legitimacy environment, because old politicians and newcomers alike are seen with trepidation or outright derision and fear, an inordinately high proportion of voters are strategic in their electoral behavior. Because of this environment, the logic of voting for the mal menor (lesser evil) is prevalent. As Cyr and Melendez (2017) have shown, negative partisanship, particularly in the form of anti-Aprismo/anti-Alanismo and anti-Fujimorismo, is rife. Indeed, most candidates elicit viscerally negative reactions in portions of the electorate—whether Keiko Fujimori, Alan Garcia, Ollanta Humala, Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, Lourdes Flores, Veronika Mendoza, Alejandro Toledo, Luis Castaneda, Julio Guzman, Pedro Castillo, and many others, as detailed in Chapter 3 (see also: Melendez 2016b). Peru’s electoral history in the post-party system collapse period has consistently showcased strategic voting dynamics at work. In 1990 anti-Vargas Llosa voters coordinated to vote strategically for Alberto Fujimori; during the Fujimorato, anti-Fujimorista voters settled on Alberto Andrade, but when his candidacy was destroyed by the regime’s shenanigans, voters flocked to Castaneda… and ultimately to Toledo in 2000; in 2006, Peruvians who feared Humala converged on Alan Garcia; in 2011, anti-Fujimorista voters coordinated to deliver the presidency to Humala; in 2016, the electoral power of anti-Fujimorismo yielded the presidency to a lackluster campaigner, “anti-candidate” Pedro Pablo Kuczynski; and in 2021, anti-Fujimorismo, a negative identity larger in its dimensions due to the abusive and arbitrary way Keiko Fujimori exerted parliamentary power, delivered the presidency to a candidate who elicited high rejection among broad swaths of the electorate, Pedro Castillo.

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Strategic voting behavior enhances preference volatility within an electoral season, as well inter-temporal vote volatility across elections. The upshot is that colossal swings in voting intentions—unconceivable in institutionalized party systems—are commonplace. Forecasting outcomes is thus a particularly perilous exercise in (democratic) party non-systems.3 Only by understanding these dynamics can we make sense of why seemingly astonishing electoral outcomes have occurred with regularity in post-1990 Peruvian electoral history. If the domain of competition remains as large as it has been in the past two decades (70–90 percent of the electorate), analysts should not be surprised by electoral surprises in the future. Indeed, the very notion of surprises or surprising outcomes is suspect in such contexts, for it assumes that both electoral supply and voting patterns within delineable parameters exist. Another correlate of a floating voter marketplace is the high fragmentation of electoral preferences. There is no theoretical reason why the electoral preferences of an electorate comprised of floating voters should be concentrated on few candidacies, and every reason to expect that preferences shall be more scattered, potentially as much as the electoral supply allows. It follows that amid a political landscape of independent voters, several electoral vehicles can concurrently become electorally competitive. There is electoral space for several candidates to gain traction amid a vast voting mass of independents. In more institutionalized settings, large and rooted political parties close off the electoral space. Not so in Peru, albeit the electoral expansion and growing institutionalization of Fujimorismo somewhat diminished the electorate’s percentage of floating voters. In Peru, a good number of first-round presidential candidates (not infrequently as many as four or five) hover in the range of 10–20 percent of voting intentions, either at the early or final stages of the electoral season. Any of those candidates stands a veritable chance of being catapulted to the second round. Such levels of support are generally insufficient for winning an election in more institutionalized and less fragmented party system settings. The high fragmentation of political preferences means 3 Even the most knowledgeable Peruanistas (political scientists and analysts with expertise in Peru, native and foreign) have been repeatedly confounded by final outcomes and have frequently erred in their electoral predictions. The list could be endless: Julio Cotler, Fernando Tuesta, Aldo Panfichi, Martin Tanaka and many others have ventured electoral predictions which they have duly aimed to rationalize. Very often, they have been ultimately disproven by outcomes. To be sure, all have hedged their bets, acknowledging the inherent unpredictability of Peru’s electoral marketplace.

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that every percentage point change in the fortunes of contenders can alter the identity of those who enter the second round. A highly fragmented electoral scenario implies, therefore, that strategic voting does not need to occur en masse to be truly consequential. Even low overall levels of strategic voting that generate shifts of three or four percentage points in voting intentions can, in a fragmented electoral field, doom a candidate and propel another to electoral glory.

6

A Stylized Account of Peruvian Electoral Campaign Dynamics

This section provides a highly stylized account of a standard Peruvian election. It seeks to integrate the multiplicity of factors that influence voter preferences over-time and, in conjunction with changing supply, yield a final electoral result. The objective is to illustrate succinctly how the operating dynamics of an electoral cycle in a democracy without parties can be understood. It is necessarily a reductionistic exercise, but less so than trying to understand outcomes simply via a Downsian-only lens or a structural cleavage framework, for instance. We have artificially divided an electoral cycle into four time periods, each denoting a particular juncture in the campaign period—separated by weeks (see Fig. 2). This inter-temporal framework underscores the importance of campaign effects, contingency, and iterated rounds of strategic voting in shaping final outcomes. Only thus can we shed light on the role of irreducible uncertainty, thus explaining why electoral predictions by pundits and scholars have been repeatedly wrong, for the dynamics here outlined do not lend themselves to predictions, “informed” or otherwise. These dynamics also underscore the notion that placing Peru as part of a Latin American regional trend (whether the Left-wing pink tide in the 2000s or the more recent right turn in Latin America) based on nationlevel electoral outcomes constitutes an artificial and misguided exercise. The highly contingent nature of electoral outcomes renders any postfacto categorization of Peru’s political leanings—Peru “going Right” or “going Left”—misleading. Amid a changing effective electoral supply and a floating electorate devoid of partisan affiliation, the analyst’s danger of falling prey to retrospective determinism is ever-present. As is the danger of assigning some discernible meaning to the election outcome or ascribing to it a message or mandate (policy-centered or otherwise) from the electorate. No meaning or message can be construed from an

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ELECTION DAY (FINAL RANK ORDER)

STRATEGIC VOTING EN MASSE TIME 3 RANK ORDER:

D

B

C

A

CAMPAIGN EFFECTS VALENCE ISSUE POSITIONING, t

STRATEGIC VOTING INTENTIONS (MODERATE) TIME 2 RANK ORDER:

C

D

B

J

K

A

B

A

CAMPAIGN EFFECTS VALENCE ISSUE POSITIONING Group AFFILIATIONS

TIME 1 RANK ORDER OF CANDIDATES: I

J

C

D

E

F

G H

K

PERSONAL BRANDS (AND DIMINISHED PARTY BRANDS) Fig. 2

Stylized dynamics of a first round presidential election, in four stages.

(retrospectively) intelligible but also fortuitous outcome, one of many plausible ones—as shown by the many different rank-orders of candidates that transpire during a campaign. When contingency and strategic voting are of paramount importance, the final election outcome is one that few

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voters may have favored when the election period began. In a negative legitimacy environment comprised of independent voters, we can discern which candidates a large or majoritarian part of the electorate was determined to eschew in relation to the candidate supply on offer, but an Election Day outcome does not provide a general message from voters that goes much beyond that. Given the dynamics here outlined, electoral outcomes in Peru are highly unreliable as indicators of issue-based popular mandates. Electoral outcomes are too contingent in nature to extract from a singular election les sons about what overall sentiment voters are expressing. (Though policy preferences can surely be gauged via other instruments such as professional surveys). Let us then provide here a stylized account. Every election since the party system collapsed (in 1990) has been shaped by three permanent background factors: an enormous domain of competition bequeathed by the absence of partisanship, that is, a “floating voter” electorate; the structural estado-nacional primordial cleavages of the sort that Vergara (2007) has identified; and a negative legitimacy environment whereby politicians and political entrepreneurs alike are widely despised or even feared (see Chapter 3). The application of a standard funnel approach to understand elections in the Peruvian context means that the following factors matter in ascending order of importance: group affiliations have the least influence, followed by issue positioning of candidates; most decisive are valence issues, campaign effects, and personal brands. The effective party supply, given by the candidates running and not their (mostly irrelevant) party labels, shapes the extent to which permanent factors (state presence, class cleavages, sociocultural cleavages) can be potentially activated—candidates’ effective political agency, of course, mediates that activation. But it is short-term considerations that possess causal primacy in affecting voter choice. In a negative legitimacy environment, candidates accrue rather small voter adherence (positive capital) from their personal brands, but personal brands are particularly relevant in embodying the negative identities that fuel (or super-charge) strategic voting. Some candidates embody personal brands that generate intense adverse sentiments among large swaths of the electorate, others somewhat less so; most candidates’ brands will be appealing to one side or the other of the relevant structural cleavages, though the occasional candidate may be able to straddle that “integrated in state and nation” versus “excluded” citizen divide—but possibly generating even more fickle voter allegiances than other rivals more firmly grounded on either side. The upshot is that

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voter behavior is highly contingent on changing supply: negative identities are activated based on which candidates appear electorally viable at each juncture, mobilizing voter collective action against them. In addition, those personal brands that have been damaged or diluted set a limit on those candidates’ potential electoral growth, while newcomers to the electoral arena have greater growth potential—particularly if they do not elicit strong negative perceptions on either side of the structural divide (these may be called “centrist” from a structural cleavage viewpoint, not an ideological one). Ceteris paribus, newcomers, and candidates unburdened by intense negative identities are better positioned to benefit from the dynamics of strategic voting. The enormous domain of competition necessarily engenders a fragmented distribution of electoral preferences, because few voters have been encapsulated. That same condition also provides an incentive for many a political entrepreneur to enter the field, because there are few a priori impediments for electoral success amid a free-floating electorate. Thus, we should expect an initially highly fragmented electoral supply. The interaction of the effective party supply (i.e. the individuals running under different partisan labels) and the aforementioned background conditions jointly yield a first rank order of candidates (time 1 or T1), as revealed in public opinion polls published by mass media. The very circulation of such polls unleashes its own independent marginal effects on future voting intentions. The campaign strategies of the candidates, and in particular campaign mistakes and campaign-induced revelations that damage the image of some candidates, all engender the first demand-side electoral realignment of preferences, as citizens defect from some candidates and flock to others (time 2 or T2). Crowding-out and crowding-in effects acquire greater volume as Election Day approaches. During the course of the campaign, the large volume of undecided voters dwindles, but strategic voter behavior picks up enormous speed in the final days leading up to Election Day. This process often changes the previous rank order of candidates, because the preferences of the large mass of undecided voters may well not align with the preferences of the mass of voters who profess to know their choice. A second effect also ensues: candidateswitching propelled by strategic considerations. As voters become more informed about the electoral viability of their first or second choice candidate, they may have an incentive to defect to another candidate who is revealed by public polls to have better prospects, because many voters want to defeat a feared or derided option emerging as a viable

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candidacy. Given Peru’s negative legitimacy environment (including the entrenchment of some negative identities such as anti-Fujimorismo, antiHumalismo, or anti-Alanismo), most voters will find some candidates they regard as particularly detestable or dangerous. It is the coupling of pervasive negative identities and a floating electorate that provide the raw materials for strategic voting en masse. In other words, these two elements make large-scale strategic voting inevitable. This repeated strategic behavior, alongside the continuing effect of electoral campaigns, valence considerations, issue positioning, and unexpected contingencies, generates yet a new realignment of voting intentions (time 3 or T3), and in consequence a new rank order of candidates. Successive public poll inter-temporal rank ordering of candidates is prone to change, particularly amidst a highly fragmented field. Concerns about the electoral viability of candidates become more prominent as Election Day nears, and therefore the scale of strategic voting becomes larger. The proportion of undecided voters with one week to go before Election Day has hovered around 30 percent, and the “undecideds” who retain that status until the day of the election has averaged around 20 percent (Urrutia 2021). These high percentages provide an idea about the potential dimensions of strategic voting in the very final stages of a campaign—in addition to widespread strategic behavior in previous stages. Candidates with no change in their campaign strategies become either the beneficiaries or losers of sophisticated strategic voter behavior—that is, largely for reasons not of their own making. Strategic voting dynamics continue to operate until Election Day, which is prone to deliver an outcome quite different from the one predicted by early polling.

7

Conclusion

Peru’s party universe is among the least programmatically structured anywhere in the developing world. A static analysis (a snapshot in time) shows the party menu in Peru to have some degree of differentiated programmatic offering. Programmatic differences are also observed when perusing the demand side. Some Peruvian voters (slightly over onethird) profess that they are guided by policy considerations in their vote choice. However, the prospect of even moderate programmatic structuration is negated by the ever-changing effective party supply and the concomitant discontinuity in inter-temporal voting patterns.

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Moreover, polling evidence reveals that Left–Right ideological considerations do not guide the voting behavior of most Peruvian citizens (close to two-thirds of the electorate). The presumed movement of party contenders along the ideological spectrum is not responsible for the large swings in voting intentions that characterize elections in the Andean nation. Explaining Peruvian politics with a standard Downsian framework unhelpfully misrepresents the country’s electoral dynamics. Simply put, ideology does not constitute a central pillar or a defining part of the linkage profile of the Peruvian party universe. Rather, short-term influences on voting behavior dominate, rendering electoral preferences exceedingly volatile. Valence considerations and campaign effects are very important. But the central party–voter linkage type is personalistic. Most voters take their cues from the objective and subjective personal traits of candidates (see Chapter 3). In settings where personalistic voting is predominant, it is germane to draw the distinction between nominal and effective “party”/electoral supply. The latter is significantly more variable than the former. In a world where personalism is the keystone linkage type, effective supply is comprised of the slate of individuals running in an election, not the observed party menu per se. Peruvian political elites behave in a manner largely autonomous from voter demand dynamics or other strictures (ideology, party norms, etc.), such that individual political ambitions account for important changes in the party menu, including electoral vehicle creation, exits, splits, mergers, etc.… The ever-changing effective “party” supply from election to election impedes political learning on the part of voters and forecloses the possibility of party universe stabilization. Peru’s non-system status is manifested at every electoral cycle—and at every administrative level, national, regional, or local. The underlying causal factor behind the large degree of uncertainty surrounding electoral results is straightforward: a marketplace dominated by free-floating (independent) voters. As a result, valence considerations, campaign effects, supply-side changes, and political agency (candidates’ acts of commission or omission), play a much greater role in shaping electoral outcomes than they do in party universes where a significant share of the electorate is encapsulated by political parties. A funnel approach to understand the multiple factors that account for electoral outcomes in Peru yields an inverted pyramid of causal factors with respect to what obtains in the most institutionalized party systems.

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This picture of Peruvian electoral dynamics is incomplete without reference to an additional phenomenon. In party non-systems pervaded by nonpartisans, strategic voting constitutes a permanent feature of the electoral dynamics; it is highly important in shaping electoral processes and outcomes. In the absence of partisanship, more voters engage in a rational calculus to use their vote strategically if their preferred option increasingly appears to entail a “wasted vote.” Voters without an initial clear preference are also acting strategically when they coalesce around what polls reveal to be a winning or increasingly competitive candidate. In a negative legitimacy environment, where most candidates are either derided or feared by large sections of the electorate, strategic voting behavior is necessarily more prevalent than in standard legitimacy environments. Strategic voting magnifies the volatility of voting intentions and the unpredictability of electoral outcomes, as shown by Peruvian presidential, mayoral, and other electoral contests since 1990. Crowding-out and crowding-in voter dynamics foster large-scale electoral realignments that, particularly in the context of a high fragmentation of the vote, can lead to electoral outcomes once unimaginable. Acknowledging that personalistic linkages, valence considerations, campaign effects, and strategic behaviors are the central, recurrent factors shaping the vote, enhances our understanding of electoral processes in democracies without political parties—and precludes common misinterpretations.

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CHAPTER 6

How a Democracy without Parties Malfunctions

1

Introduction

Political science theory holds political parties to be central for the functionality of democratic governance. More specifically, parties are theoretically deemed to be necessary for the adequate functioning of democratic responsiveness, governability, and vertical and horizontal accountability (Mainwaring and Scully 1996; Mainwaring 2018; Przeworski et al. 1999). Institutionalized political parties are posited to be the central entities that aggregate societal preferences at a high level, and mediate between state and society. Parties also recruit and train political cadres for the exercise of public office, which becomes inestimable in the development of a professional political class knowledgeable in the management of public affairs. In the exercise of these functions there are no good substitutes for political parties. At best, there are partial substitutes in organized civil society as regards representation and aggregation of interests. But in their mediating function between state and society, parties are non-substitutable. Similarly, institutionalized and programmatic parties help citizens choose between different sets of public policy options, such that enacted policy through time is responsive to the preferences of the majority. Political parties are also called upon to push forth changes to public policy in response to new societal preferences and demands. Elections can act as mechanisms of thick vertical accountability only to the extent that institutionalized political parties populate a democracy, according to standard © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 O. Sanchez-Sibony, Democracy without Parties in Peru, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-87579-4_6

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democratic theory. Full-fledged political parties endowed with robust internal organization possess the wherewithal to hold incumbents to account should there be deviations from their programmatic identity or electoral mandate. Moreover, institutionalized parties also provide politicians with incentives to protect party brands or stay faithful to their political identity, as well as monitor and limit deviations from the party platform, thus fomenting accountability. Voters are also afforded the opportunity to reward or punish incumbents based on the degree to which party governments follow electoral mandates while governing. Moreover, institutionalized political parties act as a bulwark against the siren calls and appeal of populism because they uphold the legitimacy of democracy as a system as well as contribute to generating functional levels of popular satisfaction with its workings. Socially rooted parties also endow the political system with predictability and foment party system closure. Anti-establishment outfits and populist strategies have limited space to grow when political parties encapsulate the bulk of the electorate. Finally, standard theory posits that institutionalized political parties help prolong the longevity of democracy and avert its breakdown, because they can enhance the legitimacy of democracy qua political regime, provide a ready-made organizational opposition to would-be autocrats, can strengthen the fortitude and autonomy of legislatures, and can contribute to the pluralism, impartiality, and strength of institutions that uphold the rule of law, among other essential democratic functions (Mainwaring and Scully 1996; Mainwaring 2018). The quip that “democracy is unthinkable save in terms of parties,” is one of the most quoted among students of party politics. The advent and longevity of “democracies without parties” such as Peru (Levitsky and Cameron 2003; Levitsky 2018) or Guatemala (Sanchez-Sibony 2016, 2022), affords comparativists the opportunity to evaluate whether the workings of these partyless polities conform with established political science theory. In methodological terms, the Peruvian and Guatemalan democracies are “most likely cases” of democratic disfunction: these democracies should be incapable of performing its most important representation and accountability roles. While there is robust empirical evidence from cross-country studies confirmative of a correlation between party system institutionalization and the quality of democracy, the indepth study of particular cases at the extreme end of party universe under-institutionalization can potentially yield valuable insights and unveil plausible causal mechanisms tying these two variables. The exercise of

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subjecting the empirics of a case study to the test of standard theory is also useful for its potential to reveal insights that do not conform with party politics theoretical tenets. This chapter engages in this exercise by examining the quality and workings of Peruvian democracy post 2001 across five areas: democratic responsiveness to societal preferences; election-based vertical accountability; the relative prevalence or absence of populism; governability in state–society relations, and the consolidation of democracy defined in the classic way as invulnerability to democratic breakdown. The empirical perusal of Peru’s Really Existing Democracy (RED) is here found to closely conform with theoretical expectations; a party-based framework can indeed help explain many of the central dysfunctions afflicting Peru’s wretched low-quality democracy. However, there are two partial exceptions worthy to note. First, Peru has been largely spared radical populism and only evinced a low-intensity variant of populism in the post 2001 era. Secondly, the democratic consolidation dimension constitutes a partial deviation from theoretical expectations in the sense that risk of an outright democratic breakdown and electoral authoritarianism has been kept at bay—notwithstanding recent “authoritarian situation” episodes emanating from interbranch brinkmanship.

2

The Absence of Democratic Responsiveness: Institutionalizing Policy Certainty

After the competitive authoritarian period of Alberto Fujimori’s reign (Carrion 2006), Peru’s return to democracy was much celebrated. Party system collapse contributed decisively to the soon-to-follow collapse of democracy. But Peru’s post-2001 democratic regime evinces significant political continuity with the competitive authoritarianism of the 1990s in regards to the nature of the moving parts of the political system, the entrenchment of nonparty norms of conduct, the chasm in statesociety relations, and the political culture of that decade, among other continuities that could be cited. The continued extreme weakness of electoral vehicles post 2001, along with feeble state institutions, have preconfigured a very weak and dysfunctional democracy. Alternation in office has scarcely been a problem in Peruvian democracy. The absence of partisanship alongside repeated failures of government performance in the delivery of public goods has systematically doomed governing vehicles in their attempts at reelection. Voters have

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consistently used the electoral process to “boot the rascals out,” such that elections have operated to deliver thin vertical accountability in this limited sense. However, elections have not served as instruments to deliver public policy attuned to popular demands. In fact, inter-temporal turnover in the executive has not delivered noticeably different public policy outputs. Elections bring new governments to the executive branch, but the country’s policy trajectory does not change. This phenomenon strips elections of much of their key presumed role as an instrument of democracy (Powell 2000), for electoral processes have demonstrably not translated voter demands into corresponding social policy and economic policy. Adam Przeworski famously called democracy “the institutionalization of uncertainty,” insofar as elections entail uncertainty about winners (the composition of future governments), and thereby uncertainty about future government policies as well. Peru certainly conforms to the first part of the dictum, but not the second. The extreme uncertainty of electoral outcomes has coexisted with remarkable continuity in enacted economic policy. At one level, Peru’s policy continuity is surprising in that it defies established political science theory about the relationship between party systems and economic policy. Inchoate party systems foster a climate of high uncertainty in the political realm (Mainwaring and Scully 1996), and by extension, in the economic realm as well. Under-institutionalized governing parties face lesser political constraints to embark upon changes or even radical departures from the economic policy status quo. That helps explain why during the 1980s governing parties in Bolivia, Ecuador, Peru and Brazil implemented “radical heterodox stabilization programs that violated party programs (ibid., 26),” while governments operating amid institutionalized party system settings did not. Gustavo FloresMacías’ work (2012, 8) on this topic shows that party system underinstitutionalization enhances both the likelihood that outsiders come to office and “the ability to carry out economic reform once they are in office.” Ceteris paribus, given the extremely inchoate nature of Peru’s party universe and the concomitant frequency with which political outsiders access the presidency, we should expect large volatility in economic policymaking and other areas of public policy across presidential administrations. Yet the country evinces strict continuity in the economic policy realm, such that the neoliberal orientation is intact since the first Alberto Fujimori presidential term (IMF 2015). Peru is a case study that

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deviates radically from Flores-Macías’ general theory. While the two variables are related in probabilistic fashion, party system institutionalization is not a necessary condition for policy stability. Peru shows that longstanding policy continuity is possible amidst very inchoate party universes. Because of their political feebleness and lack of technical cadres, political parties can be irrelevant for the conduct of economic affairs, and rather powerless to change the established course of economic policy. When diminished type parties and politicians are irrelevant for the formulation of economic policy, influence in this area is bound to be delegated to actors that are well organized and wield clout, such as technocracy and business associations. In post-1990 Peru, economic policies have not been crafted, defended, and preserved by electoral vehicles, nor are such policies the result of partisan convergence around a given economic orientation; there is no inter-party consensus to forge state-level policies or politicas de estado. Peru’s volatile and feckless party non-system precludes viable inter-party pacts from materializing or lasting into the future, because identity of the “party” units and their relative political clout is too changeable across electoral cycles. Politics is too short-term driven, only a few vehicles achieve horizontal coordination among their members, and electoral vehicles largely interact in non-cooperative ways. But more fundamentally, such pacts would be irrelevant, because the partisan arena is not where economic policy is crafted; rather, Peruvian state-level policies have been conceived, shaped, and refined by Peru’s technocracy. Unlike most other state ministries, the finance ministry constitutes an “island of excellence” in terms of competence, expertise, and organization prowess amid an otherwise weak Peruvian bureaucracy (Dargent 2015). One key factor explaining why the neoliberal policy regime has become consolidated and unaltered, regardless of which political party or political entrepreneur wins high office, is the acute weakness of the political class (comprised of free agents) vis-à-vis the technocratic class ensconced in key economic agencies of the state (Vergara and Encinas 2016; Dargent 2015). Peruvian electoral vehicles lack the political clout that comes with inter-temporal social rootedness, and they also are bereft of party cadres with highly specialized knowledge of economics (or cadres in any other area of policymaking)—with few partial exceptions. Incoming Peruvian governments are therefore in need of borrowing independent technocrats to staff key ministries. In practice, a lot of economic decision-making authority is delegated to the finance ministry and the Central Bank. A second reason accounting for Peru’s economic piloto

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automatico—the moniker used to denote the invariant neoliberal orientation—lies in Peru’s remarkable macroeconomic performance (in GDP growth) from 1990 to about 2015, situating Peru as an economic superstar in Latin America (IMF 2015). This widely recognized legitimacy of (macroeconomic) performance has endowed the Peruvian technocratic class with ample credibility and political clout, both domestically and international circles—particularly in relational terms vis-à-vis discredited politicians. Indeed, high-level technocrats atop the Central Bank and the Finance ministry, such as Julio Velarde, have won international awards and recognition for their stewardship of the economy. Peruvian technocracy has acquired an important degree of political power as well as political autonomy, as Dargent (2015) has shown. Peruvian economic technocrats are not a mere conduit for the business class to impose its preferred policy options. Technocrats have acted as a straightjacket on politicians entertaining statist or otherwise nonmarket-friendly economic policies, thus annulling the possibility of political responsiveness to public demands. Another reason for the observed continuity in economic policy (the so-called automatic pilot) lies in the instrumental and structural power of organized business. As the private economy has grown over the last quarter century, the political power of the business community has grown in tandem (Crabtree and Durand 2017, chap 5). Despite the absence of a robust business political party, Peru’s business community has neglected to invest in party-building, at least in part because it can exercise direct leverage vis-à-vis the state when it perceives that its underlying material interests are at stake. To use a classic term in the field of political economy, the structural power of Peru’s business community has grown enormously, allowing it to gain corresponding leverage vis-a-vis the state. Therefore, the potential (performance) cost of deviating from organized business’s preferred economic orientation has become more prohibitive for incoming governments to contemplate. Peru’s stellar macroeconomic performance and the concomitant growth of the private sector since the early 1990s has endowed the organized private sector with a level of political power it did not previously enjoy. While bereft of a “business party,” Peruvian organized business enjoys high levels of instrumental power, in addition to structural power. Presidents contemplating to move economic policy in a direction that veers away from neoliberalism have predictably faced the wrath of a powerful and vocal (not least, via its control of key mass media outlets) business community, and as much congressional obstructionism as the latter could muster.

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Electoral outcomes have been irrelevant for shaping the contours of economic policy because Peru’s amateur politicians are exceedingly feeble not only in relational terms (vis-à-vis the technocracy) but also in a more fundamental, absolute manner. The negative legitimacy environment in which politicians transact deprives them of political capital. Presidential and congressional candidates lack programmatic agendas and institutionalized political parties to buttress those agendas. Since 1990, national electoral contests have been marred by high doses of populism and personalism, to the detriment of programmatic, ideas-based campaigning (Boas 2016, chap 4). Presidents-elect come to office bereft of ideas, resources, party-based advisors, societal allies, and other important and necessary tools for charting a distinct and coherent policy course underpinned by the necessary political support base. The successful formulation and enactment of economic or political reforms require such instruments. In small part, policy continuity has thus proceeded by default, given governments’ lack of basic political resources to steer public policy in a different direction. Elected politicians are exceedingly powerless vis-à-vis nonelected actors. In good measure, this general landscape explains why no elected government has been able nor willing (campaign utterances aside) to wrestle control of the economy from the “automatic pilot” that commands the economy. Peruvian presidents’ congressional isolation and political weakness find a correlate in their portfolio allocation strategies. While in party-based settings weak presidents carry out cooperative allocation strategies that give ministries to other political parties (Camerlo and Martinez-Gallardo 2018), this is not a viable political option for Peruvian chief executives. The high fragmentation of the legislature, coupled with the weakness and unreliability of potential electoral vehicle allies, prompt chief executives to buttress their political support by recruiting technocrats, thereby “obtaining key resources they need to govern effectively: policy expertise and external support” (Vera and Carreras 2018, 179). In no other realm of public policy do incumbents seek to palliate their political isolation and weakness more obviously than in economic policymaking. The upshot, however, is that in so doing, governments abdicate all responsibility for the management of the economy, with attendant political consequences. The neoliberal economic regime, notwithstanding its celebrated GDP growth track record, runs afoul of Peruvian citizen preferences. Peru’s economic “automatic pilot,” in tandem with the neoliberal political order that sustains it, is utterly unresponsive to social preferences. Many public

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opinion polls reveal an immense state–society disconnect in the realm of economic policy and beyond. A March 2016 Datum poll, for instance, showed that a sky-high 91 percent of Peruvians want to change the economic model (29 percent desire a total change; 34 percent voice preference for a partial change; and 28 percent want to alter some aspects of the model), whereas only a scant 3 percent is content with it. An Ipsos-Apoyo poll carried out in 2021, revealed a very similar distribution of preferences: 32 percent wanted radical changes in the economic model; 54 percent desired moderate changes and 11 percent opted for the status quo (El Comercio 2021). That is, 86 percent of Peruvians desired changes in the economic policy regime. Peru’s personalistic linkage party– voter profile, coupled with the power of the economic establishment vis-a-vis feckless vehicles, means that these preferences are lost in electoral and political processes. The manifest utter inability of Peru’s feckless party universe to channel (even partially) economic preferences comes with visible political costs in terms of trust in political institutions and system legitimacy. Only 49.3 percent of Peruvians supported democracy as a system in 2019, the lowest percentage over the 2006–2019 period (LAPOP 2019). In 2019, only 28 percent of respondents were satisfied with the workings of Peruvian democracy, also the lowest figure in that fourteen-year interval, while confidence in political parties reached a new nadir, standing at 21.2 percent in 2019 (LAPOP 2019). The poll Latinobarometro placed Peru among the three most dissatisfied citizenries with the working of their democracy in Latin America (The Economist 2018). Only 9 percent of Peruvian respondents were satisfied with the performance of the economy (Latinobarometro 2018), among the five lowest degrees of satisfaction in Latin America. The gap between objective macroeconomic performance (which increased the size of the middle class, reduced poverty levels, etc.), and citizens’ satisfaction with that performance over the years, is particularly notorious in Peru. This poses something of an intellectual riddle. Part of the answer lies in the deficient delivery of public goods and low social spending (Levitsky 2014). Peru’s inordinately low level of public and social spending is clearly at odds with public preferences, affecting both system legitimacy and the (evanescent) popularity of incumbents. Peru’s levels of spending on education and healthcare on a per capita basis rank among the lowest in Latin America for many years. Similarly, spending on anti-poverty conditional cash transfer programs is very low by regional standards, and its overall redistribution effect is null (Jaramillo 2014). Overall, social

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spending and the expansiveness or scope of social programs in Peru are substantially more limited than in most other Latin American countries of comparable GDP per capita (Lustig 2016), fomenting serious deficiencies in the delivery of social services that create perpetual discontent and contribute to short honeymoons for new chief executives. Garay’s (2017) work empirically shows the importance of political competition among institutionalized political parties and attendant links between parties and social movements in fostering the expansion of social policy. The upshot is that Peru’s partyless landscape has attenuated the political incentives that compel presidential candidates and incumbents to address and respond to enormous social needs. This partly explains why both Toledo and Garcia obviated a great opportunity to use the enormous incoming foreign exchange resources accruing to the national treasury during the commodity boom (2003–2013) to sizably expand social policy. They lacked political incentives to do so, nor did they face pressure from organized social movements pushing for social policy expansion. Institutionalized left-wing parties, which in other countries have taken up the mantle of ramping up and reallocating social spending (Huber and Stephens 2012), have been marginal players in Peru, where the political left has a very poor record of electoral performance. In Peru, the pervasive and continued unresponsiveness of the political system to social preferences has contributed to the perpetuation of an acutely under-institutionalized partisan landscape and, for a time, the steady rise of a populist outfit (Fujimorismo) that derives political capital in no small measure from its popular reputation for delivering results. For as long as popular demands are not channeled by electoral vehicles, voter dissatisfaction can be expected to build, regardless of favorable or even stellar macroeconomic indicators. Policy performance has conventionally been held to be the most important determinant of regime support. Peru deviates from this common wisdom in the realm of macroeconomic performance, but so do countries like Venezuela (which under Chavez displayed strong regime support despite poor performance) or post-Pinochet Chile (where strong macroeconomic performance did not translate to regime support). Rhodes Purdy’s (2017) work does much to illuminate what explains such gaps by focusing on how policy decisions are made. In polities where there are extensive opportunities to participate in the policy process, citizen feelings of efficacy are strong and regime support is high as a result. Peruvian technocracy’s sway over the management of the economy has de facto depoliticized many aspects of economic

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policy, contributing to citizens’ low sense of efficacy, and concomitantly low regime support—notwithstanding remarkable (if territorially uneven) economic growth performance for many years. The lackluster economic performance Peru has displayed after the end of the commodity boom period (2003–2013) is contributing to lower levels of regime support among a more precarious middle class, vulnerable to downward mobility. Stokes (1999) has averred that the impact of political parties on democratic responsiveness depends on what parties are—their objectives and organization. The Peruvian case lends support to this asseveration, in a basic manner. Because “parties” in Peru are purely office-seeking, uninterested in public policy, organizationally weak, and largely epiphenomenal, they do not alter or shape the policy status quo to align it with public preferences; their policy preferences, insofar as they can be discerned, are rather irrelevant, as policy is set by the poderes facticos, domestic (technocracy, organized business) and international (foreign investors).

3 Vertical Accountability: Repeated Betrayal of Mandates Mandate reversals have occurred with troubling regularity in Third Wave Latin America (Stokes 2001). Economic constraints feature prominently in explanations of this insidious phenomenon. Economic crisis conditions during the 1980s and 1990s incentivized many political parties campaigning on statist and redistributionist platforms to enact neoliberalism once ensconced in office. The de facto policy latitude to enact left-of-center economic policymaking was meager, due to countries’ greater dependence upon international capital and the strictures imposed by international financial institutions. However, changed economic conditions during the 2000s substantially reduced the incidence of mandate reversals in Latin America (Domínguez 2008, 329–335). The commodities boom amplified the policy latitude of many governments (particularly rentier states), enabling them to follow through on promises of expansive social policy and statist economics, because favorable terms of trade endowed the region’s treasuries with unprecedented financial windfalls (Mazzuca 2013). Secondly, the (partial) delegitimation of the Washington Consensus neoliberalism agenda—in good part due to lackluster economic growth performance, as well as a reconsideration of the intellectual validity of some of the free market policy recommendations—amplified the range of economic policy choices policymakers

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were ready to consider (Kingstone 2011). From the early 2000s onward, the United States came to exercise less leverage vis-à-vis Latin American to impose its preferred free-market policies than in times past. The structural power of international capital vis-a-vis Latin America was temporarily reduced because foreign exchange earnings from commodity exports were plentiful, supply of financial capital ample, and international interest rates were low. Given an international and economic context that amplified enormously the economic room for maneuver, governments throughout the region followed through on the broad outlines of their campaign promises, including the many Left-of-center parties-inthe-executive during the 2000s (Flores-Macías 2012)—such as Bolivia, Venezuela, Ecuador, Argentina, and others. Peru qualifies as a resourcerich country, a rentier economy. High raw material prices showered post-2003 Peruvian governments with ample resources, which offered the opportunity to enact large increases in public and social spending. Popular demand for statist policies and ambitious social policy find much echo in the interior impoverished regions of the country, where the neoliberal model is least supported. In short, since the early 2000s, both (voter) demand and (financial resources) supply factors were present for pushing forward with an ambitious redistributive left-of-center public policy agenda in Peru. Toledo, Garcia and Ollanta Humala campaigned on a left-of-center economic agenda. Nevertheless, they did not govern with a programmatically leftist orientation. Enacted public policies in Peru maintained a highly conservative bias before, during, and after the resource boom years (2003–2013). This poses something of an intellectual puzzle: why have incumbents betrayed their campaign mandates with such unfailing regularity? The social uprootedness, organizational weakness, intellectual vacuity, and powerlessness of Peruvian electoral vehicles provide important clues to understand repeated betrayals of mandate. (Again, this is true only to the limited extent that electoral mandates can be said to exist, for reasons uncovered in Chapter 5). First, their socially uprooted character affords electoral vehicles with a high level of political autonomy from society. While the absence of organic linkages with society deprives diminished (unrooted) parties of political clout or claims to inter-temporal representation, it concurrently grants them ample autonomy in the conduct of policy vis-à-vis an atomized electorate and unorganized social constituencies. Incumbents enact betrayals of mandate in the knowledge that “their” (instrumental) voters cannot punish or constrain their actions

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(except in the court of public opinion), for voters do not have channels of voice and representation (corporatist or otherwise) within governing “party” structures. A second reason underpinning betrayals of mandate centers on time horizons (Carey and Reynolds 2007). Institutionalized political parties lengthen the time horizon of political actors because qua collective entities parties are concerned about future elections. However, in a landscape comprised of electoral vehicles with short shelf-lives, political entrepreneurs heavily discount the future. In consequence, they are much less concerned about the implications of their decisions for the future of their electoral vehicles—including the fallout from mandate reversals. Thirdly, organizationally feeble diminished parties, or Independent outfits, cannot constrain their leaders, which a priori gives them much room for maneuver in policy choices. Such leaders do not face internal formal party rules, norms, or powerful, countervailing party notables that can constrain their actions. Nor do most electoral vehicles benefit from a party brand that needs to be protected, which a priori can reduce degrees of freedom for leaders. It is personal brands that have value in Peruvian politics, not party brands (see Chapter 4). Finally, the short and uncertain nature of political careers in Peru also militates against the enactment of electoral mandates. Career politicians have every incentive to think about future elections, and thus to avoid decisions or political actions that might compromise their future careers. Peru, however, lacks a bona fide political class. Because outsiders and amateurs are the numerical norm in the Peruvian political landscape, the future is heavily discounted. While many other developing country democracies are pervaded by political uncertainty (Lupu and Riedl 2013), the inability of political actors to predict the future is accentuated in partyless landscapes. Peruvian political entrepreneurs work on the assumption that their political careers will be very short. Reelection rates for lawmakers, for example, averaged a strikingly low 20 percent during the 1995–2008 period, a much lower figure than that which obtains in other Latin American counties (Tanaka and Barnechea 2011). Similarly, low reelection rates apply for other elected officials (including governors). In consequence, political entrepreneurs do not face strong incentives to be (ideologically, programmatically) faithful to the voters that elected them to office. The policy promises made during campaigns are promptly forgotten by elected politicians. In sum, the institutional prerequisites, as well as the individual-level incentives for lengthening political time horizons, are absent. This feature of the Peruvian landscape inexorably

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creates very perverse dynamics for the level of responsiveness the political system can offer. The power of markets in constraining the viable choice set of economic policies, coupled with increasing disrepute and weakness of parties throughout Latin America, account for evident vertical accountability deficits throughout the region. However, it is difficult to name another country where the deficits in vertical accountability have been as large as in Peru (Vergara and Watanabe 2016), because in few other places are the institutions of interest aggregation and state–society mediation as feeble. In light of these considerations, it is not surprising that Peruvian presidents repeatedly incur in betrayals of mandate ever since the party system collapsed. Let us delve into the empirical evidence that illustrates this entrenched phenomenon. 3.1

Mandate Reversals Across Time

Alejandro Toledo campaigned for the 2001 presidential election on a “vaguely centrist” platform, “emphasizing job creation, decentralization and the satisfaction of basic human needs (Schmidt 2003, 344).” Toledo promised to increase public sector salaries. Once ensconced in office, it became clear that, notwithstanding his campaign promises, economic policies would not visibly differ from those of Fujimori. In a signal to markets and investors, the new President hired Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, a well-known neoliberal technocrat and member of the country’s economic elite, to run the ministry of finance. Later, Kuczysnki was named prime minister. Toledo’s economic agenda followed strict free-market orthodoxy: he privatize state-owned enterprises, imposed discipline on national budgets to keep expenditures in line with revenues, dismantled barriers to trade and capital movements, and pursued trade agreements with China, the United States, and other countries. While the economy performed well during 2001–2006, the benefits of growth accrued to “the top onethird of the income distribution, and barely reached the poor and the extreme poor, which made up around half of the population” (St. John 2010, 194). The absence of an active social agenda betrayed his “electoral mandate,” leading many observers to reasonably regard his administration as a lost opportunity for inclusive growth. Toledo relied on a strictly trickle-down approach to economic development, governing to the satisfaction of economic elites, but much more to the ideological right than he had promised voters.

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Alan Garcia, ever the astute politician, approached the 2006 presidential election cognizant of the widespread popular demand for change, which had catapulted the outsider Ollanta Humala and his radical proposals to a high place in the polls. The economic growth model pursued since the time of Fujimori’s neoliberal turn had generated very uneven growth, benefiting Lima and the coastal regions, but leaving the country’s interior neglected. Demands were rife for the renegotiation of taxes levied on large mining and hydrocarbon corporations which were obtaining enormous profits amid an explosion of commodity price, such that public spending on education, health, and pro-poverty programs could be augmented significantly. That emerging if incipient social consensus shaped the campaign. Garcia sought to position himself as the candidate of cambio responsable (responsible change), as he named it, embodying demands for some sort of departure from neoliberalism, while seeking not to antagonize conservative, middle-class Lima voters. Garcia proposed during his campaign a number of initiatives less statist and leftist than those of Humala in 2006, but not insubstantial deviations from the pro-market and pro-investment economic regime: the revision of mining contracts between the state and foreign MNCs; the augmentation of social programs and expansion of agrarian credit; changes to the Free Trade Agreement with the United States; and not least, changes in the Constitution of the Republic. Indeed, Garcia “cast himself as a moderate social democrat in the mold of Chile’s Ricardo Lagos and Michelle Bachelet” (Schamis 2006, 29). Once ensconced in the presidential palace, however, Garcia governed from the right. He presided over economic policy so conservative that PPC’s Lourdes Flores could credibly label it as “el gobierno para los ricos ” (a government for the rich). Despite copious amounts of foreign exchange and tax revenues coming into government coffers, a result of the commodity boom and attendant economic growth, the proceeds were not used in any substantial way to combat inequality or poverty. During Garcia’s term, the Peruvian ship of state sailed on (neoliberal) “automatic pilot” and ignored the mass of Peruvian citizens who had accrued few benefits from the prevailing economic model (see: Lopez 2013). Alan Garcia’s government missed a clear opportunity to visibly augment social spending, reneging on his “responsible change” campaign promises and thus violating his electoral mandate. Ollanta Humala ran a very radical and populist campaign in 2006, which earned him some comparisons with Chavismo (Sanchez-Sibony

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2012). By the time of the 2011 presidential elections, he had internalized the reasons for his painful 2006 second round electoral defeat, prompting his calculated shift toward the center of the political spectrum (Cameron 2011). But his programmatic agenda was still center-left. His campaign slogan was christened La Gran Transformacion (The Great Transformation), which sought to attract many Peruvians disgruntled by the failure of trickle-down economics to benefit the country’s interior provinces. As soon as Humala won the 2011 presidential elections and assembled his governing team, he rushed to reassure the business community by reappointing the sitting president of the Central Bank and naming an orthodox economist of unquestionable market-friendly credentials, Miguel Castilla, to the powerful Ministry of Finance. His government also negotiated directly with the business community a tax on mining earnings that was acceptable to mining corporations. Less than 100 days into Humala’s government, the head of the powerful business association CONCIEP, Humberto Speziani, could say publicly that the initial doubts of the business community “had been dissipated” and that “overall, the balance [we make of the Humala government] is definitely positive.” Polls conducted early into the Humala presidential administration showed the government losing support most rapidly in the southern interior regions where voters had electorally backed candidate Humala by large margins, votes that had been decisive for his first-round victory. Two years into Humala’s government, CONCIEP’s Speziani would reveal that “we meet with a [government] minister once a month,” and that members of the government cabinet were solicitous every time he “called on the phone” (Gestion 2013). Humala’s Great Transformation had turned into “the great continuation” of neoliberal policies. Yet another Peruvian president betrayed his electoral mandate, and thus undermined vertical accountability (Aviles and Rosas 2017). Pedro Pablo Kuczynski’s government constituted another iteration in the cycle of betrayals of mandate, but this time from a political rather than economic standpoint. He had been elected president in 2016 largely as a reaction against Fujimorismo, on the back of voters who were particularly focused on democratic governance, the rule of law, and the imperative to fight corruption. Kuczynski, cognizant of these popular sentiments, and seeking to galvanize the electoral force of antiFujimorismo, had fashioned himself as the candidate who would protect such precious aspirations against the predations of Fujimorismo. But rather than maintaining and building political capital based on the defense

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of democracy and the rule of law, he veered off track. Soon after taking office, Kuczynski reverted to the technocratic profile he had eschewed during the campaign, and focused his government on a preoccupation with macroeconomic indicators and the attraction of Foreign Direct Investment. His cabinet was almost entirely comprised of technocrats and figures from the private sector. Repeating the mistake of previous Peruvian chief executives, the PPK government cabinet lacked professional politicians who could provide a legible, widely-understood narrative of the government’s vision, plans and priorities, or skillfully defend the incumbent against criticism. In this context, it was easy for the Fujimorista opposition to cast and disparage it, not without some truth, as “the government of lobbysts.” Rather, than confront the aggressive abuse of congressional power on the part of Fuerza Popular, Kuczynski appeased Fujimorismo by meekly conceding to the illegitimate censure of several of his ministers, naming replacements that were amenable to Keiko Fujimori’s organization, and seeking a modus vivendi with the very political formation Kuczynski’s voters rejected, to whom he owed his presidency. Indeed, “keeping Congress mollified so that it would go along with plans for modernizing the economy became [PPK’s] priority number one” (Vergara 2018, 67). The democratic, anti-Fujimorismo agenda and (crafted) personal brand that had delivered Kuczynski the 2016 election victory were ignored and sacrificed on the altar of political expediency and economic considerations. The President’s pusillanimous behavior and turnaround in his rapport vis-a-vis Fujimorismo came at a very high cost in terms of presidential public approval numbers and societal credibility, both of which plummeted. His personalistic outfit, Peruanos Por el Kambio, went as far as to concoct an under-the-table deal with Kenji Fujimori to grant Alberto Fujimori a presidential pardon that would free the autocrat from jail, in the hope that this would allow his government to survive—effectively making a mockery of his voters, as well as betraying the support of the political left, which had publicly backed him during the second round of the presidential election. Even before Pedro Pablo Kuczynski was ousted from office via a congressional maneuver, his political capital had been irredeemably dilapidated because of the open betrayal of his explicit and implicit electoral mandate. The early stages of the Pedro Castillo presidency provided strong clues to predict its political fate. It was very unlikely that the incumbent be able would fulfill any of the central electoral promises made in the campaign. The size of the government’s electoral mandate was

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very small, given that it had barely garnered 19 percent of the vote in the first round. Catapulted to office in the second round on the back of the anti-Fujimorista vote, the Peru Libre government’s prospective popular support thus rested overwhelmingly on legitimacy of performance. But its performance in office proved to be dreadful, such that Castillo’s disapproval rating rose to over 60 percent only six months into his presidency. The new president’s incapacity and unwillingness to build bridges with other political formations, loss of ideological allies in Congress, and open internal rifts amid Peru Libre (given the clout of vehicle founder Vladimir Cerron), deepened Castillo’s political isolation. No other government in recent memory displayed communication deficiencies—i.e., ability to convey a sense of policy priorities and political orientation—as obvious as Peru Libre’s. The criteria by which Castillo selected his cabinet ministers was opaque, and changed in rapid succession. By February 2022, the third cabinet rotation (fourth cabinet) was underway. The overall technical abilities and issue expertise of most ministers was widely considered to be abysmal, contributing to malperformance. Determined enemies in Congress and among the poderes facticos reduced the chances of the leftist government’s mandate fulfillment. The keystone of Castillo’s campaign was to usher in a Constituent Assembly to reform the economic chapter of the Constitution, but the congressional opposition moved swiftly to ensure it had veto power on the matter, blocking the direct democracy route contained in the existing 1993 Constitution. Besides the constitution, the other main element of Castillo’s 2021 electoral campaign had been the promise to expand access to public services. Independently of the opposition’s constraining actions, a pertinent query surrounding Peru Libre’s mandate fulfillment was whether the leftist government was truly working for the enactment of progressive public-regarding reforms. The evidence accumulated during the first six months of the presidential tenure showed that it was not. Peru Libre in-the-executive and its representatives in Congress catered to particularistic and rent-seeking interests, contravening its people-centered discourse. In early 2022, the General Attorney opened a preliminary investigation into influence-peddling and collusion by the President. Castillo had purportedly “unduly and indirectly” influenced the awarding of state contracts in exchange of bribes (IDL Reporteros 2022). Prime minister Mirtha Vazquez, a highly respected figure for her probity and competency, resigned, adducing the lack of presidential resolve to tackle corruption. Interior minister Avelino Guillen

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resigned for the same reasons. More broadly, mounting evidence pointed to ruling vehicle’s patrimonial conception in the management of the state, alongside its defense of informal sector interests. The operative alliances Peru Libre retained in Congress, after the defection of erstwhile leftist ally Nuevo Peru, were “aimed at the destruction of the few positive institutional reforms that had been enacted in recent years, such as those in education and transportation” (Banda 2022). All in all, “an informal pact” was discernable between the Castillo government and assorted congressmen of various political formations (Fujimorismo included) in defending the interests of informal sectors in mining, transportation, and private education (Vivas 2022). Insofar as Castillo’s campaign had been critical of formalizing the transportation sector, and vowed to protect transportistas from alleged “abuses of the state,” the sitting President was fulfilling part of his campaign promises—at the cost of the rule of law and the formalization of the economy. Much as had occurred with previous presidents-elect, Castillo faced strong pressures to discard his radical campaign promises. Peru Libre’s calls to nationalize the mining industry and move toward statist policies, rattled markets. Castillo bowed to environmental pressures and political incentives to moderate his discourse in the second round of the election. The appointment of moderate leftist economist Pedro Francke, a former World Bank technocrat, as finance minister, calmed markets. Francke assured economic agents that there would not be any forthcoming nationalizations. Instead, he averred, the new government wanted mining companies to contribute more to the public treasury via higher tax rates. Similarly, the ratification of conservative economist Julio Velarde as head of the Central Bank aimed to signal continuity in the management of the macroeconomy. In all, the incoming Pedro Castillo government, ignoring the Marxist manifesto of Peru Libre as well as the Vladimir Cerron radical faction, followed the orthodox macroeconomic script of previous administrations, in the knowledge that it could not govern effectively without the acquiescence of organized business and markets. For a “candidate who had ran largely on a socialist platform” (Moncada 2021), the maintenance of economic orthodoxy entailed a betrayal of his electoral mandate. But beyond this mandate reversal, Castillo was betraying his social base on account of governmental corruption, patrimonial practices, and sheer political and managerial incompetence.

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Consequences of Repeated Betrayals of Mandate

Repeated betrayal of electoral mandates is not cost-free for Peruvian democracy. The phenomenon carries pernicious consequences: the delegitimation of the political class and of electoral processes—and even of democracy as a regime. When policy switching is practiced successively by different governing party labels, “citizens may become disaffected with democracy more generally, abstain from voting, or support maverick parties and charismatic politicians, often with anti-democratic appeal” (Kitschelt et al. 2010). It is revealing that amid an economy that achieved one of the highest rates of continuous GDP growth in the developing world (IMF 2015), evincing remarkable reductions in absolute and relative poverty alongside the growth of a sizable middle class, public support for democracy has not increased during the two decades since the return of democracy (Latinobarometro 2000–2020). Macroeconomic performance and rising prosperity alone cannot bridge the chasm between Peruvian state and society. Peru has thus been a salient case in Latin America of “democratic impotence,” that is, the sustained inability of democracy to deliver on the revealed economic policy preferences of voters. The phenomenon is also observed in established democracies, such as those in Western Europe, with a similar political fallout of citizen disaffection in every country where it occurs (Sanchez-Cuenca 2017). Voters lose confidence in democratic institutions when their leaders violate voter expectations of governmental policy. When citizens perceive that elections are an irrelevant instrument for channeling public policy preferences, democratic institutions become delegitimized—particularly political parties and Congress—and electoral dealignment grows. Violations of mandate have contributed to sharp declines in presidential approval in Peru (other causes surely operate, as detailed in previous chapters). When voters perceive that governments are reneging on their campaign promises, they withdraw support from incumbents. Amid a negative legitimacy environment, sitting governments depend more on public goods delivery performance and mandate fulfillment than otherwise, because their original source of electoral support is insubstantial in nature, instrumental (i.e., an absence of partisans). Operating in a landscape of exceedingly weak party–voter linkages, we should therefore expect overall support for Peruvian incumbents to be, on average, comparatively low. Regional comparisons bear out this prediction. For illustration, presidential approval in Peru averaged

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a meager 28 percent between 2002 and 2013 (during the heyday of the commodity boom!), compared with averages of 47 percent in Ecuador, 48 percent in Bolivia, 52 percent in Argentina and Chile, 63 percent in Brazil, and 65 percent in Colombia, according to data from Latinobarometro (2014). Trust in political parties is also lower in Peru than across all of its regional neighbors. These marked differences cannot only be attributed simply to state weakness. To be sure, Peru’s dysfunctional state apparatus places serious limitations on governments’ ability to deliver on many campaign promises. However, historically the Peruvian state is not markedly weaker than that of Andean (Adelman 2006) and Central American countries, where elected leaders do not face such precipitous and speedy falls in public approval. Thus, explanations that center on state weakness (Levitsky 2018, 345–47) provide a first approximation to understand the phenomenon of low intertemporal popular support for incumbent governments, but these explanations are insufficient. While many Latin American countries are beset by weak states, few display the levels of electoral attrition observed in countries such as Peru or Guatemala (Mainwaring 2018, 58). Many factors can protect, and have protected, many Latin American governing parties from the electoral consequences of malperformance in office: sociocultural or programmatic party brands, tilted electoral playing fields, clientelistic networks, corporatist linkages, or a combination thereof. Peruvian electoral vehicles, by contrast, confront the electorate in naked fashion, which renders them very vulnerable to malperformance in office. The impact of state weakness on electoral performance is mediated by relative party strength, among other factors. Because Peruvian parties-in-the executive are bereft of administrative or ideological resources that can serve as political insurance against unpopularity, their popular support depends enormously on public policy results. In other words, it is the juxtaposition of state weakness and party weakness that is particularly damaging for incumbent’s support and political viability as well as for inter-temporal electoral stability more broadly. The public perception that leaders do not follow through on their campaign promises is certainly damaging for those leaders who violate their electoral mandates, but also more generally for the legitimacy vested upon politicians and mediating democratic institutions writ large. Democratic regimes that systematically fail to be responsive to citizen demands witness an erosion of system legitimacy. Politicians’ image as public-regarding agents who aim to promote the common good is also

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decimated as a result of serial mandate reversals. Notwithstanding the stellar macroeconomic performance Peru posted for many years and the growth of the (precarious) middle class, Peruvians do not perceive that elections have been instruments for generating public-regarding policy outputs. A telling poll by Latinobarometro reveals that the percentage of Peruvians who feel that governments rule for “the benefit of the people” is among the five lowest in Latin America (a mere 13 percent), while the belief that the country is ruled for “the benefit of a few powerful groups” is widespread (84 percent), placing Peru among the top five countries in the region in that dark category (Latinobarometro 2016). Repeated mandate reversals thus carry systemic implications, inasmuch as the phenomenon deepens the chasm between state and society. A second pernicious consequence stemming from repeated deviations from electoral mandates is that governing electoral vehicles do not build party brands. Thereby, diminished type political parties perpetuate their low societal rootedness and doom their future electoral prospects. As illustrated in this section of the chapter, old and new Peruvian political formations alike have invariably violated the programmatic offerings and promises that defined their campaigns. Building a programmatic party brand requires consistency in policy orientation— in addition to policy differentiation from other parties (Lupu 2016). Peruvian parties-in-government have missed this necessary ingredient, for they have systematically and fragrantly reneged on campaign promises. The corruption offenses perpetrated by all Peruvian governments has, perhaps with even greater force, also precluded the emergence of incipient “party” brands. Observed repeated violations of electoral mandates have had a common denominator: rightward shifts. Left-of-center or centrist campaigning on the part of electoral winners has been followed by rightof-center governing agendas. (PPK constitutes the only exception, insofar as he did not campaign on the left). The chief reason for why incoming governments regularly engage in left-to-rightward shifts in economic policy is not difficult to discern: while there are powerful electoral incentives to appeal to the many Peruvians that remain economically disenfranchised (even amidst a booming economy), the prevailing institutional and political constraints upon any visible deviation from neoliberalism are all too formidable for weak, socially uprooted governing parties to contemplate, let alone overcome. Would-be contestatory incumbents face powerful and organized opponents, and risk interrupted presidencies—as

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President Pedro Castillo discovered in his early days in office. The political incentives not to deviate from the prevailing neoliberal economic model are too powerful for incumbents to ignore. That is why “since 2001, economy ministers, who exercise huge power in Peru, have all been appointed for their links to global business and banking networks” (Crabtree 2020, 150). It is not exaggerated to assert that the political viability of the Left in office has depended upon the renouncement of its ideological substance. The narrowing of “acceptable” political discourse as pertains to economic policy has condemned would-be contestatory presidential candidates to elite opinion opprobrium. It is symptomatic of this narrowing of “respectable” discourse that the term anti-sistema (“antisystem”) used to be applied in the 1980s to parties and candidates who held anti-democratic ideas; from the 2000s onward, the antisistema label came to be pejoratively applied to those who sit outside the free-market economy elite consensus. In short, Peru’s politico-economic establishment deems strict adherence to the neoliberal model to be more important than the defense of democratic governance, as repeatedly demonstrated by its “revealed preferences,” to use the language of economists.

4 Horizontal Accountability: From an Innocuous to a Transgressive Congress The under-institutionalization of a party universe also has implications for the ability of Presidents to maintain popular support and thus be able to govern with some authority. Linkages between the executive branch, the legislature, and party leaders are stronger in institutionalized party systems (Mainwaring and Scully 1995, 1996) Politicians or political outsiders that rise to the presidency atop an electoral vehicle and face a Congress populated by other substantively similar vehicles, are bereft of the necessary institutional support for governance. This describes the predicament of Peruvian presidents: they find that their own congressional caucus is unreliable, while their legislative allies are also fickle. Hence, the institutional basis for engaging in dependable coalitional politics is lacking. Moreover, Peruvian presidents discover that their ability to retain congressional support depends to an inordinate degree on their level of popularity in the court of public opinion. A priori congressional backing for incumbents evanesces as soon as chief executives see their public approval numbers

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decline, and incumbent chief executives need to rely more on the distribution of particularistic benefits to curry legislative support. Because Peru’s electoral vehicles lack brands or other assets that free agents find politically valuable, nor durable sources of cohesion, loyalty on the part of lawmakers is fickle and unreliable. They are guided by short-term calculations. What is more, the highly volatile levels of public approval accruing to chief executives renders their parliamentary support more vulnerable and unsteady, insofar as the rampant disloyalty of voters quickly translates into the disloyalty of lawmakers. Executive–legislative institutional conflict constitutes a common source of ungovernability in under-institutionalized party universes. However, this phenomenon has generally not obtained in post-2000 Peru—until 2016, that is. Peru’s floating electorate has predictably generated fragmented legislatures and a string of minority Presidents (Toledo, Garcia, Humala, Kuzynski, Vizcarra, Castillo) who cannot count on majoritarian partisan support in Congress. This perennial condition is, ceteris paribus, theorized to be a source of institutional conflict and governmental paralysis in presidential regimes beset by high party system fragmentation (Mainwaring 1993). But the extreme weakness of Peruvian electoral vehicles has unsuspectingly contributed to easing the executive branch’s ability to govern because congressional caucuses are malleable to outside influence and patronage-type incentives, relatively unburdened by the strictures of firmly held principles or ideology. Ponce (2016) shows that Peruvian minority presidents have been relatively successful at managing to get their bills approved by Congress. Electoral vehicles’s emptiness as “repositories of policy expertise” vis a vis an executive branch that, by contrast, can hire such expertise and teams of technocrats, further favors the passage of executive-originating legislative bills. However, this asymmetry concurrently debases greatly the check-and-balance constitutional role of the legislature. Cross-country research finds that the level of legislator professionalization constitutes a key factor shaping the legislature’s ability to constrain executive action—whereby professionalization is measured either in terms of prior legislative experience or in terms of lawmakers’ prior professional work experience (Shair-Rosenfield and Stoyan 2017). Peruvian congressmen rank low on both dimensions, evincing a marked decay in professionalization with respect to the 1980s (Degregori and Melendez 2007; Pease 2006), a trend that has continued as of early 2020s. Presidents’ ability to negotiate the allocation of financial resources (controlled by the executive branch) with legislators constitutes

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a crucial tool in canvassing legislative support. Peruvian chief executives have exploited most lawmakers’ de facto status as free agents to their own political advantage. Whereas in other country settings chief executives find opposition based on programmatic or ideological differences, in Peru these are generally not sources of congressional opposition. (There are exceptions: the Peruvian Nationalist Party proved disciplined in its consistent ideological-driven opposition to the bills introduced by Alan Garcia’s APRA government). Indeed, chief executives have not found it difficult to co-opt individual lawmakers to smooth the process of legislating and to push forward their legislative initiatives. Because most legislators cannot look forward to reelection and have little loyalty to their party labels (which have few political assets to offer them), they are easy to co-opt at a rather low price. Across successive administrations, co-optation has occurred via “congressional perks, patronage jobs for friends and relatives, cash bribes, and blackmail (threats to investigate corrupt activities)” (Levitsky 2014, 301). In line with other Latin American countries where control of the executive branch affords partiesin-the-executive the ability to literally buy support in Congress (Ames 2001), it appears that such dynamics also explain why minority Presidents in Peru have, during the 2001–16 period, escaped the trap of inter-branch gridlock more assiduously than the literature on presidentialism predicts (Valladares 2012, 203). The end result stemming from the delineated configuration of factors—i.e., party organizational weakness, short-term legislators’ behavior, and programmatic fecklessness—is that “Peruvian presidents’ ability to turn bills into laws is rather high in comparison to other Latin American presidents who enjoy congressional majorities” (Ponce 2016, 193). Yet another way in which a “democracy without political parties” undermines governability is by making dependable inter-“party” cooperation rare. For democracy to work well, reasonable doses of both cooperation and competition are required (Karl and Schmitter 1991). Peruvian electoral vehicles’ short-termism and lack of programmatic identity militates against cooperation based on programmatic orientations, such that public-regarding legislative output is scarce. Instead, the Peruvian Congress has evinced a pernicious sort of inter-party cooperation: the concoction of hidden coalitions aimed at procuring partisan impunity for corruption, or otherwise cooperation with the intent to open the gates of important state institutions for patronage purposes. To be sure, this collusive behavior is not made explicit, nor is it publicly acknowledged

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by political leaders, so as to avoid potential political costs. These underthe-table alliances are reminiscent of the “ghost coalitions” that Mejía Acosta (2006) outlined for the Ecuadorean case. There is no more famous example of such insidious cooperation than that of “Fujiaprismo”: Fujimorismo and Aprismo cooperated behind the scenes in order to maintain or augment their degree of infiltration and power within the judiciary or the electoral management body. Via synchronized maneuvers, these two electoral vehicles collaborated to introduce legislation aimed at shielding their respective leaders from legal prosecution or otherwise aimed at reducing their penal accountability. These vehicles also joined efforts to misuse and abuse their legislative prowess in order protect public officials strongly suspected of corruption and malfeasance, but whose complicit behavior served as a bulwark for partisan impunity (Alvarez Rodrich 2018). To the limited extent that some electoral vehicles can be elected to Congress on the basis of programmatic or issue-based promises, “party” responsiveness to voters gets lost in the legislature. In consequence, the Peruvian Congress qua institution has, in important respects, abdicated its public policymaking function during the post-Fujimorato era. By omission rather than commission, the legislature has delegated this function almost fully to the technocratic class ensconced in state agencies. The bureaucratic capacities of the Peruvian Congress are so low that “it is recurrent to see that the work of parliamentary commissions is highly dependent on other state agencies, and even private entities, that allow [the commissions] to gather information so that they can minimally carry out their institutional role (Figueroa Burga 2016, 14).” Several of the elements the Inter-American Development Bank (2012) has posited to be good measures of the bureaucratic capacity of a legislature are related to party institutionalization, including: the longevity of political careers, the education of congressmen, and their specialization in the issue-areas of legislative commissions, as well as a corps of highly trained bureaucrats to be parliamentary advisors. Figueroa Burga’s (2012) in-depth study of the Peruvian ordinary Commission of Energy and Mines can be read as a representative example of the abysmally low capacities exhibited by Congress, which renders each of its commissions easy to capture by powerful vested interest groups. These groups, particularly the business sector, have gained “the power to decide [in the congressional setting] the orientation of public policies, which policies are approved and how they are applied in practice, or not applied” (Durand 2005, 138). The extremely low level of support Congress enjoys among Peruvian citizens

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(which dropped to an abysmal 11 percent by 2009) further hobbles its effectiveness as a political institution. That low level of social legitimacy is endogenous to the fecklessness of Peruvian electoral vehicles: the public perception of “party” caucuses as corrupt and legislature as a marketplace where self-serving lawmakers traffic in obscure interests, dooms the institutional reputation of Congress. In turn, this enormous disrepute of the legislature dovetails with the continuing popular appeal of strongman figures who can presumably cut through political fecklessness and inefficiency. The strong party ideal rests on the ability of political parties to advance programmatic policy platforms as well as their ability to act collectively once in government so that platforms can be converted into operative policy. But when “the second pillar is in place without the first, [it] opens the possibility for parties to be effective predators for the rents associated with controlling the state” (Carey and Reynolds 2007, 271). That is, party discipline in the absence of programmatic or public regarding objectives can translate into the effective pursuit of predatory or rentseeking goals. The Peruvian case certainly provides much evidence to help validate this general assertion, as seen, for example, in Fujimorismo’s disciplined parliamentary vote against education reform bills that sought to bring Peruvian for-profit universities into account for the shoddy quality of the education they deliver, closing those which did not meet certain standards. Because individual Fujimoristas were shareholders in some of the largest for-profit universities, Fuerza Social used its legislative clout to keep these educational enterprises afloat. The desire of education minister Jaime Saavedra to elevate educational standards cost him the job when Fujimorismo forced his censure in the defense of unspoken “corrupt interests,” as the head of Transparency International, Jose Ugaz, put it (El Comercio 2016). The same can be said of Fujimorimo’s financial stakes in informal industries such as illegal mining. Programmatic consistency is absent among congressional caucuses. However, consistency has not been lacking in other, subterranean dimensions. The disciplined voting and unspoken collaboration among lawmakers of different electoral vehicles obtains in the defense of illegal rent-seeking interests and corruption. Drug trafficking expert and scholar Jaime Antenaza has documented the presence of a narco-bancada (narco-caucus), a group of congressmen associated with narco-traffickers who consistently vote to block drug-related legislation as well as to filter information to the benefit of narcos. Legislators comprising this narco-bancada included

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members of Fuerza 2011, Gana Peru, and other political formations, for a total of 12 congressmen in the 2011–2016 legislative term. No less than 45 narco-candidates ran in the 2016 legislative elections, out of which 21 won seats. Ten out of these 21 new congressmen led a narcotracking ring, and an additional four were stand-ins for narcos (Diario UNO 2018). Fujimorismo fielded 17 narco-candidates for Congress in as many as ten regions of the country, which made it the political formation with the largest number of such candidates. Whereas during the 1980s and 1990s narcotraffickers had occasionally financed campaigns, in more recent times narcos have stepped directly into the political game. According to Antenaza, a fuller investigation would find a larger number of narco-legislators than hitherto identified, ensconced within “almost all political formations.” Capturing elected offices grants the head of narco organizations political protection as well as social legitimacy, whereas the financial sponsorship of an elected official provides only partial and unreliable political protection (Peru 21, 2014). Thus, the manifest incentive of narco organizations is to directly have their own congressional representatives elected. In sum, the fecklessness of electoral vehicles, the absence of normative values within them, the scarcity of reliable and legal political finance sources, and the short-lived nature of congressional lifespans translates into a broader problem: the infiltration of illegal groups in Congress. The increasing cost of political campaigns enhances the relative political competitiveness of narcos and their political allies vis-à-vis clean electoral vehicles. Peruvian political formations screen congressional candidates largely based on instrumental grounds, namely, their ability to bring either financial capital or local electoral prowess to the organization (Levitt 2012, Chapter 4; Zavaleta 2014). Despite public assertions to the contrary, individuals’ probity and a track record of integrity are not screened for. The operative criteria for candidate selection thus makes electoral vehicles permeable to the infiltration of individuals linked to illicit economies. Relatedly, Peruvian legislators are amateurs, with little experience and knowledge of public policy, and therefore hampered in their ability to scrutinize competently the policy content of the legislative bills they are tasked to act upon. The decline of the traditional (diminished) parties has increasingly filled Congress with dilettante legislators, with inevitable consequences for the functioning of this essential institution for democracy. The average medium level of professionalization found among Peruvian legislators for the decade of the 2000s (Cabezas Rincon 2011) has visibly declined thereafter. The

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ephemeral nature of legislative careers, given that around 70 percent of congressmen are not reelected, lowers dramatically the incentives facing sitting lawmakers to collectively invest in the strengthening and institutionalization of the legislative body. In innumerable ways, congressmen regularly contribute to the disrepute of the legislature as an institution, not least because of their corporatist modus operandi, including many instances of self-dealing—such as legislating to increase parliamentary salaries. The systemic corruption found inside Congress across legislative terms, regardless of its “partisan” composition, has helped place the institution as the least trusted by Peru’s mass publics (LAPOP 2020a, 21). In comparative terms, the level of trust Peruvians profess toward their legislature is the lowest in Latin America over the 1995–2018 period, standing at 18 percent on average (Fundacion Carolina 2020, 12). While the level of trust in Congress had fallen region-wide to an average of 20 percent of those polled by 2020, the corresponding figure for Peru was a meager 7 percent, thereby maintaining its ranking as the country most distrustful of its legislature in Latin America (among countries polled) (Latinobarometro 2021, 70). The above mentioned factors have clearly aided the endogenous perpetuation Congress’ feebleness vis-à-vis other institutions. In turn, the institutional feebleness of the lawmaking body has measurable consequences. Political scientists have uncovered a robust correlation between the strength of legislatures and the quality of democracy (Fish and Kroenig 2009). The causality arrow between the strength of legislatures and the strength of parties goes in both directions: weak parties make for weak legislatures, but weak legislatures also contribute to party weakness, as research shows (Fish 2006, 15–18). Strong legislatures incentivize political actors to invest in party-building, because “where legislatures occupy center-stage, politicians must invest in political parties in order to advance their careers (ibid., 15).” In Peru, the opposite reality obtains, perhaps best exemplified in that it has been rare for a political figure with presidential aspirations to have forged his or her political bona fides and personal brand in the hallways of the national Congress. While there are a few exceptions (i.e., Accion Popular’s Victor Andres Garcia Belaunde), such insider candidates have had meager electoral success in nationwide elections. Evidence from past elections suggests that in Peru personal brands are tainted by dint of an individual’s time spent as a representative in the national Congress.

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The Peruvian Congress displays the makings of a political bazaar in which favors are traded, chief executives buy legislative votes in surreptitious (and sometimes illegal) ways, and illicit interests thrive. Lobby groups are certainly influential in the Peruvian Congress, but they are not specialized groups with expertise and autonomous organization as is often the case in established democracies; rather, they are fluid groups of incumbent lawmakers, ex-legislators, and ad hoc consultants (Mujica 2012). The absence of programmatic politics coupled with the ephemeral nature of a typical legislator’s tenure in office and the weakness of monitoring institutions, dovetail with the pervasive instrumentalization of politics for personal enrichment, political protection, and the trading of favors. Relatedly, the absence of fealty on the part of many legislators toward their electoral vehicle means that the latter do not act “as a wall and filter of the diverse forms of pressure and vested interests that seek to influence them” (Mujica 2012). In other cases, electoral vehicles are themselves instruments for the furthering of corporatist agendas. Consequently, chief executives not infrequently find, to their chagrin, that their policy initiatives are opposed because they conflict with the rent-seeking and profit-making interests, or impunity-seeking motives, of free agents and entire caucuses in Congress. This reality regularly prevents the enactment of public-regarding legislation. For example, Fujimorismo used its legislative clout to oppose executive branch attempts during the 2010s to raise the overall standards of tertiary education by way of raising the level or closing down shoddy for-profit universities, a business in which Fujimorismo had vested financial interests. In general, the 2001–2016 era was not characterized by gridlocked executive–legislative relations despite the prevalence of minority Presidents. The country thus averted the most troubling of the ungovernability scenarios Juan Linz theorized in his critique of presidentialist regimes (Linz 1990) on account of the dual legitimacy problem inherent to this form of government. Peruvian chief executives have engaged in coalition building, either overtly or covertly, to ensure legislative support for their initiatives. When Presidents have wielded pork-barrel offerings to grease the wheels of Congress, and have been willing to engage in unsavory under-the-table tradeoffs, they have prevailed, accruing vehicle-by-vehicle and seat-by-seat support for their legislative initiatives. The reality that most caucuses in the legislature do not seek policy outputs but rather narrow, particularistic benefits, has paved the way to higher levels of governability in interbranch

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relations than standard political science theory predicts for minority presidentialism. But pervasive particularism has come at a high price for the performance of Peruvian democracy, not only in terms of transaction costs (lower public goods provision, etc.), but also in terms of cabinet stability. Kellam (2015) finds that the greater the presence of particularistic political parties in assemblies, the more governmental cabinet changes occur, while majority governments become more elusive. This finding appears to apply to Peru, where cabinet changes are all too frequent, and stable inter-“party” alliances are nowhere in sight, amid rampant particularist logics. 4.1

Executive–Legislative Relations: Moving Toward Serial Brinkmanship

Democracies burdened by under-institutionalized party systems have been theorized to be prone to executive–legislative conflicts (Mainwaring and Scully 1996; Mainwaring 2018). The chief reason behind this logic is that political outsiders atop electoral vehicles, with weak adherence to democratic institutions and facing determined enemies in the establishment parties, are more likely to be elected to the highest office in presidential systems. Another reason for expecting inter-branch conflict is that weak party universes are more prone to electoral and seat fragmentation and thus the production of minority presidents. The combination of outsider presidents and minority status in Congress is, of course, the most dangerous mix for executive–legislative relations. In the period since 1990, Mainwaring (2018, 80–82) shows that out of ten outsiders who became Presidents in Latin America, “eight experienced severe conflict with Congress.” Alberto Fujimori was almost removed in a vote by the Chamber of Deputies in 1991 (Kenney 2004, 186), and he later staged a famous self-coup in 1992 (Cameron 1998), events that comported with standard political science theoretical expectations. Interestingly, and not coincidentally, the two exceptions to the correlation between outsiders and interbranch conflict come from Peru: namely, the governments of Alejandro Toledo and Ollanta Humala. Both presidents were able to concoct ad hoc coalitions and the use of patronage to pass legislation and avoid serious interbranch conflicts that rose to the level of a constitutional crisis. Nevertheless, neither was able to escape the specter of, and chatter in political circles about, their removal, often rationalized on specious

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grounds. (For example, Alan Garcia considered using his Aprista congressional delegation alongside legislative allies, to oust President Humala, but desisted, reportedly judging that his electoral prospects for 2016 were better without instigating instability.) As regards the question of why Peruvian outsider Presidents (Alberto Fujimori excepted) have not been willing to rule in delegative fashion by way of circumventing checks and balances, the prevailing negative legitimacy environment features as perhaps the most prominent explanation. Beyond what may be said about the proclivities of individual leaders, chief executives are not elected with resounding mandates and their political capital rapidly dwindles in office, thus forestalling the possibility of ruling in delegative fashion. Relatedly, the prevalence of low-intensity populism in Peru, as opposed to a radical variant, also partly explains the absence of clear cut delegative democratic rule a la O’Donnell. Incumbent chief executives have not availed themselves of populism as a political strategy to be wielded while in power, nor attempted to overhaul institutions, for reasons to be explored below. In sum, after Alberto Fujimori, Peruvian outsider (and maverick) chief executives have not acted as the theoretical literature predicts a priori, and thus have not posed a problem for democratic rule or executive–legislative governance—though the case of president Martin Vizcarra could arguably be conceived as a partial exception. However, the potential for serious interbranch conflict in Peru has been latent ever since the party system imploded in 1990. Recent developments afflicting Peruvian democracy have shown in stark fashion that the underlying structural disarticulation between the executive and the legislature can materialize in a constitutional crisis at any moment. Between 2017 and 2020 the political system underwent two vacancy processes to remove the sitting President of the Republic, one presidential resignation (Kuczynski), and the dissolution of Congress. Over the course of 2021 and 2022 some congressional caucuses also tried to jumpstart a vacancy process against the sitting chief executive. This recent period of institutional brinkmanship also reaffirms that the absence of serious conflict during the 2001–2016 period was not a sign of self-sustaining stability in interbranch relations; rather, it was a contingent outcome. As GrzymalaBusse has expounded, there is a distinction between the duration of an outcome across time (continuity) and the capacity of a political system to deliver said outcome (stability). Indeed the “the passage of time does not, on its own, lower the perception of risk” (Grzymala-Busse 2011,

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1279). In the post-2001 era, Peruvian presidentialism displayed (precarious) continuity, but not the organizational basis to deliver stability. Thus, almost inexorably, institutional instability eventually emerged. In a real sense, the 2016–2022 (ongoing) period of recurrent constitutional crises reflects the unsurprising final stage or denouement of a democracy that has functioned without political parties for over twenty years. The Congress elected in January 2020 mirrored the extreme decomposition of the party universe, comprised of free agents with little adherence to democratic norms, operating for short-term political gains, and open to the use of “constitutional hardball”—defined as a behavior whereby political actors use their institutional powers to the limit and beyond (Tushnet 2004), evidencing no forbearance. The conflict between the executive and legislative branches rose to dangerous levels during the presidency of Pedro Pablo Kucyznski. Peru’s semi-presidential system empowers the legislature to censure ministers, vote to oust the President of the Republic via a vacancy procedure, or name key posts to state administration, among other institutional prerogatives. On paper, these powers can allay a few of the problems that Juan Linz (1990) famously theorized that burden presidentialism qua political system—not least, its institutional inflexibility to deal with political crises. However, while the powers and prerogatives of Congress as enshrined in Peru’s semi-presidential system can potentially be useful to keep executives in check, they can also be abused in order to unduly attack and undermine the executive branch. Fujimorismo, using its majority of 73 congressmen won in the 2016 parliamentary election, abused its congressional power to debilitate the incumbent government. It wielded its absolute majority (and attendant constitutional powers of censure) to oust no less than four of Kucysnki’s most important ministers, on the basis of unproven allegations of corruption (Arce and Incio 2018). These ousters were animated by the double purpose of weakening the chief executive as well as the intent to neutralize ministers whose policies and initiatives ran counter to Fujimorismo’s corporatist interests. Thereafter, President Kucysnki’s reign was weakened and discredited due to his incapacity and unwillingness to stand up to Fujimorismo—as it dithered and sought accommodation with it, betraying his electoral mandate. His term in office became one aimed at mere political survival. Fuerza Social, not long thereafter, ushered in the process requesting Kucysnki’s vacancy for “moral incapacitation,” a vague provision found in the Constitution that allows for excessive discretion (and thus abuse) on the part of lawmakers.

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The conflict between the executive led by the presidency of Martin Vizcarra and Congress, rose to the level of a constitutional crisis, continuing the period of high-level interbranch conflict triggered during the Kuczynski administration. President Vizcarra had staked his political future on his steadfast backing of a set of politico-institutional reforms as drafted by a panel of scholars called the Comision de Alto Nivel para la Reforma Politica (or High Level Commission for Political Reform, see CANRP 2019). These reforms included the end of immunity for members of Congress as well as an investigation into the presumed corruption of Attorney General Julio Chavarry. When lawmakers purposely stalled the consideration of the Commission recommendations, and archived several key reforms, President Vizcarra raised the political stakes by putting forth a cuestion de confianza (confidence motion) for Congress to act upon. With this move, the chief executive thus forced lawmakers to either approve six unmodified political reform bills or grant Vizcarra the prerogative to dissolve Congress (Calderon 2019). Congress accepted the deliberation of those bills, but then stalled and proceeded to dilute some of those bills. Vizcarra then took the confrontation one notch higher by proposing to bring forward the 2021 general elections to 2020, to renovate both the executive and the legislative branches of government. While the proposal was supported by public opinion (70 percent of citizens were in favor), Congress refused to countenance the proposal, and archived it (Paredes and Encinas 2020, 10). Vizcarra then put forth a second cuestion de confianza (confidence motion) on account of the alleged rushed manner in which Congress was approving new candidates to the Constitutional Tribunal, politicizing the selection process and inadequately vetting candidates on the basis of their qualifications. When Congress refused to even deliberate about this motion as part of proceedings, the Vizcarra government interpreted the maneuver as a de facto denegation of confidence. The government argued that this constituted a second refusal of confidence and thus enabled the President of the Republic to dissolve Congress and convoke new elections. Congress, besieged by overwhelming public support for the measure (85 percent in favor) and without the backing of the military or the international community, voted and approved the dissolution measure, but retaliated by suspending Vizcarra from the presidency and swearing in his vice-President Mercedes Araoz as a replacement (Paredes and Encinas 2020). Araoz later desisted from this high-handed congressional maneuver and the presidency was kept in Vizcarra’s hands. While

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individual lawmakers legally challenged the constitutionality of Vizcarra’s dissolution of Congress, the dissolution was later given legal legitimacy by the Constitutional Tribunal (Tribunal Constitucional 2020). It is a telling manifestation of the enormous social disrepute of Peruvian electoral vehicles that a President without any congressional representation was able to politically defeat all of them in his battle against Congress. Devoid of public support, congressional political formations were revealed as paper tigers when a sitting President with popular credibility endeavored to systematically confront them. The Congress elected in January 2020 was the most amateurish in composition in the post-2001 era. Even to a greater degree than previous legislatures, the temporary 2020–2021 Congress was filled by newcomers and political neophytes, including at least two formations with antisystemic traits. One immediate consequence of the further decline of traditional parties was the entry into Congress of new leftist and rightist political formations inspired by crude anti-capitalism. Populist measures the new Congress passed included the suspension of tolls in roadbuilding contracts. The chamber also threatened to refund workers’ compensations to the state pay-as-you-go system, which would provoke its bankruptcy. It also wanted to impose price controls and freeze loan repayments, with dangerous consequences for economic stability. For the first time in the post-2001 era, economic populism seemed to be gaining ground amid an important state institution. As a response, the organized private sector felt the need to publicly call upon congressmen to pass legislation only after economic proposals were “carefully argued and after consideration of the technical basis that underpin them” (El Comercio 2020)—an unprecedented step over the past 30 years. The dramatic decline in the congressional presence and prowess of Fujimorismo resulting from the 2020 election, did not end interbranch conflict. A new iteration of the conflict occurred when a secret recording inside the presidential Palacio de Pizarro revealed that President Vizcarra had instructed officials to cover up a case of petty influence peddling. This was the so-called “Swing case,” whereby a personal friend of the President was favored in the granting of government contracts worth $50,000 from the Ministry of Culture. The politician who divulged the audios, Edgar Alarcon, was a UPP lawmaker who faced charges of illicit enrichment from his tenure as Comptroller General of the nation (El Pais 2020), and thus had a personal stake in Vizcarra’s ouster. The underlying cause of the executive-legislative standoff remained what it had been in the

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previous Congress: the chief executive’s attempt to pass anti-corruption laws, enact political reforms and overhaul the judicial system. No less than 65 lawmakers voted in favor of starting impeachment proceedings, motivated by the wish to abort Vizcarra’s impunity-ending reforms as well as animated by sheer opportunism. The newly elected 2020–2021 Congress sought, like the predecessor body of lawmakers, to remove a President of the Republic without adequate deliberation, an investigation into the alleged misdeeds, or any public debate at all. The motley coalition of electoral vehicles attempting to impeach Vizcarra included the Union por el Peru (UPP), the newly elected anti-systemic formation led by Antauro Humala, and perhaps more surprisingly, the establishment diminished party Accion Popular. The revelation that the president of Congress, Accion Popular’s Mario Merino, had contacted the high brass of the military to earn its support, derailed momentum in favor of impeachment. It revealed Merino’s maneuvering of congressional proceedings, including his decision to allow the dissemination of audios incriminating Vizcarra in the chamber, as self-interested in intent, because Vizcarra’s ouster would grant Merino the interim presidency. Only 35 lawmakers voted in favor of ousting Vizcarra, far from the 85 votes legally required. This new episode of brinkmanship affected both the public approval of Congress and that of the President, further contributing to the public disrepute of Peru’s wretched democratic institutions. High-level confrontations between the executive and the legislature continued under the presidency of Pedro Castillo. The Fujimorismo-led political opposition, after having failed to impugn the 2021 presidential election on false charges of electoral fraud, attempted to oust the Peru Libre government via the use and abuse of the vacancy procedure less than six months into the Castillo administration. It was the fifth time that Fujimorismo and its allies of convenience utilized the vacancy procedure to attempt to oust an incumbent President since 2016; by way of comparison, the procedure had only been used three times in the 1823 to 2000 period. This fifth vacancy motion was ushered in by lawmaker Patricia Chirinos (representing the outfit Avanza Pais ) with the support of Keiko Fujimori’s Fuerza Social and Rafael Lopez Aliaga’s Renovacion Popular, on grounds that the President of the Republic had named ministers with purported ties to terrorism, that the secretary of the presidency Bruno Pacheco had meddled in irregular military promotions, and that President had favored a private firm. In defending her actions, Chirinos also alleged as a motivation the government’s “rapprochement with anti-democratic regimes.” The evident lack

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of transparency in the behavior of the Peru Libre government—including the President’s clandestine meetings with unnamed political actors outside the presidential palace, which motivated the independent Contraloria (Office of the Comptroller General) to issue a formal report that implicitly called upon the President to align his practices with standards of transparency—played into the hands of an opposition that was willing to engage in constitutional hardball for short-term political gain. The congressional support needed to jumpstart the formal process of the vacancy procedure fell just short of the 52 votes needed (in the event, 46 votes were garnered). The congressional political opposition did not cease in its efforts to debilitate and hamstring the government by utilizing its institutional powers to the tilt. When Castillo signaled his intention to proceed with a popular referendum to pave the way for constitutional reforms, a promise of his electoral campaign, Congress responded by approving a new law (Law 31399) that restricted the ability of the executive branch to call forth a referendum on matters of constitutional changes without the approval of the legislative branch. Article 32.1 of the prevailing 1993 Constitution allows for the coexistence of representative and direct democracy, including the convocation to a popular referendum on the initiative of the executive branch. The new approved law modified articles 40 and 44 contained in Law 26300 (La Republica 2022), effectively limiting the Executive’s constitutional prerogative to call forth referenda. With this action, the congressional opposition to the new government was taking the political battle to new heights, modifying rules governing executive–legislative interactions and the prerogatives belonging to each branch. In turn, President Castillo promised to take matters to the high courts on grounds that the newly approved law was (purportedly) unconstitutional. Only six moths into the Castillo administration, there was little evidence to suggest that executive–legislative relations would become more functional going forward; au contraire, given the manifest political weakness of the chief executive, the possibility of another presidential ouster by means that strained the constitutional legal framework continued to cloud the political environment. During the post-2016 period, the central institution constitutionally tasked with monitoring and checking the potential misuse of executive power—i.e. the national legislature—emerged as one that repeatedly abused its prerogatives and threatened constitutional democracy. The frequent use of constitutional hardball tactics weakened the key institutions of an already feeble semi-presidential regime and normalized

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political behavior that made more likely future episodes of executive– legislative brinkmanship. The linkage between the decay of democratic governance and the trajectory of the Peruvian party universe is unmistakable. That is, the continuing decomposition of the party universe, the irruption of Presidents-without-a-party, and the advent of ever-more fragmented legislatures, together comprised an environment amenable to further political entropy: short-term and opportunistic behaviors become more accentuated, electoral vehicle discipline weaker still, selfreferential actions more common, and mistrust among political actors more pronounced. What structural factors underlie the new interbranch brinkmanship post 2016? Three causal factors are advanced here. First, the phenomenon of minority presidentialism has become more pronounced, derivative of an even more dealigned electorate and fragmented legislatures. In consequence, recent chief executives have been institutionally weaker than before, more vulnerable to the actions of legislative chambers where they wield little clout, and where the political opposition (correctly) perceives incumbents as politically feeble. Secondly, the increased politicization of corruption has raised the political stakes of all actors. The corruption phenomenon has publicly besmirched virtually all electoral vehicles, in good measure due to the manifold repercussions in Peru arising from the Brazilian giant Odebrecht bribing scheme scandal. Corruption has become a ready-made weapon that electoral vehicles across the political ecosystem wield to try to destroy political rivals, with visible repercussions upon (deteriorated) interbranch relations. Thirdly, breaking with democratic practices has become more common as a result of a Congress more amateurish and populist in composition. More transgressive behaviors have grown in tandem with the further decay of the party universe, such that both the traditional diminished parties as well as newer political formations evince democracy-eroding manners and behaviors. Let us delve into these three causal factors in order. While none of the first three post-2001 governments (Toledo, Garcia, and Humala) commanded a congressional majority, they did enjoy a plurality of seats (in the case of Garcia, only after the Humalista opposition became divided). Toledo governed by building a “centrist coalition” of sorts that included the Frente Independiente Moralizador; Garcia’s parliamentary coalition was variable, including “Union por el Peru, Unidad Nacional and Fujimorismo, depending on the issue-area at hand” (Tanaka and Vera 2008); similarly, Humala crafted a conditional alliance

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with Toledo’s outfit Peru Posible. Hence, these governments counted with an important underlying baseline of legislative clout that enabled them to negotiate with other congressional caucuses and build working majorities. Moreover, this baseline legislative position provided chief executives with something of a “legislative shield,” to use Perez Linan’s term (2007), against the congressional opposition—which was fractured and amenable to co-optation. By contrast, the legislative predicament facing Presidents Kuczysnki and Vizcarra was much more precarious. Kuczynski had a small contingent of PPK legislators, while Vizcarra chose not to field candidates for Congress in the special January 2020 elections, in line with his anti-corruption crusade political strategy, and in line also with his personal brand-building effort to project himself as a different kind of politician. President Castillo’s congressional caucus was comprised of only 37 lawmakers (out of a 130-seat Congress), and was weakened by the defection of 4 of them only five months into his presidency. What is more, the factionalism within Peru Libre along personalistic lines (vehicle founder Vladimir Cerron versus Pedro Castillo) meant that Castillo’s command over his electoral vehicle’s congressional caucus was tenuous at best. Given their feeble position in the legislature, their small (or inexistent) legislative shields, all three Peruvian chief executives were thus vulnerable to the predations and transgressive behavior of Congress. But this transgressive comportment needs explaining. One general facilitating condition for the materialization of a predatory legislature lies in the increasingly neophyte and particularistic-driven character of the chamber as compared to the decade of the 2000s. Since 2016, “the capacity of [electoral vehicle] leaders to control what happens within their organizations is minimal, opportunism is more prevalent, and ‘political parties’ that would be expected to behave in a manner more respectful of institutions have succumbed to populist practices” (Tanaka 2021). It is not surprising that, inasmuch as the political system has been filled up with increasing numbers of “adventurers, opportunists, pragmatists, defenders of personal interests and [particularistic] group interests,” it has displayed a lower commitment to unwritten democratic rules of the game, including forbearance. Congressional actors have simply used their constitutional powers to the limit and beyond to undermine chief executives when they saw an opening, showcasing growing opportunistic behavior unconstrained by norms. A second condition explaining the recent brinkmanship between the branches of government centers upon the centrality that corruption has

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acquired in the public arena. The impact of the Oderbrech scandal on Peruvian politics changed the parameters of interaction among electoral vehicles and between vehicles and voters. It also changed the nature of the interaction between electoral vehicles and democratic institutions. The public opinion fallout emanating from this high profile scandal raised the political stakes for all the players implicated in it—namely, all former living Presidents, their electoral outfits, and other prominent actors (Durand 2018). Congressional political formations abused their institutional prerogatives and leverage to shield themselves from corruption investigations and to forestall political and legal accountability, in a context in which 68 congressmen out of 130 faced criminal charges of various kinds (The Economist 2020a). Most prominently, both Fujimorismo and Aprismo incurred in impunity-seeking behavior via the abuse of their institutional power. They were not alone. Other congressional caucuses joined in this behavior as well. Ironically, Fujimorismo used the Oderbrech-related evidence of under-the-table payments made to Kucynski during his years as finance minister in Toledo’s government, to launch a vacancy attempt at the same time that Keiko Fujimori faced credible allegations of receiving illicit campaign contributions from Oderbrech—as confessed by the construction company’s Peru representative. Corruption, more highly punished by Peruvian voters than ever before, thus became increasingly weaponized, wielded by (corrupt) political actors as a weapon against opponents. Politicians and vehicles implicated in corruption have played political offense, seeking to destroy opponents, as the best defense against political and legal accountability that could bring their own demise. There is robust empirical evidence that, ceteris paribus, low party system institutionalization correlates with levels corruption across countries (unless over-institutionalization obtains, which weakens accountability and thus foments corruption). All in all, Peru’s electoral vehicles have been enablers and purveyors of corruption, rather than accountability institutions acting as checks on its metastasis. The available evidence show that most of Peru’s electoral vehicles have sought illicit campaign finance, while many have actively incorporated into their ranks individuals who provide autonomous (often obscure) sources of finance, as well as individuals hailing from illicit economies. The Peruvian “party”-voter universe is bereft of self-correcting capabilities. Severe party universe under-institutionalization is empirically found to impede accountability, because it undermines electoral coordination needed to punish corrupt party actors (Schleiter and Voznaya 2018). For this and

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other reasons that render successful corruption control an elusive task, we can expect ongoing corruption to continue to dissolve (or otherwise impede rebuilding) Peruvian citizens’ trust in their democratic institutions. A final causal factor undergirding the new interbranch brinkmanship centers upon the more amateurish composition of Congress and, in tandem with it, the decay of democratic behaviors, however tenuous and fragile these may have been in the past. The involution of the traditional (diminished) political parties (see Chapter 3), opened the door to Congress to more amateurs, and to less disciplined caucuses. The rise of amateur politics in Peru (Levitsky 2018, 351–52) became more pronounced in the aftermath of the 2016, 2020, and 2021 general elections, spawning greater levels of political mediocrity. Empirical evidence supports the notion that political experience has implications for the degree to which politicians respect democratic processes, reflected in amateur legislators’ weaker attitudinal foundations in their support of democracy and political parties (Mainwaring 2018, 85–90). Ceteris paribus, the rise of amateur politicians can be expected to lead to more erratic, opportunistic, short-term oriented, and error-filled executive– legislative relations. These problems, of course, also ensue from more amateurish chief executives, not just legislatures—with President Pedro Castillo as the epitome of political inexperience. Branches of government filled with amateurs “are more prone to make mistakes, squander political capital, fail to build or sustain coalitions, and respond poorly to crises” (Levitsky 2018, 352). All of the protagonist political figures of the recent “brinkmanship” period have incurred enormous mistakes of agency that have squandered their (precarious) political capital, including Keiko Fujimori, Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, Manuel Merino, Martin Vizcarra, Pedro Castillo, and others. Another correlate of amateur politics is reduced adherence to key informal institutions (unwritten rules of the political game followed by political actors) that enhance governability and democratic governance. Amateurs, by definition, are less likely to be socialized into norms that are necessary for functional democratic governance. Mutual toleration between political actors and forbearance in the use of institutional powers (Levitsky and Ziblatt 2018; Holland 2016), have noticeably declined in Peru since 2016 (Dargent 2020). It would be difficult to maintain that mutual toleration or forbearance rose to the level of informal institutions in Peru during the post-2001 period. The zeitgeist of the immediate post-Fujimorato years witnessed a

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concerted effort to restore democratic institutions during the Paniagua and Toledo presidencies (Levitt 2012, 75–90). Moreover, constitutionalism enjoyed a brief stint of prestige. President Paniagua “set the tone with a leadership style that emphasized transparency and adherence to democratic rules.... [while] for Toledo, opposing the practices of the Fujimori regime was his political ‘brand’, the signature issue on which he ran in 2000 and won in 2001” (Levitt 2012, 78). Many laudable institutional reforms were enacted during the transition away from the Fujimorato, but these have not been accompanied by supporting democratic norms shared across the body politic. With the benefit of hindsight, the incipient democratic norms did not congeal or diffuse. These norms were at best restricted to a small segment of the political class—what Steven Levitsky has called the coalicion Paniaguista of liberals and the moderate left, manifested in a series of ad hoc alliances concocted for the defense of democracy. Broadening the lens to take stock of the entire political ecosystem, observed (moderate) levels of mutual toleration and forbearance were the product of circumstance and historical juncture. As soon as the political environment changed, the non-democratic norms pervading (most) political actors surfaced. The advent of an enormous asymmetry of congressional clout was one such change in the political environment. Keiko-led Fujimorismo triggered a pernicious cycle of all-out political warfare and constitutional hardball when it utilized its enormous congressional clout as a political weapon to vacate education minister Saavedra and other ministers in the Kuczysnki cabinet, violating previously maintained sensible limits in the use of censure procedures. Other constitutional hardball tactics, that is, the use of institutional powers above and beyond the spirit of constitutional law, followed. They included the legally questionable dissolution of Congress effected by President Vizcarra. Congress attempted to appoint six unqualified judges to the Constitutional Court from a hastily assembled list, aiming in effect to buy impunity (given that a large proportion of lawmakers were under investigation for corruption). Vizcarra attempted to preempt this impunity-seeking maneuver by seeking a vote of no confidence in his government, because a denial of confidence would have allowed him to legally dissolve Congress. Lawmakers circumvented this vote and instead voted to appoint their preferred first judge. Vizcarra dubiously and self-interestedly interpreted this congressional action as the “no confidence” vote he was instigating. This resulted in the legally questionable dissolution of Congress and the election of January 2020 to

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elect a new interim Congress. In turn, the interim 2020–2021 Congress attempted to vacate Vizcarra two times, successfully (and unexpectedly) achieving its aim in the second attempt. This ouster of the President of the Republic was interpreted by several scholars and constitutional legal experts as an institutional coup or a soft coup, because Vizcarra was vacated in speedy fashion amid a violation of due process: there was no congressional investigation of the alleged corruption during his time as governor of Moquegua and it is dubious that the infraction comported with the “morally unfit” (incapacidad moral ) provision of the constitution that the impeachment sponsors utilized. During the impeachment process, “rather than debate the merits of the case against him, lawmakers denounced [Vizcarra’s] ethics and his handling of the Covid pandemic” (The Economist 2020b). Amid a more politically charged climate, involving higher political stakes of political survival and legal repercussions, actors have shown little tolerance toward their political opponents and have sought to use their institutional prerogatives to the tilt in order to annihilate their opponents and thus kill looming political reform initiatives threatening to their interests. With fewer stable informal political rules to guide political conduct, politics in Peru has inexorably become more unpredictable, incentivizing actors to abuse their institutional prerogatives in other to outwit opponents and ensure their political survival. The sword of Damocles hanging over many politicos affected by ongoing corruption investigations coupled with serious attempts at political reform, have accelerated political time. Lawmakers’ time horizons have shortened even more. The imperative to neutralize reform-minded executives greatly incentivized the deployment of “constitutional hardball.” Some changes in the formal rules of the game can contribute to the decay of democracy-supporting informal institutions. For example, the ill-advised electoral reform to prohibit the reelection of congressmen, enacted during President Vizcarra’s tenure, is one such example. It furthers the incentives for Peruvian congressmen to engage in short-term behaviors, including using congressional offices for corrupt purposes; it also disincentivizes the acquisition of knowledge and expertise necessary to carry out the democratic functions lawmaker are tasked with; finally, it precludes any serious investment on the part lawmakers in the institutional strengthening of Congress qua institution. A final consequence of a more open and penetrable Congress, given an almost perfect free-floating electorate, is the greater access to

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the chamber on the part of informal sectors. The 2020–21 and 2021– 2026 congressional sessions are more representative of Peruvian society at large than previous congressional sessions. In a country where the informal sector employs 70 percent of workers and accounts for a sizable part of the overall economy, enhanced democratic representation entails greater space for informal economy representatives. Individual lawmakers who do the bidding of, and speak for, informal sectors engage in “rational calculi typical of individuals [who operate in informal settings], and can even transgress the normative legal framework” (Melendez 2020, 5). The growing penetration of the informal economy into the halls and seats of Congress, then, means that the institution’s behavior is the result of lawmakers who are more short-term and individualist-oriented in their decision-making. A decomposing Congress ever less structured along partisan lines, the corruption associated with more penetrable electoral vehicles, and the politically autistic, self-serving behavior of neophyte lawmakers, have continued to further discredit the legislature in the eyes of the mass publics. In turn, this extremely high level of disrepute has generated an inordinately high level of tolerance among Peruvian citizens for “executive coups,” defined as the unconstitutional closure of Congress carried out by chief executives. In 2018/19, no less than 58 percent of Peruvians considered that the closing down of Congress was justifiable “during difficult times,” a figure that far outstrips levels of public support found in other Latin American countries (Ramirez and Zeichmeister 2019). This climate of opinion, known to political actors, a priori lowers the incentives for chief executives to cooperate or collude with Congress. Future presidents perceived to collude with Congress shall be punished in the court of public opinion, while those that seek to confront it and publicly malign it can accrue popularity derived from negative legitimacy, but shall be ensnared in renewed brinkmanship. The upshot is that the political environment has become more inimical for interbranch governability than at any time in the post-2001 democratic era. Going forward, significant political capital can be accrued by staking out a personal brand that embodies independence from Congress and is crafted in contraposition to the institution’s corrupt dynamics. Vizcarra astutely carved out and improvised precisely such a personal brand, harnessing prevailing public opinion winds. Yet, the imperative for political survival (and the defense of corporatist interests) enticed Congress to carry out a deeply unpopular institutional coup, precariously enlarging the existing state–society

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chasm. In sum, the recurrence of minority presidentialism is not the only serious structural obstacle standing in the way of executive–legislative governability. The more pronounced anti-Congress climate of public opinion furnishes political incentives that militate against workable relations between the branches of government. The upshot is that Peruvian chief executives (whose politically viability depends inordinately on public opinion) are caught between the need to project independence from (or opposition to) a discredited Congress, and the need to build a legislative shield that can protect them from being ousted.

5

Serial, Low-Intensity Populism in Peru

Political science posits that institutionalized political parties that encapsulate voters constitute the best antidote against personalist populism (Mainwaring and Scully 1995; Navia 2003). The advent of third wave democracy appeared to usher in a party-centered regime, but political parties proved incapable of channeling or structuring political preferences. Even in 1980, the heyday of political parties in Peru, personalism was prevalent. Since the collapse of the party system, personalistic attachments became the central feature of the country’s party-voter linkage profile (see Chapter 3). The space vacated by the generalized absence of political parties in Peru since 1990 has been filled by populists wielding personal brands as their chief selling point, their main appeals strategy. If we define a populist candidate, following Barr (2009), as a combination of outsider or maverick status (vis-à-vis the traditional parties), anti-establishment discourse, and a plebiscitarian form of linkage, the most prominent political figures of the past quarter of a century in Peru fit the label, either in full-fledged form or partial fashion: Alberto Fujimori, Luis Castaneda, Alejandro Toledo, Alan Garcia, Ollanta Humala, Julio Guzman, or Keiko Fujimori, among others (Madrid 2008; Loxton and Levitsky 2018). Virtually all Peruvian presidents since 1990 (Fujimori, Toledo, Garcia, Humala, Castillo) can be considered populist per the ideational variant of the concept (Barr 2003; Hawkins et al. 2018). Cas Mudde (2004, 543) has defined populism as “an ideology that considers society to be separated into two homogenous and antagonistic groups, ‘the pure people’, versus the ‘corrupt elite,’ and [an ideology that maintains] that politics should be an expression of the general will of the people.” Thus conceived, Peru’s partyless landscape has yielded serial populism, in that a plethora of electoral candidates repeatedly wield

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this “thin ideology” electoral cycle after electoral cycle. Elections have generally offered an abundant choice set of populist options comprised of candidate-centered electoral vehicles, including Fujimorismo. While non-populist independent leaders have also been common participants in electoral politics, including defectors from mainstream parties (such as Alfonso Barrantes or Alberto Andrade) as well as the prototypical “frontperson” independent who is supported by parties that are too discredited (such as Mario Vargas Llosa or Javier Perez de Cuellar) (Roberts 2006, 86–89), the “most electorally successful type of independent leader to emerge has been the populist outsider” (ibid, 88). In light of this track record, the electoral incentives for candidates to reinvent their personal brands are strong. Even political entrepreneurs who pertain to the establishment, such as Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, have sought to portray themselves as outsiders and made calculated use of an anti-establishment discourse for the consumption of some audiences, thus running (at least partially) as mavericks (“political parties stink” Kuczyinski famously uttered). The well-entrenched distrust of politicians and institutions writ large among Peruvian voters is manifested in the prevalence of negative partisanship and negative identifies, empirically found to be more widespread than positive identities (Cyr and Melendez 2017; Melendez 2019). This environment incentivizes newcomers as well as “establishment” politicians to avail themselves of the populist ideational toolbox in the quest to be electorally competitive. Programmatic-minded political parties, to the limited extent that they have sporadically emerged in Peru, have not been able to appeal to anything other than narrow sectors of society. Peru’s political landscape may be best conceived as a land of pervasive but low-intensity populism. The term low-intensity populism is utilized here as a variant of the populist phenomenon that stands in contraposition to what De la Torre (2007) has labeled “radical populism.” The radical version is characterized by a political rhetoric that “divides society into two antagonistic camps, promises forms of direct democracy... and centers its legitimacy in permanent elections” (De la Torre 2007, 25). Hawkins (2016, 244) conceives of radical populism as “an unusually intense and consistent populist discourse... with clear references to an evil elite and a highly bellicose, uncompromising stance...[and] little pluralism in [its] language.” Radical populists such as Chavez, Correa, or Morales displayed anti-imperialist, nationalists rhetoric and strategized so as to profoundly polarize societies, subvert democratic institutions,

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and amass a great amount of personalized power. In pursuit of those objectives, they engaged in a logic of populist permanent campaigning aimed to lend legitimacy to their actions, including the overhaul of the inherited institutional infrastructure. If we follow Hawkins’s or De la Torre’s conceptualization of the term, post-2000 Peru has been free of radical populism in the quest for high office—except for Ollanta Humala’s 2006 presidential campaign (Cameron 2009) and Pedro Castillo’s 2021 campaign (Munoz 2021). What is more, after the Fujimorato regime, Peru has been free of radical populism in the exercise of presidential power. Let us briefly delve into the incidence of populism conceived as a “thin ideology.” Empirical evaluations to gauge the incidence of populism across Latin America conducted by Hawkins and Castahno Silva (2016) show that Peruvian political formations score low on populism, measured via the content analysis of party manifestos and public speeches. This is true even for electoral vehicles conventionally labeled as populist, such as Fuerza Popular (Fujimorismo), or to a lesser extent, Humala’s Partido Nacionalista Peruano (PNP). Alan Garcia and the APRA of the post-2000 era is found to have a radically toned down populist rhetoric with respect to the past. On a 0 to 2 scale of lower to higher levels of populism, Fujimorismo scores 0.025, Humala’s PNP stands at 0.92, Castaneda’s Solidaridad Nacional scores 0.8, and Alejandro Toledo’s Peru Posible hardly registers on the populism thermometer, standing at 0.05. In comparison, radical populist parties in Latin America display scores of a higher order of magnitude: Bolivia’s Movimiento al Socialismo scores 1.5; Venezuela’s Partido Socialista Venezolano Unificado (PSVU) scores 1.72; and Ecuador’s Movimiento PAIS scores 1.42 (Hawkins and Silva 2016, Appendix A). While many Peruvian candidates and party leaders have paid some lip service to anti-establishment politics, these empirical findings give validation to the notion that Peru has not been beset by radical populism in the post-Fujimorato era. Peru’s democracy may thus be best conceived as a land of pervasive but low-intensity populism. We can broadly define low-intensity populism as a thin ideology that political entrepreneurs wield that includes, in constrained form and moderation, some anti-establishment rhetoric and appeals to “the people,” but is circumscribed to the campaign season, bearing no sizable practical consequences beyond the election. In other words, in this variant of populism, the mentioned ideas are utilized to access power, but are disavowed in the exercise of power, cast aside as a governing strategy. Low intensity populists are not change agents; they aim to win

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elections, but not to engage in institutional reengineering—unlike radical populists. They are, therefore, not anti-systemic actors. They work within the established institutional framework, and are ready to ally with, or work alongside, establishment parties and politicians. Low intensity populists also eschew the politics of permanent campaigning, whereby divisive rhetoric is used throughout an incumbent’s tenure in office (Conaghan and De la Torre 2008). In good part, the absence of radical populism in Peru is an outcome emanating from the prevailing incentive structure facing politicians in the Andean nation, new and old. Firstly, the need to appeal to at least sections of an enlarged Peruvian middle-class has hitherto limited the electoral value inherent to radical populism for officeseekers—as Ollanta Humala learned after his failed 2006 presidential bid (Cameron 2011). Secondly, Peruvian political entrepreneurs who avail themselves of the populist discourse find that their ability to mobilize citizens and count on their steady political loyalty outside of elections is extremely limited. The inability of Peruvian populists to galvanize fervent and lasting political support from the mass publics precludes the possibility of overhauling extant institutions, let alone the construction of an avowed “people-centered” regime. The same societal, institutional, and structural conditions that fragment power in Peru, constrain politicians’ authority and societal reach, limiting their de facto range of options when they arrive at the Casa de Pizarro presidential palace. Third, radical populism meets the opprobrium and determined opposition of the poderes facticos (mass media, the business community). The acquiescence of society’s de facto powerbrokers is needed to govern effectively. Incumbent presidents have strong incentives to avoid alienating political actors endowed with structural and instrumental power. Perhaps the most relevant test case to ascertain the unviability of radical populism in Peru will be the presidency of Pedro Castillo, who as a candidate most closely approximated radical populism on account of his peoplecentered rhetoric and campaign promises. Castillo gave “voice to a populist discourse that paints the heartless rich and the corrupt political class as enemies of the people and their interests,” and promised, in his own words, “to create a constitution that has the color, smell and flavor of the people” (Munoz, 2021, 57). Six months into his presidency, Castillo declared his intention to jumpstart the process to convoke a Constituent Assembly, but conservative forces in Congress acted quickly to curtail his constitutional prerogatives in this issue-area. The scant partisan and societal power resources Castillo wields are patently inadequate

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to enable his ambitions to re-engineer the institutional architecture. The strategic distancing from the strongman and founder of Peru Libre, Vladimir Cerron—evidenced in cabinet changes that purged Cerron’s associates—deepened the President’s political isolation and meant that Castillo could not ensure the future backing of the bulk of Peru Libre’s congressional caucus. Cerron and Castillo “pursued different objectives” (Toledo Orozco 2021, 79), rendering difficult the forging of basic agreements among them. In office, Castillo has not engaged in the permanent campaigning radical populists are known for; to the contrary, his public appearances have been scant, and his oratory largely muted. What is more, mounting evidence of presidential incompetence, deliberate opacity (shadow cabinets, meetings outside the presidential palace), and governmental instability and disarray helped to drive down his favorability ratings in rapid fashion. More generally, Peru’s negative legitimacy environment devoured Castillo’s fragile political capital in short order, conforming to the pattern observed in previous governmental administrations (Vizcarra’s brief presidency excepted). After a mere six months on the job, an IPE poll revealed presidential approval ratings stood at 28.9 percent, while 61.5 percent of Peruvians disapproved (La Republica 2022). The possibility that Castillo could emerge as a successful change agent, in the manner of radical populists, became vanishingly small—it was, of course, low to begin with. Indeed, in a context where the incumbent was barely able to muddle through from crisis to crisis in a continuous string of selfinflicted amateurish mistakes, the more pertinent question was whether the new President would be able to serve out the full constitutional term in office. Aware of the precariousness of his political survival prospects, Castillo overhauled his cabinet a third time in February 2022, concocting a [ideologically incongruous] fourth governing team of ministers “aimed at generating accords with opposition congressional caucuses” so as to defeat a future vacancy attempt (Tuesta 2022). Nonetheless, this new cabinet also contained ethically questionable appointments and lacked technical expertise, deficiencies which the political opposition seized upon to further delegitimize the government. The President’s increased political isolation, lamentable performance in office, and dwindling public approval (even among subaltern socioeconomic sectors that were his keystone social base), boded ill for the survival of the Peru Libre “accidental” government. The dominance of populism in Peruvian politics inevitably impoverishes the quality of political discourse and debate. It also debases

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politics as a profession, and political parties qua organizations, because the rhetoric that dominates campaigns perpetuates the (false) received wisdom among voters that professional politicians and political parties are inherently detrimental for representation, governance and public welfare. This feedback mechanism, amplified by much of the Peruvian press and mass media, fuels the perpetuation of low system legitimacy and a partyless landscape. Programmatic and ideological discourses are viewed with suspicion. Presidential candidate Jaime Guzman summarized this widespread notion in his 2016 campaign: “Peruvians do not want ideologies, they want results.” Guzman aimed to peddle the notion that his ideologically vacuous political formation was centered on the delivery of solutions to the nation’s problems, as proof that he was attuned to citizen demands, wearing his nonprogrammatic campaign and appeals strategy as a badge of honor (see: Guzman 2016). To the extent that his statement faithfully depicts the demand-side of Peruvian elections (voter preferences), it conditions the supply side inasmuch as it shapes actors’ incentive structure— inhibiting the emergence of programmatically-oriented candidates, political parties, and political debate. The disdain for programs or ideological stances has become the operative sentido comun (common sense) among Peruvian political entrepreneurs ever since Alberto Fujimori irrupted onto the political scene in 1989. After the collapse of the 1980s party system, Peru’s political, societal, and institutional environment has provided fertile soil for political populism. So have the failures of democratic governance post 2000. Against this backdrop, it is not altogether surprising that Fujimorismo attained significant and growing electoral clout throughout the 2000s and 2010s. This electoral vehicle’s political behavior in the post2001 era has worked at cross purposes with the deepening of Peruvian democracy. Its anti-institutional tendencies have remained in place from the 1990s, as can be ascertained by probing its trajectory. It did not accept the legitimacy of presidential election winners in 2011, 2016 or 2021, depriving Peruvian democracy of “loser’s consent.” From its absolute majority position in Congress during the 2016–2020 legislative term, it exercised its role of political opposition to presidents Kuczynski and Vizcarra (and later Pedro Castillo) in a demonstrably abusive manner, subverting the functioning of Congress and key democratic institutions. As Fujimorismo’s political power steadily grew—in social support and institutional clout, controlling over 50 percent of seats in Congress and

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wielding greater influence vis-a-vis the judiciary—its capacity to undermine the rule of law, foment political intolerance, and promote ungovernability, grew in tandem. The intolerance, venality, and narrow-mindedness that pervades Peruvian politics at large were all deepened in line with the larger political clout Fujimorismo came to wield. While the electoral growth of an electoral vehicle can contribute to structuring and rationalizing the party universe, however temporarily, the vehicle’s contribution to political order or democratic governance is contingent on its constitutive normative values (or those of the commanding leader), as well as the incentive system within which it operates. Party universes filled with electoral vehicles or political parties that do not accept the legitimacy of their opponents exhibit combative inter-party relations, and produce the highest levels of political instability (Norden 1998), as witnessed in recent years in Peru. The perpetuation of populist politics in Peru comports with theoretical predictions that populism thrives in partyless environments. The political impact of a negative legitimacy environment, coupled with the performance deficits stemming from Peru’s weak state, are among key factors that continue to create space for populists at every electoral cycle, perpetuating serial populism. Nonetheless, Peru’s “democracy without parties” provides an interesting addendum to the theory: personalistic politics need not translate into radical variants of populism. Populism has empirically been found to correlate with democratic backsliding outcomes in Latin America (Houle and Kenny 2018). But populists differ in the intensity of their appeals strategy and in their political intent. They also confront national political settings of varying structural and institutional characteristics, which delineates the relative political viability of radical populism. Peru has obviated radical populism in the post-2001 era not least because political entrepreneurs have few obvious incentives, and are bereft of the political resources, to attempt a power aggrandizement strategy akin to that of Chavez in Venezuela or Correa in Ecuador. Electorally successful populist figures in Peru are unable to amass sufficient and lasting political capital, or organizational prowess, to entertain concocting a new populist regime built upon newly created institutions. Peru’s structural conditions (growth of its middle class, socio-regional divides in voting preferences, the power of the private sector) disincentivize wielding a radical populist strategy, especially in the exercise of executive power.

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6 Imperiled Governability in State–Society Relations In Political Order in Changing Societies, Samuel Huntington (1968) famously undermined modernization theory by showing that economic progress is no guarantee of political development. When a polity’s level of social mobilization runs ahead of its political institutionalization, instability ensues, lowering the prospects of political regime sustainability. Political parties, when they are reasonably institutionalized and can channel interests adequately, foment and consolidate institutional forms of political behavior on the part of key political actors, and thus reduce the overall level of praetorianism in a polity. Institutionalized political parties “help control and contain conflict, directing it towards legislative and electoral channels” (Mainwaring and Scully 1995, 1996, 26). This is because societally rooted parties incentivize political and social actors to channel their disputes through peaceful means. An inevitable correlate of Peru partyless landscape has been the polity’s inability to channel and contain social conflict. Aggrieved social sectors cannot count on Peru’s self-referential, unrooted electoral vehicles to incorporate social demands. Therefore, such sectors have little alternative but to engage in highly visible praetorian actions so that governmental authorities in Lima take note of their grievances (Melendez 2012). The Peruvian partyless landscape accentuates collective action quandaries that foment and perpetuate group inequalities and societal frustration (Munoz et al. 2007). Low presidential popularity stems in no small measure from very low state infrastructural power, which condemns successive incumbent political formations to malperformance in office as regards the provision of many public services—particularly in the interior provinces where the Peruvian state does not project much authority and is particularly devoid of infrastructural power. Unmet popular expectations mean that chief executives become de facto lame-duck incumbents early into their constitutionally mandated terms in office. Since 1997 no Peruvian president has maintained a mass popularity level above 50 percent. While absolute state capacity improved in some dimensions during the economic bonanza of the resource super-cycle (2003–2013), the boom concurrently empowered non-state actors—such as narcos, racketeering organizations, or illegal miners—that successfully challenged the authority and territorial reach of the Peruvian state (Dargent et al. 2017), thus neutralizing greater state capacity, measured in relational terms (i.e., stateness). While

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there have been sporadic advances in the development of a Peruvian civil service, these have not been sustained through time (Cortazar Velarde et. al. 2014). Since 1990 Peru has been governed by the politics of antipolitics. The (mistaken) popular belief that professional politicians are so inimical for good governance that democracy is better served by individuals from outside the political system is widespread in the electorate. Peruvian governments (with the partial exception of Garcia’s 2006– 2011 stint in office) have been led by neophyte Presidents who have hired tecnicos to staff government cabinets and other high offices. No less than four presidents in the post-2001 era reached the presidential palace without any prior experience of holding elected public office (Alejandro Toledo, Ollanta Humala, Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, and Pedro Castillo). This has come at a high cost in several respects, not least from the viewpoint of governability. Successive government cabinets have generally been short of genuine and experienced politicos, or otherwise technopols, who combinate technical expertise with political know-how and acumen and can do the job of selling and explaining governmental initiatives (see: Domínguez 1997). The absence of experienced politicos within governing cabinets also affects the ability of governments to fend off criticism from the opposition or civil society, undermining its popularity and authority. The Toledo, Humala, and Kuczynski administrations illustrate the cost of governing with cabinets comprised of a surplus of tecnicos and a concomitant deficit of experienced politicians who can mediate between state and society to enhance governability. (The Castillo administration exhibits personnel deficits on both counts). So-called escuderos (shield-men), experienced in the rough-and-tumble, unsavory aspects of politics constitute critical agents who can skillfully protect chief executives from (fair and unfair) opposition criticism, while politicos practiced in political communication are essential to explain and sell government initiatives and achievements. Escuderos are even more essential in executing “damage control” to cover for governmental failures and tame discontent. The general absence of such figures within Peruvian electoral vehicles accelerates the rapid erosion of governmental approval and political capital. The Toledo, Humala, Kucyznski and Castillo administrations were seriously hobbled by the absence of party cadres in government, let alone cadres comprised of seasoned escuderos and politicians. Let us use the Pedro Pablo Kuczynski government (2016–2018) as a case study to illustrate the vulnerabilities afflicting governments lacking

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experienced politicians. When the Fujimorista opposition in Congress, aiming to delegitimize the PPK government, made several spurious accusations against key cabinet ministers, the government proved unable to fend off such accusations, in good part for lack of seasoned politicos in the government. Nor did the politically inexperienced PPK government devise any political strategy to emerge victorious in this battle. This crucial episode damaged President Kuczynski’s approval ratings very early in his tenure. Bereft of adequate partisan defense mechanisms or a robust legislative shield, the road was paved for the censure and ouster of some of his principal ministers. The fact that most Peruvian presidents have been political neophytes has predictably hampered their ability to maintain public support, with attendant implications on governability. The politically neophyte status of chief executives (Alan Garcia excepted) has been manifested in many ways, but two stand out: their inattention and/or inability to forge political alliances outside of the legislature; and secondly, their inadequate management of governmental communication vis-à-vis citizens. The first problem results in executives that become increasingly isolated politically, while the second problem results in a citizenry that is at a loss to make sense of the government’s overarching vision and policy priorities—offering at best a fragmentary and unintelligible picture of their tenure, let alone their raison d’etre. The underutilization and/or misuse of mass media and social networks to communicate with citizens badly hobbled even a neophyte politician who enjoyed a very favorably predisposed mass media environment, namely President Pedro Pablo Kuczysnki (Acevedo 2017). There is another well-known avenue through which the partyless landscape has affected governability: an inability to preempt, alleviate, or channel social protest. A visible feature of the Peruvian sociopolitical landscape in the twenty-first century is the pervasiveness of large-scale protests of natural resource extraction projects throughout the country (Arce 2010). New mining technological conditions increase multinational companies’ need for water, energy, land, and landscape, particularly in the case of extractive mega-projects. In Peru, both urban and rural populations have been affected by mining MNC’s demands for greater access to these resources. Protest activity against the large scale mining projects of Tambogrande, Bagua, Yanacocha, Tia Maria, and many others have captured national headlines and revealed the structural incapacity of the political system either to preempt such repeated episodes of social contestation or to bring about their satisfactory resolution (Paredes 2016; Arce

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2010). A standard tenet of political theory holds that political competition is a primary source of government responsiveness (Key 1966; Binzer Hobolt and Klemmensen 2008). Amid a climate of high political competition, politicians are presumed to have incentives to enact policies that reduce protest activity, in a quest not to damage their popularity at election time. Peru showcases a great level of political competition: the political system has relatively low barriers to entry, and the domain of competition is very large in a context of exceedingly low partisanship. However, political competition has clearly not translated into political responsiveness. The country’s lack of socially rooted political parties and the fragmentation of the party universe have precluded the operation of this causal mechanism. The connection between public preferences and public policy is virtually undetectable in Peru. The preferences of Peruvians most affected by the activities of extractive industries—whose material wealth-creation they hardly benefit from—are not prominent in electoral vehicles programmatic platforms and, to the extent that ideas are articulated in “party” manifestos and campaigns, ignored when election winners take office. Peruvian electoral vehicles also bereft of organic links to the social movements advocating a new investment regime (Melendez 2012)—one that better reflects the demands of local communities in extractive areas. The subnational governmental level also evinces a high level of political competition but mirrors the entrenched problems that hobble political mediation at the national level: evanescent, feckless electoral vehicles and electoral movements without societal moorings and very high fragmentation (Cotler et al. 2009). Thus, protest movements surrounding MNC activity do not find useful and workable channels of articulation at the subnational level either. Peru’s “coalitions of independents” at both the national and subnational level have very limited capacity to demobilize praetorian activity by way of channeling social sector grievances toward democratic institutions. Rather, these vehicles have sought to craft ad hoc patchwork solutions only once the political visibility of confrontation damages the image of incumbents. What is more, the social uprootedness of political outfits at the regional and national levels undermines the durability of such ad hoc “solutions.” Electoral vehicles in office have also lacked experienced political operatives who can mediate between warring factions in the numerous social conflicts engulfing the Peruvian territory. Incumbent governments repeatedly mishandle legitimate social protests, and often opt to try to

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delegitimize them in public opinion. If such events have not destabilized or ousted sitting governments more often it is largely because social protests remain localized and atomized, unable to aggregate and scale up demands and grievances. This reflects, of course, an atomized civil society landscape, a structural feature that has contributed to the political survival of otherwise politically feeble governments. Moreover, the consolidation of the so-called “Lima Consensus”—the Peruvian elite’s consensus on the proclaimed virtues of neoliberalism— has paved the way for the welcoming of foreign direct investment with few strings attached (Crabtree and Durand 2017, chap. 4). President Alan Garcia famously criticized protestors of mining activities, arguing that such citizens presumably do not wish to enjoy the material fruits of economic progress and that, by opposing and blocking Foreign Direct Investment, protestors prevent other Peruvians from prospering materially (Lopez 2013). While his comments came under intense criticism in some quarters, Garcia was effectively summing up the national elites’s dominant economic worldview. Research also shows that countries with weak institutions, including inchoate political parties, display greater recourse to protest activity as an instrument to seek to influence public policy (Machado et al. 2011). Peru certainly conforms to this broad crosscountry pattern: its partyless landscape foments the incidence of violent protest, while the capacity of electoral vehicles in office to preempt praetorian behaviors, or contribute to social peace once such protests erupt, is minimal and short-lived at best. Bereft of an institutionalized and socially rooted political party at their service, chief executives are devoid of key instruments (organizational power in the legislature, experienced party cadre mediators, organized social constituents) to address and quell social unrest.

7

Democratic Consolidation? Avoiding Democratic Breakdown by Default

Peru has not come close to exhibiting the traits of a consolidated democracy—defined broadly as one where the main political actors accept and play by the rules of democracy such that democratic practices become the “only game in town.” Yet, democracy at the national level has not been under threat since the fall of Alberto Fujimori. Wherever party systems have crumbled in Third Wave Latin America (Morgan 2011), democracy

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has either perished via a thousand blows or decayed. Peru was a trailblazer in that it was the first country where party system collapse was followed by a post-Cold War brand of electoral authoritarianism (Carrion 2006). Some years later, the crumbling of party systems in Venezuela, Ecuador, and Bolivia also spawned electoral authoritarian regimes. What the four examples showcase is that institutionalized political parties and party systems are important not only for the quality of democracy, but also constitute an essential bulwark against democratic breakdown in the first place. That is, political parties are important for the viability of democracy as a regime type. The empirical record in contemporary Latin America gives this assertion much sustenance. While this association is yet to be rigorously theorized in the field of political science, the literature is not silent on it. The partisan representation of societal interest groups of central importance can preempt anti-democratic behaviors. Gibson (1996) shows that conservative parties can protect the economic elite interests by providing institutionalized partisan channels of influence, thus reducing the incentives of such elites to “kick the chessboard” (i.e., conspire against democratic governance) when its material interests are threatened. Working classes can also have a destabilizing effect on democracy in the absence of labor-mobilizing political parties, so the existence and institutionalization of such parties can make democracy more stable or viable as well (Collier and Collier 2002). In short, if the party system provides effective representation to central societal groups and key political actors such that they become stakeholders in the democratic system, they have less incentives to support praetorian actions; democracies that incorporate the key systemic actors face much better odds of survival into the future. In addition, political parties matter for democratic survival not only because they help channel the demands and rein in the social constituencies they represent, but also because they endow liberal institutions of horizontal accountability with more clout and render them less vulnerable to capture or co-optation by the executive branch (Mainwaring and Welna 2003). Peruvian electoral vehicles, given their uprootedness and ephemeral nature, cannot offer key political actors or social collectivities any means of reliable representation of their interests. In sum, a polity devoid of institutionalized political parties, according to standard political science theory, is more prone to praetorian behaviors and democratic breakdown. One key reason why partyless democracies can be more vulnerable to democratic backsliding is that the partisan opposition is weak,

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fragmented, and socially uprooted. The opposition is thus unable to adequately fulfill its check-and-balance function vis-à-vis incumbents bent on power-accretion. Yet, a democracy without parties also entails governments that are organizationally weak and uprooted, not unlike its party opponents. Therefore, significant asymmetries of institutional and organizational clout between the government and the opposition cannot be expected to obtain. In Peru, feeble and isolated executives—bereft of robust political parties, nationwide rootedness, organized societal allies, or lasting public support—are hampered in their organizational capacity to take advantage of a weak and fragmented partisan opposition. Chief executives prove unable to amplify their political power, whether in formal or informal ways. The polarization and heated campaign rhetoric of electoral campaigns, or the exclusive focus on the traits of individual political entrepreneurs (personal brands), can lead to the erroneous inference that some candidates pose a mortal danger for democracy. Such a focus can hide the invariant structural and institutional factors that work against power-accretion in Peru and other party non-systems, leading to faulty political analysis. One prominent example of such misguided analysis occurred when many Peruvian commentators and intellectuals regarded the irruption of outsider Ollanta Humala as a threat to democracy— particularly in his 2006 version, but also in his more moderate 2011 iteration. Much of the Peruvian press (dominated by right-wing outlets) portrayed both Humala’s candidacy and future presidency in alarmist tones, highlighting its presumed dire consequences for democratic governance. Yet, Humala’s presidency (2011–2016) posed no such threat. His tenure in office proved to be a “non-event” that was predictable by making use of standard political science analytical tools. Humala lacked governing experience, commanded an outfit that was a personalist vehicle without organic societal allies, was hobbled by a minority presence in the legislature, and faced a hostile business community and mass media establishment which distrusted the new chief executive’s intentions and set out to closely scrutinize the government. Former President Toledo was beset by the same absence of partisan and congressional power resources, as was Alan Garcia—to a lesser degree. Pedro Pablo Kuczysnki did not lack governmental experience, and certainly did not face opposition from business, but much like his predecessors in the presidency he lacked a socially rooted party as well as the parliamentary strength to accrue substantial political power. Kuczysnki incarnated yet another iteration of

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politically feeble chief executives in a land without political parties. Similarly, Pedro Castillo’s prospective presidency was cast by its opponents and much of the media in alarmist tones as a mortal danger to democracy. But Castillo and his vehicle Peru Libre proved to be, predictably enough, “paper tigers,” lacking the organizational wherewithal, internal coherence, or scope of popular support needed to enact the candidate’s campaign promises, let alone engineer a presidential takeover. All in all, the risk outsiders have posed for Peruvian democracy has been one of ungovernability, not democratic breakdown. Personalistic and socially uprooted electoral vehicles have militated against power-concentration and attendant democratic erosion. So has the negative legitimacy environment wherein Peruvian politics and state-society relations play out, not least because incumbents lose popularity and political capital in rapid fashion. In sum, Peru has escaped the electoral authoritarian fate of its Andean neighbors by default. Its wretched democracy has certainly not been saved by the standard institutional checks and balances, civil society, or political culture elements that can protect against democratic erosion. Arguably, the political actors that pose the greatest potential obstacle to a government with hegemonic inclinations are not found in Congress, in electoral vehicles, or in other (weak) institutions of horizontal accountability. Rather, these actors are found among the country’s core poderes facticos: the mass media, the Lima elite, and the organized business community. Unfortunately, this triumvirate of de facto powers has hardly shown a commitment to democratic principles, except intermittently and opportunistically to oppose candidates and governments deemed to pose a risk to their material interests and preferred economic agenda. The upshot is clear: a future right-wing party or candidate that does not threaten the economic status quo would stand a much better chance at building an electoral authoritarian regime than a leftist one. It follows that Fujimorismo constituted a graver danger to Peruvian democracy in the post-2001 period than any other party rival. This inference stems not simply from the party’s illiberal value system, but crucially from the fact that it counted with an array of functional (if not overt) allies among key power brokers. The Lima elite and business community, satisfied with Fujimorismo’s economic orientation, could not be counted on to exercise a reliable accountability function, as they demonstrated throughout the 2010s. In fact, in the 2011 presidential elections, the support of the poderes facticos for Fujimorismo became all too clear when faced with the prospect of a Humala administration that was deemed capable

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of deviating from the reigning neoliberal model. Nor could political formations such as Alianza Popular Revolucionaria Americana (APRA), showcasing a recent past of inter-party alliances with Fujimorismo for mutual benefit, be relied upon to defend democratic governance. Rather, the real opposition to a Fujimorista administration would have emerged from the streets, in the form of the widespread anti-Fujimorista negative partisanship that congealed in the 2010s (Cyr and Melendez 2017). Fujimorismo’s lower electoral prowess and its further disrepute in the court of public opinion has seemingly foreclosed this threat. It is not coincidental that amid an environment devoid of bona fide parties, the one electoral vehicle that could have posed a greater danger to democracy is that which enjoys (some) loyal voters and was once theorized to be a candidate for partisan institutionalization (Levitsky 2018, 347–48). This on account of the fact that partisan institutionalization can be leveraged as a power resource for authoritarian purposes, given Fujimorimo’s illiberalism. Peru is bereft of a second important trait that acts as a bulwark against the erosion of democracy: a democratic political culture. In a book-length study, Levitt (2012) maintains that the post-Fujimorato years have seen “a dramatic recovery of the rule of law among Peru’s political class,” underpinning the institutional taming of elected Presidents as Congress regained its constitutional role. In this account, the presumed reappearance of norms of constitutionalism—politicians’ adherence to the constitutional rules of the game—explains the return of democratic checks and balances made possible by the narrowing of the gap between the formal rules and the de facto rules of the game. Yet, it is highly unlikely that Peru’s elite political culture or norms—the key theorized culprit behind the return of a healthy balance of power between the executive and the legislature—would significantly change from liberal (the 1980s) to illiberal (in the 1990s), and then again back to liberal norms during the post-2001 era. Studies of political culture and elite norms of conduct largely show that when they change, the transformation is slow. Peruvian political culture at the elite and mass publics level remains essentially illiberal. A plethora of public opinion data (LAPOP 2012, 2020b) documents this illiberal political culture. An obvious first cause underlying Peru’s political culture is that the country has not enjoyed protracted periods of democratic governance conducive to democratic habituation (i.e. political socialization into democratic norms). Its longest-lasting democratic period prior to the current one (2001–) was a mere twelve years (1980–1992), and did little to foment attitudinal

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convergence towards democratic values among elites or citizens. The democratic regime’s legitimacy of performance during the 1980s was famously abysmal, souring the subjective evaluations of citizens about their regime and democratic institutions. Nor have input sources of regime legitimacy compensated for output malperformance. Quite to the contrary, they have deepened the democracy legitimation problem. Political elites’ defense of democratic values in Peru is strategic and circumstantial. A plethora of evidence garnered from the everyday behavior and public statements of politicians (and other relevant actors) can be brought to bear to back up this assessment, as Eduardo Dargent (2009) expounds in his monograph Democratas Precarios. Dargent shows that Peruvian economic and political elites opportunistically defend democratic ideas, values, and institutions when they are in the opposition, only to unceremoniously ignore them when they hold the reins of government. Peruvian politicians across the political spectrum are revealed to be precarious democrats indeed, whose support for democratic norms and the rule of law is not substantive, but rather strategic. There is little evidence to document visible change in elite-level political values during the post-Fujimorato. Strikingly few of Peru’s politicians have been willing to pay a personal, political or partisan cost in the defense of democratic values, a reliable metric of commitment to democracy. Politicians imbued with republican values in the mold of Valentin Paniagua, the caretaker President of the Republic who piloted the return to democratic rule after the fall of Fujimorismo, are a rara avis amidst the Peruvian political fauna. The nondemocratic values and instrumental ‘democrats’ that pervade political society are, in part, derivative of a self-selection process. Ceteris paribus, Peru’s casino-type electoral politics militates against the emergence of a more democratic value system: the very rapid turnover of seats in parliament, the preponderance of political neophytes/outsiders, the short shelf life of electoral vehicles and brief nature of viable political careers, or the prevailing incentives to use a (low-intensity) populist playbook, the opening of spaces for the representation of illegal interest groups, all conspire against the emergence or development of a professional political class imbued with liberal democratic values. The documented increasing penetration of unlawful interest groups, such as illegal mining or narcotrafficking, into electoral vehicles via their financing prowess, further debases this attitudinal landscape of illiberal norms. Even those (few) politicians who have survived for quite a long time as players in the political scene, a priori better

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potential candidates for political socialization into democratic values by dint of experience with democratic rule, shine in the cynical, intermittent, and opportunistic defense of such values. A few prominent examples shall suffice here to illustrate this reality. Current President Pedro Pablo Kuczynski (2016–2021), a self-styled standard bearer of democracy in his 2016 battle against Fujimorismo, publicly backed Keiko Fujimori against Humala in the 2011 elections—in effect prioritizing the defense of neoliberalism to the defense of democracy. Alejandro Toledo, the outsider who led the battle against Alberto Fujimori in its waning months in the name of democracy (when Fujimorismo was politically wounded), was the same politician who in the mid-1990s ran for office promising to “build the second floor of Fujimorismo” during that movement’s heyday. Alan Garcia has frequently aligned his political formation with Fujimorismo for instrumental purposes—even if the “Fujiaprismo” alliance has largely been covert. Once ensconced in the presidential office for a second time (2006–2011), he did not hide his desire to remain in power beyond his constitutionally mandated term. As Peruvian sociologist Sinesio Lopez wrote, alluding to an interview President Alan Garcia granted to El Comercio newspaper: Everything indicates, in pectore, that Garcia desires that route [of reelection], like Uribe did in Colombia, and he would pursue that route if he had in his hands the conditions that make it possible: a majority of seats in Congress to allow him to reform the Constitution and a high level of public approval. I do not think he lacks political will… what is missing is the amalgam of conditions that make [re-election] viable. (Lopez 2013, 115)

If establishment politicians and technopols are not imbued with democratic values and rules, it is hardly surprising that Peruvian democracy writ large fails the democratic values test. Electoral campaign periods have been particularly revealing of democratically unprincipled behavior on the part of politicians, economic elites, and a good number of important mass media outlets. In any case, the relative composition of the party universe is relevant for the adherence to democratic norms: undemocratic behaviors are likely to be more frequent and grave to the extent that neophytes, outsiders, and populist political entrepreneurs increasingly gain access to democratic institutions. Peru has been trending in this direction, with

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visible repercussions on political stability and democratic governance—as detailed above in the section on executive–legislative relations. Nonetheless, Peru has so far this century been spared the phenomenon of autocratization via executive takeover. In an ironic twist of fate unanticipated by Latin Americanists, among all of the potential gravediggers of democracy in Latin America in the early twenty-first century, it was democratically elected presidents that became the most dangerous threat. Leaders such as Hugo Chavez, Evo Morales, Daniel Ortega, or Rafael Correa or Orlando Hernandez used the window of opportunity provided by an exceedingly feeble partisan opposition to demolish the independence of check-and-balance institutions and tilt political playing fields in their favor, in the process killing democracy via a thousand blows. These leaders astutely translated temporary windows of social hegemony (popularity) into institutional hegemony, ushering in competitive authoritarian regimes (Weyland 2013; Levitsky and Loxton 2013; Marti i Puig and Serra 2020; Sanchez-Sibony 2018, 2021). Alberto Fujimori provided a usable template that was followed (consciously or not) by Latin America’s twenty-first-century authoritarian leaders. Peru shares with Venezuela, Bolivia, Nicaragua, Honduras, or Ecuador a very feeble party landscape and weak democratic institutions in general, crucial bulwarks against democratic erosion. Peru is thus bereft of two essential gatekeepers against democratic breakdown: first, a political culture marked by democratic values; and secondly, institutional strength—that is, robust democratic institutions that can act as effective checks and balances against executive aggrandizement. Ceteris paribus, these traits render Peru a good candidate for democratic backsliding, and even a relapse into competitive authoritarianism. Nonetheless, the post-2001 Peruvian polity has not moved along the path to renewed competitive authoritarianism. This political evolution stands in contrast to the aforementioned cases of democratic breakdown via a thousand blows; it also stands in contraposition with other polities evidencing presidentially-engineered democratic backsliding despite comparatively stronger institutions and more robust civil societies—such as Argentina or Colombia. Argentina under the Kirschners’ political hegemony (2003–2015) saw the independence of the judiciary undermined and the mass media assaulted and tilted in a pro-incumbent direction (Peruzzotti 2017). Colombia under Alvaro Uribe provides a second example of a country with comparatively strong formal democratic institutions that also witnessed executive aggrandizement (Garcia Villegas and Rebolledo 2009). Incumbents sized upon

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opportunities to expand their de facto powers in a context of exceedingly feeble and fragmented political oppositions in both countries. Another, complementary explanation for Peru’s avoidance of the creeping national-level authoritarianism seen in the Andean region, centers on the acute de facto fragmentation of power that characterizes the country at every level—national, regional, and local. Alberto Fujimori’s decentralization reforms (McNulty 2011), coupled with the atomization of social actors, yielded this inauspicious landscape. Aggregating power and projecting authority vertically (across administrative levels) and horizontally (across territory) constitutes an exceedingly difficult— indeed, so far elusive—enterprise in Peru. National chief executives’ de facto authority—Toledo, Garcia, Humala, or PPK—does not extend to the provinces or to lower levels of public administration. Nor do they command the power to mobilize the masses or exert any control of the “street,” in Lima or elsewhere, for lack of organizational prowess and sufficient external appeal. No Peruvian president since 2001 has enjoyed a resounding electoral mandate or been able to amass while in office public opinion ratings high enough to enable, or even contemplate, the enactment of power-accretion maneuvers. The territorial division of political preferences between Lima and the coast, on the one hand, (dominated by conservative electorate defense of the status quo) and the “interior” on the other hand (showcasing a preference for candidates who advocate upending the status quo), has arguably grown deeper, not least because of the uneven patterns of economic development widened during the economic growth phase. These geography-based political cleavages militate against the emergence of a leader endowed with nationwide popularity. Political science research shows that as societies become middle-class in socioeconomic terms, they tend to gravitate toward more conservative political stances, toward a defense of the political and economic status quo, because middle class citizens have considerable material gains to defend. As Peru developed a sizable middle class, the appeal of a transformative political project found more societal resistance. (That is the lesson Ollanta Humala learned in 2006, and the reason for the changes in his appeals strategy during the 2011 elections). Presidents in Peru thus face important structural constraints on their power that can only be marginally loosened via astute political agency. President Martin Vizcarra provides a clear example: lacking an electoral

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vehicle of his own, he built personalist-based political capital by spearheading a reformist, anti-corruption drive attuned to public sentiment. However, bereft of organizational sources of power (i.e., an institutionalized party with a strong presence in Congress), he fell victim to the opportunistic maneuverings of part of the political opposition. While Peruvian democracy has survived in the post-2001 period, it has suffered a deterioration in quality the post-2017 period. Some of the new challenges confronting Peruvian democracy have emerged as an endogenous outcome emanating from its partyless condition. As a polity burdened by a deepened negative legitimacy environment and not articulated or structured by mediating institutions Peru’s careening toward political entropy does not come as a surprise. The challenges that Peruvian democracy shall face during the 2020s are significant. These include the deleterious socioeconomic consequences emanating from the COVID 19 pandemic, lower economic growth in the post-commodity boom period, the increased appeal of political populism amid higher levels of poverty and economic exclusion, and the greater disarticulation between the executive and the legislature. Because the Peruvian polity faces these challenges armed with weaker and less legitimate democratic institutions and more degraded democratic norms, the medium term portends ill for democratic stability.

8

Conclusion

This chapter has evaluated some of the central theoretical tenets surrounding the centrality of political parties for democratic representation, governability, accountability, avoidance of populism, and democratic consolidation in one case study. The empirical perusal of Peru’s “democracy without parties” during the 2001–2021 period yields an unambiguous conclusion: basic functions of democracy go unfulfilled in the absence of bona fide political parties. Enacted economic policies and (barely recognizable) social policies have elided the representation of public preferences. Economic policy has followed a steady neoliberal course, divorced from public demands of state-delivered public goods across a range of services, including social expenditure, as shown by public opinion polling. The fatal contribution electoral vehicles make to the absence of structured programmatic politics and to enormous collective action quandaries preclude the translation of public preferences to enacted public policy. What is more, the feebleness of electoral

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vehicles, both organizationally and politically, amplifies the influence of the well-organized business community in policymaking realms, to the extent that some scholars deem the state to be captured by business. Vertical accountability is largely absent in Peruvian democracy, best manifested by the repeated betrayals of mandate on the part of successive presidential administrations. This, of course, is true only to the limited extent that program-based mandates can be said to underpin Peruvian electoral logics. The weakness and uprootedness of electoral vehicles confer upon them enormous autonomy vis-à-vis voters after elections, which enhances the danger that they pursue courses of action that negate their campaign promises. These empirical realities comport with party politics theory. As concerns horizontal accountability, the Peruvian Congress exercises little of it, in the traditional sense of scrutinizing the actions and legislation sponsored by the executive branch. The fecklessness, financial precariousness, and low institutionalization of political formations facilitate the capture of congressional commissions by vested interests, particularly organized business. For some of the same reasons, illicit rackets (including illegal miners and narcos), or particularistic interest groups (such as for-profit university conglomerates that deepen extant educational deficits), also find an opening to influence legislative output. Interestingly enough, the obstructionism, interrupted presidencies, or legislative–executive gridlock expected to occur in a context of structurally disarticulated inter-branch relations, and minority Presidents, did not obtain with the regularity predicted by standard theory—up to 2016. The ductile and corruptible character of many electoral vehicles has allowed incumbents to co-opt or curry favor with enough legislators or “party” caucuses so as to survive, while the fragmentation of the legislative chamber has often prevented collective action by political oppositions. The political precariousness of incumbents has been matched by the organizational and political weakness of institutional political oppositions. However, the 2016–2022 period has witnessed interbranch constitutional brinkmanship and interrupted presidencies, dramatically demonstrating that the previous absence of high-level conflict was not a stable, self-sustaining equilibrium. As the party universe decomposed further, minority Presidents have found themselves in ever-more institutionally precarious situations in terms of support in Congress. Legislative political formations have also been much more confrontational, and executive–legislative relations have acquired the hues of open warfare. This is due to a confluence of factors: the reality and

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perception of institutional feebleness besetting sitting Presidents incentivizes opponents to play for (short term) advantage; the irruption of new electoral vehicles bereft of democratic normative values, contributing to a decay of some key informal institutions, however feeble. Crucially, the politicization of corruption raised the stakes of the political game for all actors, spawning a frantic race to buy impunity via constitutional hardball. Populism conceived of as a “thin ideology,” flourishes in Peru, in line with what theory predicts for a polity without programmatic and institutionalized parties. Instead, the country displays serial low-intensity populism. It has avoided the radical populism in the exercise of power observed among some of its Andean neighbors in the first two decades of the twentieth century (Carrion 2022). The structural impediments that would-be radical populists face in Peru, both politically and electorally, are daunting. These include an enlarged middle class disinclined to countenance populist experiments as well as the emergence of an empowered private sector armed with formidable structural power resources. There is a second factor that keeps radical populism in the exercise of power at bay. Peru’s negative legitimacy environment renders radical populism as a political strategy, by definition based on “numbers” rather than economic or coercive power resources, rather unviable. This is because popular support for populists that reach the Casa de Pizarro is just as contingent, precarious, and ephemeral as it is for non-populists. The persistence of ideational populism, however, impoverishes the quality of public debate and militates against the emergence of more programmatic representation based on high-quality voter-party linkages. Governability is imperiled because Peruvian political formations are unable to channel societal demands and grievances, such that the latter do not find a voice in the executive branch, in legislative activity, or in day-to-day party opposition behavior. Every Peruvian government has engaged in ineffective “damage control” measures or resorted to delegitimizing and repressing social protests, while the party non-system could not preempt praetorian political activity or channel it toward democratic institutions. Again, these empirical realities comport with standard theoretical predictions in the field of comparative politics. In the context of pluralistic politics, institutionalized political parties facilitate the viability and longevity of democracy. Peru has been able to avoid the scourge of competitive authoritarianism in the twentyfirst century thus far, as well as incumbent-driven democratic backsliding. However, the survival of democracy in Peru is an outcome that in good

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measure obtains by default, due to the absence of facilitating conditions for power-accretion. Chief executives are not ushered into power with large electoral mandates, lack majorities in the legislature, and are also burdened with low and rapidly declining public approval numbers while in office, as can be expected amid a negative legitimacy environment. An electorate of floating voters lacking partisan attachments constitutes a relevant factor underpinning de facto executive constraints—though other structural factors are certainly very relevant as well. It is not coincidental that no post-2001 chief executive has attempted to embark upon a power-accretion political adventure (nor attempted to reform the Constitution). Nevertheless, robust foundations for self-sustaining democratic governance elude Peru—i.e. a democratic political culture, strong checkand-balance institutions, an organized civil society sphere, etc. Should an incumbent in the future aim to engineer democratic erosion, several favorable circumstances would have to obtain for the quest to be successful; moreover, that would-be authoritarian government would have to be closely aligned with the country’s poderes facticos. The prospect of a business-friendly government leveraging an epochal political crisis to usher in electoral authoritarianism cannot be ruled out. In conclusion, the past two decades of Peruvian “democracy without parties” provide relevant empirical evidence corroborating the theoretical credo that political parties are essential for the health of a democracy. Party non-systems produce dysfunctional governance. They impede the representation of public preferences, thick vertical (electoral) or horizontal accountability, workable executive–legislative relations, or a functional state–society rapport.

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CHAPTER 7

Conclusion

Party-based politics has been eroding across Latin America. There are strong theoretical and empirical reasons to believe that it is a trend that shall continue unabated. The dysfunctionality inherent to contemporary Peruvian politics thereby offers a glimpse of what the future portends for more and more democracies across the region. Collapses of party systems in Latin America have been episodes of enormous consequences perhaps not fully appreciated by scholars in regard to their long-term legacies. These collapses have bequeathed partyless political landscapes with little or no party-building in their wake, and in most cases, facilitated the breakdown of democracy. The case of Peru is significant because it was the first such collapse episode in the region. It thus affords comparativists the lengthiest timeframe to assess the legaciesy of party system-wide breakdowns. Peru has lacked a party system since the proto-system extant in the 1980s perished. The country evinces an archetypal party nonsystem by virtue of its persistently high level of extra-systemic electoral volatility and the absence of systemic political parties that structure political society. Only during part of the 2010s was one political formation deemed by some scholars to be potentially, on the road toward partisan institutionalization; however, its leader, Keiko Fujimori, succumbed to the tentation of behavioral personalism and its attendant ills, foreclosing any outcome other than that which has befallen all Peruvian electoral vehicles. Fujimorismo’s growing societal disrepute, poor electoral results, © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 O. Sanchez-Sibony, Democracy without Parties in Peru, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-87579-4_7

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the ongoing judicial problems of its two leaders, and diminished institutional power with which to ensure impunity, paint a very cloudy future for this political formation. Peru appears headed towards a party nonsystem par excellence as it enters the 2020s, burdened with extremely high levels of extra-systemic volatility underpinned by an electorate almost fully comprised of floating voters. Peru evinces political parties only in the very minimalist Sartorian sense of entities that field candidates for office but are generally not institutionalized along any of the standard dimensions used by political scientists. Only small variations (which became smaller with the passage of time) were found across Peruvian electoral vehicles along the dimensions perused in Chapter 4, namely, roots in society, autonomy from individual leaders, and coherence (internal-value infusion). For the past three decades, the political universe has been populated by amateur politicians and the dominance of personalism as the main party–voter linkage form. Political entrepreneurs have not displayed party-building ambitions, rather, very short-term horizons and personalist motivations shape their decision-making. When establishment politicians and political entrepreneurs alike partake in nonparty norms and behavioral personalism, political entropy ensues. The concept of personal brands wielded in this book is one with much more political and electoral relevance in Peru than that of (generally inexistent) party brands. Given the scarcity of information electoral vehicles provide, part of the enormously complex political environment Peruvian citizens inhabit, personal brands provide ready-made informational shortcuts that simplify the political world and voting decisions. Beyond the programmatic vacuity of electoral supply, the personalist-centered mass media framing of politics, as well as the anti-party socialization legacy of the Fujimorato are factors that have primed voters to conceptualize politics in a person-centered fashion. Personal brands have here been theorized as comprising ascriptive traits, socializing experiences, and personality aspects. These brands act as representational devices, such that voters can infer a great deal of political content from the personal traits of candidates: which regions of the country will be prioritized? Or what social classes will be represented? Or what national problems will receive the most attention and what degree of personal competency can be expected in tackling them? Some candidates are perceived to embody change and others continuity, as gauged from their ascriptive traits and personal biographies. Personality brands, the third component of personal brands, provide voters cues about candidates’ leadership

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qualities, teamwork abilities, and much more. We have theorized that personal brands are even more brittle than party brands, and prone to dilution. Personal participation in corruption, incumbency, and informational incongruencies that gainsay the constructed image of a politician, constitute factors that damage or destroy a personal brand, thereby obliterating the prospects of personalistic electoral vehicles bereft of other sources of political support. Because personal brands are more prone to dilution than party brands, we should expect personalism in the electorate to be a factor that accelerates political time and contributes to political entropy. The Peruvian political track record here perused provides empirical support for these deductions. Post-2016, time compression, entropy, and uncertainty have accelerated even further, in tandem with greater levels of dealignment in the electorate. The structural conditions within which electoral vehicles in Peru operate render party-building success a very difficult, almost elusive, task. The legacy of the economically disastrous 1980s coupled with the anti-partisan logic and political culture bred by the Fujimorato (1990– 2000), yielded a very pernicious environment for the building of parties both in terms of cultivating party brands, or developing durable linkages with society, for there are few usable mobilizing structures in what is a vast informal and atomized social landscape. Moreover, electoral success has not provided a launching pad for the future institutionalization of winning electoral vehicles. Au contraire, incumbency militates against party institutionalization, largely because the combination of severe state infrastructural weakness and ruling electoral vehicles’s weakness renders effective governance elusive. Given the presence of powerful structural elements inhibiting party-building, Peru shall exhibit a “post-Fujimorista society” for the foreseable future, to rescue Julio Cotler’s expression; that is, a political society without parties and without partisans, a political order marked by electoral competition without institutionalization. This book has endeavored to show that electoral vehicles’s organizational and electoral decay also stem from their conditions of origin. Diminished subtypes of political parties contain the seeds of their own destruction on account of their initial scarcity of robust sources of cohesion, organizational heft to streamline and rationalize decision-making, societal linkages to provide a cushion against bad performance, or institutionalized conflict resolution rules and statutes, among other fatal constitutive traits. It stands to reason that the more electoral vehicles approximate the category of Independents (lacking both horizontal coordination and vertical

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aggregation capabilities), the more powerful we can expect endogenous sources of decay to be. The empirical chapter on the inter-temporal trajectory of Peru’s traditional “parties” and newer electoral vehicles shows an unmistakable common pattern toward institutional involution and political entropy. Political scientists should expect the “genetic origin” of an electoral vehicle to be of utmost importance for its future evolution, especially if its genetic makeup situates it at the low end of institutionalization. Nonetheless, even political parties worthy of the label, originally endowed with more favorable constituent traits (and party-building ambitions), can easily fall prey to caudillismo, non-institutionalized factionalism, circumvention or violation of internal rules, irreparable ruptures and splits, and electoral decay, as evidenced in the trajectory of the Peruvian Frente Amplio. In sum, our empirical inter-temporal examination of Peruvian electoral vehicles evinces the powerful role of endogenous factors in shaping politico-institutional decay. We have here advanced the concept of “negative legitimacy environments,” that is, political settings comprised of supermajorities of floating voters, pervasive negative political identities, and a generic citizen preference for newcomers and political outsiders. What sustains these types of electorates are deeply rooted citizen antipolitical attitudes. The origins of these attitudinal microfoundations need to be researched in depth. We briefly hypothesize here that they can be traced to top-down socialization experiences and recurrent political malperformance. A more distal factor accounting for negative legitimacy political ecosystems may be found in inordinately low levels of social capital or interpersonal trust. Determining what set of factors generate very widespread antipartisan and nonpartisanship sentiments constitutes a field of research that is still underdeveloped, but one that shall move forward given its increasing real-world prominence and impact on the health of democracies. The three aforementioned traits constitutive of negative legitimacy environments, as defined here, work together to generate pernicious political dynamics on several levels. First, they contribute to political uncertainty. In settings where political loyalties are scarce and instrumental political relationships dominate, unanticipated changes in popular support, abrupt endings to political careers, drastic changes in the makeup of electoral supply, partisan divisions and splits, or unforeseen political “alliances” and breakups, comprise the everyday, “bread and butter” features of democratic politics. The political uncertainty that pervades democracies inserted in such environments is simply greater,

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less bounded. No single political actor or politician can escape this environmental uncertainty; all political actors face powerful incentives to adjust to an ever-changing ecosystem in instrumental fashion, unbounded by loyalty ties. Relations between the branches of government become more unstable and unpredictable, erstwhile political allies become enemies and vice-versa, and individual politicians are incentivized to jump ship from electoral vehicle to electoral vehicle when the political ground is constantly moving under them. Citizens’s low (transactional) loyalty vis-a-vis politicians and electoral vehicles necessarily translates into more volatile relations between politicians and electoral vehicles, and among politicians. Peru’s self-sustaining negative legitimacy environment reinforces the nonparty norms that the Alberto Fujimori authoritarian regime planted in the political ecosystem throughout the decade of the 1990s. A second repercussion stemming from negative legitimacy environments is a reduction in the de facto tenure of democratically elected incumbents, that is, the timespan of usable political capital deriving from their legitimacy of origin and constitutional mandate. Incumbents are deprived of the operative time horizon and political werewithal necessary to be successful in office, in no small part because they owe their victory to an inordinate number of “borrowed votes” (i.e. strategic in origin) as opposed to sincere votes. Incumbents are thus burdened by an “original sin”: a scarcity of genuine political capital. Dependence on negative legitimacy renders political support short-lived, bound to diminish once the instrumental transaction that generated an electoral victory has been completed (i.e. preventing the election of an alternative candidate). Newly elected governments in these environments are granted little political leeway by voters, such that their public approval is much more vulnerable than that which obtains in countries where governments are not reliant on negative legitimacy as the lion’s share of political capital. Incumbents saddled with low popularity are hampered in their ability to find allies in political society or in society at large, turning incumbency into a political curse that obliterates the prospects of future electoral success, let alone enhanced social rootedness in the post-presidency period. A third pernicious consequence emanating from negative legitimacy environments is the compression of political time. The acceleration of political life is, of course, a phenomenon that obtains worldwide due to technological and sociological factors that are global in nature. However,

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negative legitimacy environments add a powerful source of time acceleration, one that is endogenous to the political game. Insofar as negative legitimacy is a highly perishable commodity, it compresses political time. Evanescent political capital translates into brief political honeymoons for newcomers as well as short political careers. Negative legitimacy, the key political currency (i.e. form of political capital) in Peru—and increasingly in Latin America writ large—is almost by definition short-lived. Virtually all politicians and newcomers in Peru are burdened with negative identities, that is, they face levels of public rejection that supersede their levels of approval–often by wide margins. Free agents accrue negative legitimacy either because they are new to politics or because they represent the “lesser evil” or otherwise they stand in opposition to a despised or feared referent or symbol in public perceptions. Political actors condemned to transacting in this political currency, the main one available amid Peru’s antipolitical attitudinal environment, are politically hobbled in their ability to buy time or to fruitfully exercise power during the timeframe legally granted by the constitution. The absence of lasting political capital, in turn, contributes to the inability to be politically effective, namely, to understand and navigate the political environment, to influence others, to acquire power, and to achieve political objectives. It obviously hampers the ability to deliver results as regards issue-areas that require time, not least second generation reforms that impinge upon a broader array of stakeholders. Endemic malperformance reinforces the collective disrepute of the political arena among mass publics. The very political language and rhetoric pervading negative legitimacy environments—reliant on the disparagement of public affairs, politicians, and political activity writ large—deepens the disrepute of the profession of politics and its players. While this perilous political ecosystem has afflicted Peru for thirty years, it is increasingly in evidence throughout Latin America. The consequences are apparent on multiple fronts besides time compression. From the standpoint of representative democracy, if actors define themselves largely in negative terms, the informational deficiencies plaguing the elite-citizen relationship are accentuated, and ceteris paribus, programmatic-based politics is further diluted. Electoral contests in such environments are robbed of much substance. What is more, elections’ vaunted conflict resolution capabilities are diminished as well as temporally shortened. This book has also sought to shed light on the electoral dynamics that obtain in partyless environments. It has underscored the importance

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of considering effective electoral supply, personal brands, contingency, and iterated rounds of strategic voting calculus, as key factors to understand final electoral outcomes in a democracy without parties. Only by placing these factors centerstage can we fully grasp why electoral predictions offered by pundits and scholars have been repeatedly proved wrong, for the dynamics here outlined do not lend themselves to predictions, “informed” or otherwise. Amid a changing effective electoral supply and a floating electorate devoid of partisan affiliation, analysts run the risk of falling prey to retrospective determinism once electoral results are known. When short-term causal variables, including strategic voting, are of paramount importance in shaping the vote, the final election outcome is one that relatively few voters may have favoured when the campaign began. In a negative legitimacy environment evincing an enormously large domain of competition, observers and analysts should expect the unexpected. Additionally, these dynamics also give the lie to attempts to place Peru as part of a Latin American regional trend based on national electoral outcomes (whether the Left-wing pink tide of the 2000s, the subsequent “right turn,” or the more recent “lefist resurgence” in Latin America). This amounts to an artificial and misguided exercise. Outcomes in Peru do not reflect primarily a programmatic message or mandate, for this party–voter linkage type is exceedingly weak and unstructured by political party institutions. The highly contingent nature of electoral outcomes renders any post-facto categorization of Peru’s political leanings—Peru “going Right” or “going Left”—misleading if those labels imply programmatic social choices. If those assessments and labels are used to refer to prospective policy orientation, they can also obfuscate (i.e. oversimplify) the political picture. Candidate-centered electoral vehicles are not programmatically oriented, and when nominally programfocused, they are hardly reliable as a predictor of the nature of policies to come–as Chapter 6 shows. Moreover, Peru’s insubstantial electoral vehicles do not carry enough political clout, nor managerial/technocratic prowess, to steer the ship of state toward a desired direction. Burdened with acute political weakness, electoral vehicles that ascend to high office are consumed by day-to-day political firefighting and survival; they lack sufficient political capital to reorient public policy in a substantive manner. In comparative terms, Peru’s party universe most closely resembles its counterpart in Guatemala. The experience of this Central American country shows elections to have been almost irrelevant exercises as an instrument of social choice (Sanchez-Sibony 2016, 2022). Regardless

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of the identity of the winning electoral vehicle, the country’s policy contours remain unchanged, and the clout of the de facto powers (chiefly, organized private business) unaltered. The political democratic game is demonstrably impotent to modify or shape societal power structures. The Peruvian case is rather similar. Both countries also showcase that party non-systems have self-perpetuating dynamics, such that the predicament of a “democracy without parties” can indeed constitute a self-sustaining political equilibrium through time. In addition, both Guatemala and Peru illustrate the fatal impact of party non-systems on the quality of democracy. While an institutionalized party system is hardly a sufficient condition for a robust democracy, the absence of bona fide political parties (capable of vertical integration and horizontal collective action), endowed with inter-temporal stability, inevitably damages the quality of democratic governance, for parties’ putative functions cannot truly be substituted for by other institutions. Societal representation, thick vertical and horizontal accountability, or mediation between state and society are sorely lacking and there is little evidence that any of these important features of high-quality democratic governance has been strengthened over the past two decades. The operative structural disarticulation between the executive and the legislature in Peru, facilitated by a disjointed party universe and the internal incoherence of electoral vehicles, began to produce serious problems for democratic stability in the post-2016 period, enhancing political uncertainty. Throughout the entire post-2001 democratic period, Congress has signally failed to fulfill its institutional check-and-balance role as well as its democratic function qua deliberative organ. The opportunistic, self-serving manner in which electoral vehicles with parliamentary representation behave has deepened their social disrepute, as well as that of the legislature qua institution, in mutually destructive ways. In addition, it has dangerously heightened social approval for executive takeovers (to the extent that Peru stands as a regional outlier in this respect), dramatically evidenced by public opinion poll data. This poses a real threat in that it charts one viable avenue via which democracy could die again in the foreseeable future: a self-coup carried out by a popular incumbent. The literature on party-building has broadly shown that institutional reforms can make, at best, a modest contribution to forging institutionalized parties, but cannot create robust political parties anew from the ashes of a barren party landscape. There are rules that certifiably contribute to party non-building—for example electoral systems

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that foster personalistic party–voter linkages–which democracies are best advised to eschew. However, rule-creation is often flawed and unstable. The lesson that the Peruvian case reinforces is that the creation and reform of legislation with a bearing on political parties are not frequently crafted with best-practice frameworks in mind; rather, they are the endogenous result of the structure and component units of the party universe itself. It is parties that create electoral systems, such that the nature of rule-writers has implications for the crafting and design of rules: in Peru, this means short-sighted electoral vehicles moved by shortterm calculations, populist inpetuses to cater to public sentiment, and little regard for sources of expertise. The ever-changing quality of Peru’s party universe makes for rule-making processes bound to produce policycycling. In a democracy without parties, such reforms are rarely influenced by a considered deliberation of the state of knowledge surrounding the relationship between electoral laws and party system institutionalization. For example, the latest important electoral reform in Peru, which precludes the reelection of parliamentarians, can be deemed populist and anti-party in nature. It can be read as a concession to popular negative sentiment toward parliamentarians; it shall certifiably contribute to the continued amateur makeup of Congress, as well as the absence of elite investments in political careers or investments in the legislature and its governing rules. In sum, Peru’s party non-system landscape helps perpetuate the marked feebleness of the nation’s institutional infrastructure because it promotes amateurish, evidence-free, and populist reforms as well as reform-cycling. The political instability inherent to party nonsystems and the negative legitimacy environments undergirding them, perpetuates institutional weakness writ large. Perhaps in no other political setting can the prospects of reform-induced institutional strengthening (including party-building) be considered to be so dismally low. With the decay of Fujimorismo and the death of Alan Garcia, some analysts have heralded the end of a cycle and the beginning of a new era of party system renovation. This book should throw some cold water on this notion. Renovation there will be on a superficial level—new electoral vehicles and newcomers will populate the landscape—but there is little to suggest that the pernicious dynamics undergirding Peruvian democracy will be renovated. The political troubles of APRA and Fujimorismo (alongside the PPC and AP) emanate from some of the endogenous deinstitutionalization forces and broader environmental conditions detailed in this book. The diminished electoral clout of these electoral vehicles

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also enlarge the size of the floating electorate and thus the domain of competition, granting entry into the party non-system to greater numbers of free agents and more acutely amateurish free agents than in the recent past. The 2020 and 2021 parliamentary elections provided clear evidence in this direction. The anti-systemic behavior of Fujimorismo proved dangerous for Peruvian democracy, because it deepened prevailing illiberal norms, subverted institutions, and fomented interbranch conflict. Keiko Fujimori’s “coup-in-slow motion” attempt after she narrowly lost the 2021 presidential election continued this trendline of anti-systemic behavior, debasing extant democracy-supporting informal institutions. The marked reduction in the power of this electoral vehicle with respect to the past, must thus be welcomed by democrats. However, at least some within the group of voters Fujimorismo attracted can be presumed to migrate to other populist formations with similar anti-systemic leanings. Again, the 2020 and 2021 parliamentary elections provided some evidence to this effect. Peru’s wretched democracy may be salvaged only by default, in line with the past two decades: the heightened fragmentation of the political scene shall prevent any one electoral vehicle or political entrepreneur from accumulating institutional power sufficient to erode democracy, and so will the evanescent nature of popularity inherent to Peru’s negative legitimacy environment, which voraciously consumes political capital. Yet, the end of the commodity boom, coupled with the medium-term economic effects of the COVID pandemic, shall continue to diminish the size of the Peruvian middle class, increase socioeconomic inequalities, and expand the mass of voters who reject the economic policy regime and democratic institutions. In the current and foreseeable politico-economic context, it is reasonable to expect that the domain of competition will continue to be enormous, and the related fortunes of radical populist offerings may well expand, alongside affective political polarization. Studying the case of Peru yields lessons for what future democratic politics shall look like across much of Latin America. There are both empirical and theoretical reasons to think that Peru stands as a harbinger of operative political dynamics in the region. It is a future in which democracy shall be less structured by political parties and become, instead, person-centered; it is also a landscape wherein, ceteris paribus, democratic governance will be in greater peril. Theoretically, given the high political capital, amenable incentive structures, and the long-time horizons necessary for building state infrastructural

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power, democracies without parties (and those with a family resemblance) shall yield precious little state-building. If the trends and operating forces delineated in Chapter 1 continue across time and space, as here theorized, conditions amenable for building capable states will keep worsening. Therefore, we can expect states and governments to continue to malperform with respect to the delivery of essential public goods (security, shared economic prosperity, public services), accentuating distrust toward political parties and democratic institutions. The logic of entropy, the short-termism inherent to accelerating political cycles, enhanced personalistic elite-citizen linkage profiles, negative legitimacy environments, and other such self-perpetuating dynamics, all suggest that we can expect scant party-building political agency going forward—and even fewer successful party-building outcomes. Those political systems that become further delegitimized because of political and economic malperformance will generate more pronounced negative legitimacy environments, which render party-building and state-building more elusive. In broad terms, what heralds the continued deinstitutionalization of party systems across Latin America is the reality that structure and (human) agency are, at this historical juncture in the region, vectors working in the same destructive direction: weakening extant political parties (diminished or not) and spawning personalist electoral vehicles (Independents). Structure and agency are mutually reinforcing each other, whereby purposeful agency reinforces and compounds highly adverse structural conditions for the institutionalization of political parties, and the structural landscape becomes ever more inimical for partybased political behavior, in turn promoting institutional and behavioral personalism. Political entrepreneurs find the cost of party-building too onerous, and person-centered strategies attractive, given the incentives offered by prevailing national structural conditions: namely, party-averse and distrustful citizenries, negative legitimacy environments, an informational ecosystem that accelerates political time, a technological era that offers ready-made party substitutes, or chronically weak state infrastructural power that renders programmatic party brand building difficult, to name some structural elements inimical for party-based politics. Similarly, human agency on the part of political entrepreneurs entrenches and deepens party-averse structural factors. Notably, Independents are more prone to deliberately bypass party-building, and to socialize citizens (or subjects amid electoral authoritarian regimes), as well as current

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and future politicians, into nonparty norms. They also contribute to institutional decay and thus regime malperformance, eroding institutional and party-based politics at large. Theoretical considerations aside, the empirical record unambiguously shows that political parties qua institutions and qua vote-gathering entities continue to decay across the region while personalism takes center stage across more polities. Over the past three decades, Latin American national trajectories exhibiting continuous party system institutionalization are rare. By contrast, cases of rapid or slower system-wide deinstitutionalization are common, while polities exhibiting severely under-institutionalized party universes are trapped in a vortex of self-perpetuating logics, for reasons outlined in this book. Political outsiders and independent mavericks continue to make inroads all over the subcontinent, even amid polities once thought to possess consolidated or institutionalized party systems. On current trends, partyless or party-scarce polities comprised of free agents, political outsiders, and mavericks operating amid large domains of electoral competition, will become the regional norm. There are powerful empirical and theoretical motives to believe that the general tendency toward partylessness will proceed unabated–albeit at a different speed in each nation. If so, the operating dynamics described in this book, already discernable across several national units, shall increasingly inform the electoral and political workings of more and more Latin American countries. Incumbency shall become a political curse, the pace of political time shall accelerate, collective action problems will grow in dimension, political uncertainty shall be all-encompassing, governmental performance shall languish or worsen and, in the mass attitudinal sphere, negative legitimacy environments shall become entrenched, a cause and effect of the foregoing factors. The quality and viability of democratic governance will suffer as a result.