The making of party systems : crafting in the new democracies of Africa, Latin America and Eastern Europe

Abstract

The third wave of democratization has been accompanied by a resurgent faith in political engineering and the crafting of democracies. This study aims to scrutinize one particular form of crafting: of the party system. It seeks to answer the question to what extent the party system can be the conscious and purposeful creation of electoral engineers. In the end, this study should provide an answer to a question that was posed more than thirty years ago, but still stands today: "Can a party system be planned?". Or, more precisely: "Can a party system be planned as part of the planning of democracy?". The answer comes from an investigation of the experience with crafting in the three regions where the third wave of democratization has been most successful so far: Latin America, Eastern Europe, and, more tentatively, Africa. The aim is not to present a detailed and exhaustive overview of crafting in all the relevant countries from all three regions, but to concentrate on the strongest cases of crafting. The idea is that such "extreme cases" bring out most sharply the possibilities and limitations of crafting. In short, the thesis will discuss why, how, and with what effect the crafting of party systems takes place. Descriptively, the thesis analyzes how countries have dealt with the twin dangers of fragmentation and the politicization of subnational cleavages. Prescriptively, the thesis evaluates the effectiveness of the various methods of crafting in relation to the different goals. Success of crafting is linked to the democratic legitimacy of particular interventions in the development of the party system to see whether there exists a trade-off between the two. By sketching the possibilities and limits of electoral engineering, this study hopes to contribute to the study of institutional design and performance in new democracies as one of the main contemporary frontiers of empirical democratic theory.