Vibrant parties are those that “retain intense attachment among activists” (p. 6) even in between electoral cycles. Fernando Rosenblatt argues that four factors—Purpose (P), Trauma (T), channels of Ambition (A), and moderate Exit barriers (E)—explain party vibrancy. He applies this framework to 12 important parties in three consolidated democracies in Latin America: Chile, Costa Rica, and Uruguay. The empirical evidence consists of 221 in-depth interviews with leaders of those parties (conducted between 2010 and 2013, when no electoral contests took place) and secondary sources on each party’s historical evolution.
The PTAE framework draws on Albert Hirschman’s exit-voice-loyalty analysis of organizations. Purpose is the capacity of the party to unite leaders and members around a project, program, or worldview, thus producing “prospective loyalty.” Purpose may not last over extended periods, because the need to adapt to changing contexts and shocks often makes parties abandon their ideologies. Trauma refers to a shared experience of suffering by the founding members of the party, typically because of civil war (Costa Rica) or government repression (Chile and Uruguay). It produces “retrospective loyalty,” although, like Purpose, it tends to erode over time as the traumatic events become distant memories.
Emotional loyalty may provide the initial basis for vibrancy, but eventually more rational-materialistic incentives are needed. Channels of Ambition mean that the party satisfies the career goals of its activists and leaders, which is reflected in reasonable levels of intraparty elite renewal. Barriers to Exit exert a curvilinear effect on vibrancy: if they are too low or too high, the party will suffer many defections as soon as it faces problems or oligarchic ossification, respectively; if they are moderate, vibrancy will be bolstered because “exits” will be uncommon but will still function as an effective alert mechanism.
The first part of the book poses the research questions, lays out the PTAE theory (plus rival hypotheses), and describes the qualitative research design. The second part dedicates a chapter to each country, with sections on their political parties; a fourth chapter synthesizes the findings of the country and party case studies. The third part consists of the concluding chapter, which summarizes the overall findings; briefly explores their possible applications to Venezuela’s AD, Brazil’s PT, and a few parties beyond the region; elaborates on the remaining research challenges; and reflects on the complex relationship between party vibrancy and democratic consolidation.
The book’s empirical evidence is probably its main strength. The author conducted more than 70 long interviews in each country with all types of politicians, from former presidents to young activists. This rich source of primary data, with a focus on recent years, is well complemented by materials from secondary sources on the more distant past. The descriptive side of this evidence offers conclusions about some of Latin America’s most iconic parties that are far from obvious. The pinochetist UDI is the only party that obtains PTAE (capital letters indicate the presence of a causal condition; lowercase letters its absence) and is therefore the most vibrant party in the sample (although the author questions whether the assassination of its founding leader Jaime Guzmán by leftist guerrillas can be equated to civil war or repression). Interestingly, UDI’s coalitional partner RN appears at the opposite extreme, along with Costa Rica’s PUSC—both obtain ptae. All the main Uruguayan parties are vibrant, whereas none of the Costa Rican or Chilean parties are (with the exceptions of the PLN and UDI, respectively). The modal configuration is ptAE, in three cases: the Uruguayan PC and PN, and Costa Rica’s PLN. These and other rich characterizations are important contributions to the study of parties in Latin America.
The book, however, suffers from significant shortcoming in terms of causal inference. The methodological sections emphasize, in line with much recent literature on qualitative methods, “conjunctural causation.” The four explanatory variables, as well as vibrancy, are dichotomized. This implies 16 possible configurations, but the 12 parties analyzed provide information about just 8 of them (several parties obtain the same causal configuration). The author, for example, states, “PtaE is not sufficient for party vibrancy” (p. 218); however, none of the parties analyzed falls in that particular configuration. How then do we know his assertion is correct?
Causal inferences in this context are problematic. Here is an example: E is found to be the only condition present in all cases of vibrancy, but the study does not observe any parties in several configurations containing E; for example, the theoretically interesting PtAE. Moreover, concluding that “the presence of only one of the factors has proven insufficient for vibrant organizational survival” (p. 198) is unwarranted, because the most critical configuration in this respect (ptaE) is empty of cases. Consequently, there is no way of knowing whether E is either a necessary or a sufficient cause.
There is, then, a contradiction between the emphasis on conjunctural causality and the failure to discuss—and draw the correct implications from—the eight “empty” configurations. Likewise, there is a contradiction between the alleged strengths of qualitative methods in measuring concepts in a more precise, nuanced, and context-sensitive way (than typical quantitative indicators) and the actual operationalization, which measures clearly continuous underlying variables through dichotomous indicators. The country chapters do treat vibrancy as continuous, identifying parties as, for example, highly vibrant (UDI), “still vibrant but significantly less so” (p. 169, referring to Uruguay’s PC and PN), or not vibrant (e.g., the PSCh or RN). The systematic empirical analysis in chapter 2, however, just classifies parties as vibrant or not. Moreover, this dichotomization is based on the proportion of interviewees who responded positively to three questions about vibrancy. Respondents, however, often disagreed: the PN, for example, is considered vibrant by 8 of 13 party leaders interviewed (61.5%). Differential levels of agreement (e.g., 100% of UDI respondents considered it vibrant) could have been used to produce a more nuanced and precise measure of vibrancy. The measurement of P, T, A, and E also consists of dichotomous indicators imposed on (unobserved) traits and (observed) levels of agreement that are in fact continuous, to the extreme that RN is considered not to have channels of Ambition even though 50% of interviewees said it does (Table 3.2).
Including two simple tables would have made data analysis significantly more transparent and rigorous. Merging tables 3.1 and 3.2 would allow the reader to easily see under what causal configuration vibrancy occurs (or better, what level of vibrancy occurs). A second, new table would have the 16 possible causal configurations in the rows, and the parties fitting each of them in two columns (for vibrant and nonvibrant cases). The absence of these tables or of similar analytical devices in the text attests to the book’s imbalance between its rich array of primary and secondary data and its limited effort at data analysis. An important consequence of this limitation is that, despite the stress on conjunctural causation, the empirical analysis often suggests that vibrancy is additively bolstered by the presence of more conditions, rather than interactively produced by the conjunction of all (or a given subset of) conditions.
Party Vibrancy and Democracy in Latin America leaves the reader with the feeling that more could have been done to exploit the wealth of empirical evidence produced and systematized by the author. In spite of this, the book’s descriptive findings and plausible explanatory claims regarding P, T, A, E and vibrancy will be of interest to those working on the related areas of party (or party system) institutionalization, survival, collapse, and adaptability.
