Political Analysis Advance Access originally published online on June 26, 2009
Political Analysis 2009 17(3):311-332; doi:10.1093/pan/mpp007
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Modeling New Party Performance: A Conceptual and Methodological Approach for Volatile Party Systems
Department of Political Science, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, 503A Cavanaugh Hall, 425 University Boulevard, Indianapolis, IN 46202-5140 e-mail: tmustill{at}iupui.edu (corresponding author)
This study of new political parties in the Third Wave democracies of Bolivia, Chile, Ecuador, and Venezuela conceptualizes the early life of a party as a developmental phase. The analysis uses latent trajectory modeling to identify five qualitatively distinctive performance profiles, which the author calls "explosive," "contender," "flash," "flat," and "flop" trajectories. This finding challenges the conventional approaches used in the study of new party performance, where scholars classify parties using subjective criteria, often into the successful/failed dichotomy. In unstable party systems, where we expect greater diversity in the performance profiles of new parties, latent trajectory modeling is preferred because it yields a result more consistent with extant theorizing on new parties. In stable systems, as in the case of Chile, the approaches can yield similar results. Nevertheless, the case of Venezuela (1958–88) demonstrates that even in stable party systems, the modeling approach used here can identify important variation that alternatives might miss.
Authors' note: I thank Jonathan Hartlyn, Marco Steenbergen, Raúl Madrid, Simón Pachano, Carlos de la Torre, Sarah Mustillo, and three anonymous reviewers at Political Analysis for comments.