Comparing the stabilization process of party systems in developing regions

Eduardo Olivares

Party system institutionalization brings together concepts such as stability, social identification, and well organized party structures. Unlike the situation in consolidated democracies, party systems in most developing states are weakly institutionalized. In this paper, I use an update dataset for a sample of 40 countries, showing that developing countries do not only have higher levels of volatility than developed societies, but also higher levels of volatility dispersion, especially in Latin America. The traditional measure of electoral volatility, the Pedersen Index, is frequently employed to assess degrees of electoral stability in each country. To complement this measure, a weighted Pedersen Index of Electoral Volatility is calculated, giving heavier importance to last electoral cycles in the history of a country and lighter weight to its initial cycles. Results suggest that 1) older democracies are losing stability, 2) most of developing countries are gaining consolidation, and 3) among the developing countries, Latin American political party systems show high levels of instability and of dispersion in terms of electoral volatility. These analyses are relevant to better our understanding of the origin and evolution of party systems in developing democracies in general, and in Latin America in particular.