Party Brands, Partisan Erosion, and Party Breakdown*

The dramatic and sudden decline in the staying power of established political parties is one of the most puzzling features of Latin American democratic politics since the Third Wave of democratization. Between 1978 and 2007, one-quarter of the region’s established parties broke down, meaning that they suddenly became uncompetitive for national executive office. Parties that had only recently been major competitors were relegated to an average vote share of merely 6 percent. Their breakdowns severely deinstitutionalized these party systems, upending and fragmenting once stable systems (Roberts 2014). How might we explain these deinstitutionalizing breakdowns? Scholars of comparative politics often attribute party breakdowns to poor performance by incumbent parties. Corruption scandals or poor economic stewardship, they argue, cause voters to reject the incumbent party en masse, leading the party to break down (e.g., Coppedge 2005, Dietz and Myers 2007, Kenney 2004). But bad performance is far more widespread than party breakdown, and established parties have survived some major economic crises. In the 1980s in Peru, for instance, President Alan García’s economic policies led to some of the worst hyperinflation in world history, peaking in 1989 at 12,378 percent. Still, at the end of García’s term, his Popular America