Are Parties What’s Wrong with Democracy in Latin America?” paper presented at

Scholars blame the deficiencies of Latin American democracies on weak political parties and volatile party systems. Among these deficiencies is mandate unresponsiveness: the tendency of politicians to pronounce themselves in favor of policies in campaigns and then abandon these policies once in office. Yet political theory and experience in Latin America yield contradictory expectations: that strong parties may enhance responsiveness and that they may reduce it. My case studies and a statistical analysis of cross-national data show that dramatic and early policy switches were carried off both by weak parties in volatile systems, and by strong parties in stable systems. To understand policy switches we must look beyond the deficiencies of political parties. I close with some reflections on the normative desirability of mandate responsiveness. 1Political parties express and channel citizens ' interests, provide predictable choices to voters, maintain linkages between government and civil society, impose order on legislative processes, and discipline politicians: this is the conventional wisdom. To work well, democracy requires that these functions be carried out. It is frequently observed that political parties i