Evading the Patronage Trap

Front matter

A the Patronage Trap

Brian Palmer-Rubin

Interest Representation in Mexico

Contents

Abbreviations vii Figures and Tables xiii Acknowledgements xv

Introduction: Interest Organizations and Unequal Development in Latin America 1

Part 1: Situating the Analysis 1. Analytical Approach to Organizations and Policy Representation 21

Introduction

Interest Organizations and Unequal Development in Latin America

Fifteen years ago, the World Bank (2007, 108) attributed disappointing economic performance in many developing countries to the “inequality trap,” a vicious cycle linking economic and political inequality. The World Development Report on inequality concluded that “societies prosperous today are so because they have developed more egalitarian distributions of political power, while poor societies often suffer from unbalanced distributions.” The World Bank—one of the most influential advocates of the “market-led” economic model in the last century—today has come around to the idea that free markets alone often fail to produce inclusive growth. It has increasingly become apparent that slow growth and sharp contrasts between economic winners and losers in many developing countries are due more to the underrepresentation of non-elite economic interests than to excessive state intervention in markets.

Latin America has long been recognized as the most unequal region in the world (Lustig 2020). Nonetheless, development models in the region have hewed to an oligarchic economic model—masked as a neutral market-led model—and the prospect of economic policies oriented to generate economic opportunity has been off the table for decades. Economic elites manipulate the policymaking process to produce “extractive” economic institutions (Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson 2005), which are oriented to funneling rents to themselves rather than spurring innovation or productivity gains or creating good jobs for ordinary citizens. Inclusive development models have been off the agenda for so long that non-elite actors have very few policy alternatives on which to focus their demand-making.

At best, we may point to the success cases of twentieth-century industrialization in East Asia, which featured a much more active role for the state in protecting domestic firms, regulating labor market institutions, and guiding finance (Evans 1995; Johnson 1982). It is not clear that this model would work for Latin America, nor that it is appropriate for the lateindustrial age. However, we may extract from these success cases the lesson that large-scale upgrading in models of production requires close coordination between the development bureaucracy and societal stakeholders. In most Latin American countries, such formal institutions of interest representation are sorely lacking. And while economic elites have many avenues through which to influence policy, the demands of non-elites—industrial workers, small-business owners, family farmers, and the massive informal sector—are inchoate and typically go ignored.

This failure of economic interest representation is puzzling in light of significant advances in democratic representation in the region, which may have been expected to empower the masses in development policy. As mid-twentieth-century authoritarian regimes recede into history, procedural democratic institutions have consolidated, affording most citizens a genuine choice at the ballot box. Over the last few decades, elections in the region have become increasingly trustworthy and the rule of law has strengthened. Based on expert assessments of democratic institutions in the region, Mainwaring, Scully, and Cullell (2010, 19) surmised a decade ago that “the period since 1990 has been by far the most democratic in the history of Latin America.”

Latin America has also witnessed important innovations in democratic deepening. Every country in the region—save Panama—has passed national laws requiring participatory institutions—*formal institutional spaces that involve citizens or civil society groups in...public policy” (Mayka 2019, 1). These institutional models have improved well-being for marginalized populations (Touchton, Sugiyama, and Wampler 2017; Touchton and Wampler 2014). For example, participatory budgeting—a system that allows inhabitants of urban neighborhoods to determine how to spend a portion of their local budgets—has contributed to a democratic culture of deliberation in Brazil (Baiocchi, Heller, and Silva 2011; Fung and Olin Wright 2003). These models have acquired “best practices” status among multilateral development institutions and have been replicated across five continents (Ganuza and Baiocchi 2012; Mansuri and Rao 2013).

Latin American countries have also expanded social and economic rights by adopting much more inclusive welfare states, which in some cases foster significant societal participation. Social policies have expanded beyond unionized formal-sector workers to also include previous labor market outsiders, such as informal sector workers and the rural poor. Conditional cash transfer programs—devised in the 1990s in Mexico and Brazil —represent a sea change in social policy by delivering benefits to the neediest and have expanded throughout the region (Garay 2016; Pribble 2013). Combined with expansions in old-age pensions and health care, these policies have improved living standards and broadened citizenship rights across the region (Diaz-Cayeros, Estévez, and Magaloni 2016, chaps. 5-6; Hunter and Sugiyama 2014).

Why, despite these advances, have Latin American democracies proven unable to confront the structural inequalities that cripple their economies and leave their masses without opportunity? I contend that we may lay the blame at the feet of these countries’ systems of interest representation, which exhibit an exaggerated version of “biased pluralism,” a system in which the demands of organizations representing economic elites—especially large corporations—predominate over those that represent the interests of the much more numerous non-elites. The malady of biased pluralism was diagnosed by classic works of American political economy decades ago (Dahl 1961; Lindblom 1977; Schattschneider 1935) and has been revived in recent years (Gilens 2012; Hacker and Pierson 2002; Skocpol and Hertel- Fernandez 2016). These scholars conclude that economic institutions in the United States and other wealthy democracies respond disproportionately to the interests of economic elites, who leverage political connections, campaign contributions, and mobile capital to sway regulatory policy, government contracts, infrastructure, tax breaks, and more.

Undoubtedly, disparities in economic representation are more pronounced in developing countries, where the working classes are yet more prostrate and a dependence on foreign direct investment grants extraordinary power to multinational corporations. Schneider (2013, chap. 5), for instance, attributes the “hierarchical” character of Latin American economies to the weakness of organized labor and fragmentation of the working classes along the formal-informal divide. Large informal sectors—beset by economic vulnerability and challenges to collective action—are certainly partly to blame for the persistence of oligarchic development models (Blofield 2011; Castells and Portes 1989). However, a more inclusive model of sectoral representation—along the lines of Northern European societal corporatism or East Asian developmental states—would not only require a more encompassing and empowered set of institutions to represent workers, but would also feature spaces for non-elite producers—such as farmers and small-business owners. Organizations representing such producers are uniquely positioned to demand state intervention oriented to generating economic opportunity, as opposed to simply increasing benefits for consumption.

This book focuses on such organizations and develops an account of biased pluralism in developing countries typified by the centrality of patronage—discretionarily allocated state benefits—to popular-sector interest representation. Rather than serving as conduits for demand-making about development models, political parties and interest organizations often broker state subsidies or social programs, augmenting the short-term income of beneficiaries, but doing little to improve their long-term economic prospects. The predominance of patronage (or clientelistic) appeals as the currency of party-voter linkages in Latin America has received considerable attention (Diaz-Cayeros, Estévez, and Magaloni 2016; Kitschelt et al. 2010; Stokes et al. 2013). In contrast, I centrally engage the demand side of interest representation, diagnosing the pressures that cause many non-elite interest organizations to specialize in demand-making for patronage rather than the fundamental policies that shape development models.

When organizations become diverted into patronage politics, the economic demands of the masses go unheard in the policies that most affect their lives and, along the way, their economic interests go unrepresented. While experiments in participatory governance have proven to empower marginalized citizens in decision-making processes about spending, they fail to address a vacuum in scaled-up demand-making about development models. And while expansions in social policy have increased benefits for consumption, policies to guide models of production and generate economic opportunity have withered. When it comes to structural components of economic policy—trade agreements, industrial policy, labor policy, infrastructure, and regulation of competition—states lack institutional tools for the incorporation of non-elite stakeholders. Rather, economic representation in neoliberal Latin American has been characterized by a haphazard blend of insulated technocracy, crony capitalism, and populist and clientelist co-option of the lower classes by political elites.

This book traces this disconnect to the failure of organizations to channel citizen interests into economic representation. I focus on non-elite interest organizations—specifically agricultural and small-business associations, but this category also includes labor unions, neighborhood associations, indigenous associations, and many others. These organizations are the key actors with the potential to levy economic policy demands on behalf of non-elites, yet divide into two camps. On the one hand, some organizations engage in programmatic representation: translating members’ interests into sector-wide policy demands, socializing citizens to identify with sectoral or class interests, and mobilizing these populations in electoral campaigns and protests on behalf of collective interests. Other organizations, however, focus their efforts on patronage representation, maximizing their members’ share of individualized benefits from the state, typically by entering into clientelistic relationships with political parties. The perseverance of oligarchic capitalism in Latin America generates from the overwhelming proportion of organizations—especially those organizations that represent the most marginal populations—that specialize narrowly in the latter representation model. So what explains why non-elite interest organizations so often fail to offer programmatic representation?

Argument

I argue that these models of representation are explained by the types of relationships that these organizations form downwardly (with their members) and upwardly (with political parties). For interest organizations to confer programmatic representation on their membership base, both the organization and an ideologically aligned political party must converge: the organization with programmatic demands and the party with a programmatic incorporation strategy. For popular-sector organizations and left-wing parties, this convergence is rare. Quite often, one or the other of these actors— or both—is compelled to engage in patronage politics, undermining the potential for programmatic representation. For organizations representing middle-class economic sectors—such as small-business owners—and for right-wing political parties, this convergence on a programmatic representation model is more common, as middle-class organizations tend to be less dependent on state benefits for survival. These a priori asymmetries are the prime causes of biased pluralism in developing democracies. The theoretical model has two parts, corresponding to the organization and to the party. First, I consider organizations’ downward ties with their members. Organizations’ policy demands are shaped by the strategies that they use to recruit, retain, and mobilize members. Any mass organization must retain a large and active membership to survive. Thus, organizations must address this central collective action challenge before devoting their resources to effecting policy change. Regardless of the stated purpose of an organization, the way that it meets this challenge shapes its policy engagement. I refer to this strategy as the source of its organizational capacity and categorize organizations into two groups. Some organizations sustain organizational capacity internally by offering services that encourage members to join and participate in organization activities. Such services may include training programs, legal support, networking opportunities, access to finance and more. By generating their own “selective benefits” (Olson 1965), these organizations maintain a degree of autonomy that allows them to engage in programmatic demand-making and to push back against biased pluralism. For other organizations, selective benefits are externally provided. Most commonly, a state or party patron provides access to individual benefits through sectoral subsidies or social programs that leaders allocate selectively to members to incentivize participation. When organizational capacity is externally provided, the organization becomes dependent on the state or party patron. It lacks the autonomy to engage in programmatic demand-making and becomes specialized in patronage bargaining.

Second, I consider organizations’ upward linkages with political parties. Ruling parties typically are willing to reciprocate with patronage benefits if their core organizational allies are focused on patronage demands. In systems where distributive spending is discretionary, the cost is relatively low for a party to favor its electoral allies with these benefits in exchange for campaign support. However, organizations’ programmatic demands go unanswered in the absence of a political party that coincides in its preference for a programmatic linkage. Parties stand to benefit by incorporating organizations with which they share policy goals into programmatic policies, as this cements powerful long-term linkages and frees up distributive benefits for allocation to non-core groups. However, not all parties are capable of sustaining programmatic linkages.

I argue that parties’ origins shape their future capacity to form either programmatic or patronage-based linkages with interest organizations. Parties that form ties to ideologically aligned organizations before they are able to challenge for elected office go on to incorporate these organizations into programmatic policies once they govern. In contrast, parties that only come into contact with organizations in the midst of challenging for office do not invest in the arduous task of creating programmatic linkages with interest organizations, instead mobilizing these allies opportunistically through patronage.

Where organization and party coincide in a preference for a programmatic or a patronage-based linkage, that outcome becomes self-reinforcing.

Introduction í

Such an outcome is common for organizations representing middleand upper-class groups, such as business chambers and their right-wing party allies. Thus, in the programmatic equilibrium, the organization develops traits that sustain programmatic representation, such as formal non-partisanship, which allows it to lobby with politicians of all parties; a homogenous membership base, composed of members who engage in the same economic activities and thus share economic policy goals; and norms of internal democracy, which nurture new leaders and hold them accountable to shared goals.

In contrast, where organizations and parties converge on a patronage-based linkage—a common occurrence for organizations representing the popular sector and left-wing parties—the organization becomes ensnared in “the patronage trap; a vicious cycle wherein the organization specializes as a broker for discretionary state benefits and becomes unable to engage in programmatic representation. Such organizations feature oligarchic leadership norms as the leader converts into an indispensable broker for patronage benefits and attract a heterogenous membership base, drawn to short-term private benefits. The ubiquity of the patronage trap for popular-sector interest representation is a key explanation for the extreme mode of biased pluralism that most developing countries exemplify. However, these pressures are not insurmountable and there is much to be learned from non-elite organizations that manage to evade the patronage trap.

Why Programmatic Organizations Matter

The ability of interest organizations to represent non-elite interests in economic policy has important implications for economic development models, the effectiveness of social spending, and the quality of the electoral process. In each of these realms, democracies—and developing democracies in particular—face trenchant obstacles that organizations potentially help overcome. By the same token, however, organizations that fall prey to the patronage trap contribute to the problems of elite bias, inefficient and unfair social spending, and clientelist electoral systems.

First, where non-elite organizations have voice in important policy episodes—e.g., the negotiation of trade agreements, defining priorities for infrastructure investments, regulating markets—they can help counteract upper-class distortions in economic models. Class bias in interest representation has long been a concern of scholarship of advanced democracies

(Lindblom 1977; Schattschneider 1960; Verba, Schlozman, and Brady 1995). While less empirical research exists to uncover biases in poor and middle-income democracies, such as those of Latin America, we might expect the problem to be more pronounced, given their hierarchical economic institutions (Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson 2005) and discretionary state institutions (Levitsky and Murillo 2013). And while the rise of technocratic governance in the region was meant to insulate economic policymaking from rent-seeking, the effect has more often led to the severing of channels for popular-sector influence, while elites and corporations continue to enjoy privileged influence through social ties to technocratic elites (Babb 2001; Dargent 2014) or through the threat to disinvest, which confers de facto structural power (Fairfield 2015b).

When non-elite groups wield voice in economic policy, they can counteract this class distortion, with important consequences for development models and wealth distribution. Scholars of Latin American politics have identified organized non-elite stakeholders as key actors in important reforms of union regulations (Burgess 2004; Cook 2007; Murillo 2001), tax policy (Fairfield 2015a), the welfare state (Garay 2016; Pribble 2013), environmental regulation (Amengual 2016; Hochstetler 2011), minority rights (Paschel 2016; Yashar 2005), and informal-sector labor enforcement (Holland 2015; Hummel 2017). On the other hand, when these organizations’ participation in policymaking is geared toward maximizing patronage benefits, engagement with the state can have the perverse result of excluding popular-sector interests (Fox 1994).

Programmatic organizations can also bolster the effectiveness of distributive programs. Programmatic organizations are involved in the design of distributive programs, such as agricultural subsidies or training programs for small businesses, seeking to orient these programs to address the needs of their sector. In contrast, patronage-based organizations typically are concerned only with maximizing the share of these programs that they can control. The discretionary allocation of distributive benefits to promote the electoral prospects of governing parties has been well documented, particularly in the developing world.! Scholars of anti-poverty spending have shown how partisan distribution criteria undermine the efficiency of these programs. Yet these scholars have focused their recommendations on the supply side, stressing the importance of adopting formula-based criteria to

1. See Golden and Min (2013) for a review.

tie politicians’ hands (Diaz-Cayeros, Estévez, and Magaloni 2016, chap. 5; Stokes et al. 2013, chap. 9).? In contrast, my findings suggest that demand is also largely to blame for persistent misappropriation of these funds. Where organizations approach the state with the central goal of maximizing their share of distributive resources, politicians have little incentive to adopt formula-based distribution criteria. Thus, overturning discretionary norms in distributive politics may require not only reform of state institutions, but also a transformation in the demand-making strategies of the organizations that represent these programs’ beneficiaries.

Finally, programmatic organizations play an important role in connecting voters to political parties that align with their policy preferences. Given limited information about party and candidate platforms, voters are not automatically drawn to the parties that best represent their policy preferences or their economic interests (Bartels 1996). Rather, voters, particularly in developing democracies, often support parties based on a variety of other factors, such as the personal traits of the candidate, populist campaign rhetoric, performance evaluations of the incumbent, or vote buying (Arnold and Samuels 2011; Baker and Greene 2015; Kitschelt and Wilkinson 2007; Stokes et al. 2013). Lower-class citizens are particularly vulnerable to non-programmatic voting given greater deficits in information and value derived from electoral handouts (Dixit and Londregan 1996, 1144; Stokes et al. 2013, 158-71). In the last century, social-democratic and labor parties relied on labor unions to do the work of socializing the working class to support parties of the left and mobilizing it in campaigns (Collier and Collier 1991, 41-44; Katznelson 1986). Thus, the decline of unions and other mass popular sector organizations has played a central role in the current crisis of representation in Latin American democracies.

Existing organizations—both those that have held over from the heyday of corporatist mass organizing, as well as those that have emerged in recent decades to represent outsiders—have the potential to fill in this gap. In contrast, when organizations are enmeshed in patronage linkages with political parties, as often occurs with organizations composed of the poorest

2. Conditional cash transfer programs, such as Mexico’s PROSPERA (previously PROGRESA and Oportunidades) and Brazil’s Bolsa Familia are the poster children for a wave in non-discretionary (formula-based) social spending (De La O 2015; Garay 2016). However, “demand-based” social programs and subsidies remain widespread in Mexico, particularly on the subnational level (Cejudo, Michel, and Sobrino 2017; Garay, Palmer-Rubin, and Poertner 2020; Rizzo 2019).

segments of society, they undermine programmatic party-voter linkages. Voters are encouraged to mobilize on behalf of the party that offers the most private benefits for members, whether or not that party promotes an economic model that stands to benefit them.

Situating the Analysis: From State Corporatism to Neoliberal Pluralism in Latin America

The setting for my analysis is Mexico since the turn of the century, a country with a variety of structures for interest representation in both urban and rural areas. In the twentieth century, Mexico's political system was dominated by a single party, the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). The PRI built sectoral organizations of labor, peasants, and other popular-sector groups. These sectors were incorporated into a corporatist system, wherein they were controlled from above by the party-state, while also receiving financing and organizational resources such as mandatory membership requirements (Collier and Collier 1991, 232-50; Stevens 1977). As in other corporatist Latin American states, this system of interest representation relied on the import-substitution industrialization (ISI) economic model, which granted the state ample margin to invest in privileged economic sectors, regulate trade, and sustain a generous welfare state for labor market insiders (Malloy 1977). From the 1980s onward, Mexico passed through two massive transformations that drastically altered the terms for popular-sector interest representation. First, it embraced the neoliberal orthodoxy of free trade agreements, liberal macroeconomic policy, minimal market intervention, and a thin welfare state (Lustig 1998). Second, Mexico’s electoral system opened up. After seven decades of one-party rule at every level of government, opposition parties from the center-left and center-right began to claim important subnational victories in the 1980s and 1990s, culminating in the PRI’s loss of the presidency in 2000. The electoral opening introduced space for dissident interest organizations to engage in demand-making outside the PRI’s corporatist structure. This history endows Mexico with a wide spectrum of interest organizations, which vary both in the types of relationships that they form with political parties and in the type of policy demands that they levy.

While Mexico offers an ideal context to probe the roots of programmatic and patronage-based modes of interest representation, the dynamics uncovered in this study extend much further. Most broadly, the challenges of organizational maintenance—and the tradeoffs inherent in the decision of linking with an external actor to generate selective benefits—are relevant for mass-membership interest organizations throughout the democratic world. For instance, anarcho-syndicalist labor unions in twentieth-century Western Europe moderated their demands when embedded into social-democratic parties (Przeworski and Sprague 1986). On the party side, the observation that a party’s genetic organizational traits shape the ways in which it mobilizes societal allies has been confirmed in research on Western Europe (Mair 1994), post-communist Eastern Europe (Tavits 2013), and Sub-Saharan Africa (Riedl 2014).

The challenges of non-elite interest representation that motivate this book are most pronounced in “patronage democracies” (Chandra 2004), systems in which government actors exercise discretion over the distribution of basic goods and services, and often allocate these benefits under an electoral logic. Many such democracies are found in Latin America, and scholars have widely documented the use of state patronage to mobilize individual voters through clientelistic ties (Diaz-Cayeros, Estévez, and Magaloni 2016; Hidalgo and Nichter 2016; Muñoz 2014; Nichter 2008; Stokes 2005). Patronage politics is also incredibly common in state interactions with interest organizations (Holland and Palmer-Rubin 2015).

While the centrality of patronage to Latin American systems of interest representation has remained a constant over the past century, the dynamics of patronage exchange have changed drastically over the last few decades. Since the 1980s, Latin American states have moved from corporatist systems—which combined heavy doses of economic resources and top-down coercion of interest organizations—to pluralist systems that grant greater autonomy, but less support. Under mid-twentieth-century corporatism, hierarchical and often monopolistic representatives of workers, peasants, and business were embedded in elaborate pacts with ruling parties (Collier and Collier 1991; Lehmbruch and Schmitter 1982). These organizations were granted privileged access to policymaking, government posts for their leaders, as well as economic and organizational inducements such as state subsidies and mandatory-membership statutes. In exchange, the organizations ceded control and accepted regulation by the state, undermining their ability to engage in contentious mobilization or to demand fundamental changes in their countries’ economic models. Mexico's post-Revolutionary administrations mobilized the popular sectors in what was perhaps the broadest-reaching, and certainly the most durable, instance of popular-sector incorporation in the region.?

As the statist development model was phased out beginning in the 1980s, however, corporatism decayed in Mexico and throughout the region. Unable to sustain the same level of inducements for their allies, former “labor-based” parties weakened ties with mass organizations, relying increasingly on media appeals and clientelist handouts to win elections (Greene 2007; Levitsky 2003; Roberts 2015). As Collier and Handlin (2009b, 48-60) describe, these economic and political transformations in Latin America over the past three decades have led to a decline of the mode of interest representation typified by corporatist union-party linkages (the “union-party hub”), and the emergence of a new pattern. This new interest regime, which they refer to as the “associational network,” is composed of a diverse array of interest organizations. These interest organizations include both the formal-sector workers that were incorporated during the previous period, but also more precarious groups such as informal-sector workers, landless peasants, neighborhood associations, and indigenous movements. These organizations are organized less hierarchically than union confederations and execute a wider variety of functions independent of political parties (Collier and Handlin 2009b, 66-73).

While the withdrawal of the state from top-down control of organizations affords greater autonomy, the cessation of state subsidies and compulsory membership have left organizations more precarious (Collier and Handlin 2009a, 24-29; Kurtz 2004b; Shadlen 2004). Organized interests struggle to secure financial resources, sustain membership rolls, and coordinate in collective activities to pressure the state.* Facing these challenges, many organizations turn to external actors—often political parties—which offer material benefits in exchange for campaign support and control over

3. Along with Venezuela, Mexico undertook a “radical populist” mode of incorporation, in which “both the working class and the peasantry were mobilized electorally and organized into functional associations, such as unions, linked to the reformist political movement or party” (Collier and Collier 1991, 196). Unlike Venezuela, where the labor-mobilizing party eventually entered into a pact that ensured alternation among moderate parties, Mexican incorporation spearheaded a coalition of forces that became part and parcel of a one-party dominant regime that monopolized elected office in Mexico until the late twentieth century.

4. A group of studies have identified cases of neo-corporatism under more decentralized and contingent forms of state support (Chartock 2013; Etchemendy 2019; Rich 2019; Rich, Mayka, and Montero 2019).

organizational activities (Garay 2009). However, the prospect of aligning with a political party, as opposed to engaging in other forms of political mobilization, still presents these organizations with a tradeoff between access to the levers of power and autonomy over demand type and strategies (Collier and Handlin 2009b, 81-91; Fox 1992a). Some organizations, therefore, opt to remain non-partisan, forgoing privileged access to patronage benefits to retain control over demand-making strategies. However, consolidating and surviving as an autonomous interest organization poses the significant challenge of sustaining collective action through organizational resources alone. Organizations that abstain from state patronage must devise services on their own that are sufficiently appealing to attract and retain members. This challenge is rarely met by organizations representing the lower classes.

Parties’ approaches to linking with interest organizations have also transformed in the neoliberal era. The decline of organized labor and the ISI model made mass organizing more tenuous for twentieth-century corporatist parties. Former “labor-based parties” navigated this transition with varying levels of success (Burgess and Levitsky 2003). For example, Mexico's PRI and Argentinas Justicialist Party (PJ) persisted in programmatically moderate forms while Peru’s American Popular Revolutionary Alliance (APRA) and Venezuelas Democratic Action (AD) became non-competitive party shells. Recent decades have also witnessed the emergence of new electoral vehicles on the left, born out of quite diverse circumstances and with quite different relationships to the organized popular classes. In the 1970s, Brazil’s Workers’ Party, Brazil (PT) built a national organization on the back of a democratic labor movement and other grassroots movements to fill a vacuum on the left in a country that never had featured a successful labor-based party. In the 1980s, Mexico's Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) split off from the dominant party, bringing in urban social movements and dissident peasant associations to occupy the space that the PRI relinquished on the left. In the 2000s, Bolivias Movement to Socialism (MAS) merged indigenous social movements with corporatist associations inherited from a previous age of radical populism to reach the presidency as the region's only consolidated “movement-party” (Levitsky and Roberts 2011, 11-16). And in Ecuador and Venezuela, party-system collapse opened space for populist leaders to construct personalistic regimes with highly redistributive agendas, but little space for autonomous societal participation.

Right-wing parties in Latin American also take different organizational forms, with consequences for their relationships to organized business. Mexico’s main right-wing party, the National Action Party

(PAN), represents an extreme case of an externally mobilized party, which has retained a strong ideological brand and organic ties to core business organizations, even as it moderated to compete in subnational elections in the 1990s and to conquer the presidency in 2000. In this sense, the PAN is relatively unique in the region, as most other prominent right-wing parties are either “authoritarian successors” (Loxton 2015) or were founded as personalistic vehicles, such as the parties of Uribe in Colombia, Fujimori in Peru, and most recently Bolsonaro in Brazil.

These different partisan movements have different uses for interest organizations. While parties today rarely embed organizations to the same degree as under the heyday of corporatism, organizational allies continue to offer parties highly coordinated networks of citizens, capable of mobilizing voters and organizing ground campaigns. However, under the current interest regime, parties often seek much looser ties with organizations than before. These linkages are intermittent—lasting for a single election rather that over several elections—and instrumental—based on a negotiated exchange rather than programmatic or ideological affinity (Garay 2009). Particularly where parties are unstable, they often form ties with organizations that last only a single election, and are based on clientelist exchange rather than policy influence (Holland and Palmer-Rubin 2015; Novaes 2018).

Other parties, however, sustain organic ties to interest organizations, featuring long-standing linkages based on shared programmatic goals and the nomination of organization leaders to state office and party leadership. Such linkages can help anchor a party brand and signal to voters that the party is favorable to a particular social group (peasants, informal workers, etc.) (Lupu 2013; Poertner 2021). Organic ties to organizations can also help a party build and maintain “activist networks” (Calvo and Murillo 2019), bringing voters into contact with the party, recruiting candidates and sustaining a presence during periods out of office. Since the 1980s, innovative modes of incorporating popular-sector organizations organically into the party have helped the Brazilian PT, Bolivian MAS, and Uruguayan Broad Front (FA) consolidate and sustain electoral success (Anria and Cyr 2017; Bentancur, Rodriguez, and Rosenblatt 2019; Gomez Bruera 2013).