Doctoral Dissertation Research in Political Science: The Breakdown of Governing Parties in Latin America

如果政党是由寻求连任的理性政客组成的，为什么政党有时会崩溃？最近，拉丁美洲的许多老牌政党都经历了崩溃，这里的定义是选举失败，政党领导人和活动人士叛逃。这些损失威胁到各方作为组织的生存。有证据表明，目前的理论不能充分解释政党解体的规模或差异。这项提案简要分析了现有的解释，并提出了一个分析政党崩溃的替代框架，该框架侧重于公众对政策和其他政府行动的需求、政党面临的竞争环境，以及党内个别领导人和活动家的选择。基于这一框架，对拉美政党解体提出了三种具体解释：裙带主义、意识形态不妥协和权力下放。为了验证这些解释，该提案概述了一项为期12个月的研究，研究对象是智利和委内瑞拉的五个老牌政党和四个新政党。NSF的资助使调查人员能够比依靠自己的资源更快地进行面谈，并让他们有时间和手段在仍在南美的情况下彻底分析数据，从而加强了这一项目。

If parties are composed of rational politicians who seek reelection, why do parties sometimes break down? Recently, many established parties in Latin America have experienced breakdown, which is defined here as losses in elections and the defection of party leaders and activists. These losses threaten the parties' survival as organizations. Evidence suggests that current theories cannot explain adequately the magnitude or the variance of the party breakdown. This proposal briefly analyzes existing explanations and suggests an alternative framework for analyzing party breakdown that focuses on the public demand for policy and other government action, the competitive environment that the parties face, and the choices of the individual leaders and activists inside the party. Based on this framework, three specific explanations are proposed for party breakdown in Latin America: clientelism, ideological intransigence, and decentralized authority. To test these explanations, the proposal outlines a twelve-month study of five established and four new political parties in Chile and Venezuela. NSF funding enhances this project by allowing the investigators to carry out interviews more quickly than if they relied on their own resources and by giving them the time and means to analyze their data thoroughly while still in South America.