“Cuando un Amigo Se Va: Surviving Foundational Leaders in Latin America”

SANTIAGO ANRIA; JENNIFER CYR; GABRIEL VOMMARO

Congreso; LASA 2022; 2022

Latin American Studies Association

Parties are essential for democracy, and democracy is a system in which parties lose elections. Yet, it is surprising how little political science scholarship studies what happens to parties when they actually lose elections or experience some other major setback. In this paper, we examine the internal processes that parties must undergo when they suffer a very particular type of loss: the sudden and unexpected departure of the party leader. No single person remains party leader into perpetuity, and so this is the kind of loss that all parties face. However, some departures are unexpected and even traumatic for the party. Evo Morales’ sudden departure from office and self-exile in Argentina represents one of these; Mauricio Macri’s dramatic second-term presidential loss is another. Nevertheless, both parties re-group, re-organize, and find solutions to remain relevant, key players in national politics. We use these two positive, but very different, cases to begin to theorize how parties in general may withstand the loss of their foundational leader. We identify two different routes to survival--routes that are based on the very different origin stories of the MAS and the PRO. We find that the bottom-up origins of the MAS, and the top-down origins of the PRO, limit the paths available to party leaders toward re-organizing the party without (at least in the short-term) the foundational leader. Specifically, their distinct origin stories help to define who must be consulted and how decisions must be made for internal party re-organization to be possible. In the paper, we trace the process by which party reorganization occurred in the MAS and the PRO. We use the negative cases of PT (Brazil) and PSUV (Venezuela) to help sustain the argument.