Authoritarian Inheritance, Political Conflict and Conservative Party Institutionalisation: The Cases of Chile and Brazil

Abstract

Party development in post-transition in Latin America has often proceeded unevenly, as right-wing elites opted for nonpartisan forms of political action and conservative parties remained poorly institutionalised. Recent research has demonstrated that party-building was facilitated where the political right benefited from valuable political assets-party brand, territorial organisation, sources of funding and clientelistic networks-inherited from authoritarian regimes. This article argues that authoritarian inheritance in isolation is insufficient to foster conservative party institutionalisation. It analyses the trajectories of the major right-wing parties in Brazil and Chile, where former authoritarian incumbents benefited extensively from authoritarian inheritance and yet levels of institutionalisation differed widely across parties. The comparative analysis demonstrates that right-wing parties were most likely to consolidate where, in addition to inheriting valuable resources from the dictatorship, they experienced ideologically-driven, violent conflict during their early years.

Full text

1
Authoritarian Inheritance, Political Conflict and Conservative Party
Institutionalisation: the cases of Chile and Brazil*
André Borges
Associate Professor, University of Brasília
Brasília - Brazil
Abstract
Party development in post-transition in Latin America has often proceeded unevenly, as right-wing elites
opted for nonpartisan forms of political action and conservative parties remained poorly institutionalised.
Recent research has demonstrated that party-building was facilitated where the political right benefited
from valuable political assets - party brand, territorial organisation, sources of funding and clientelistic
networks - inherited from authoritarian regimes. This article argues that authoritarian inheritance in
isolation is insufficient to foster conservative party institutionalisation. It analyses the trajectories of the
major right-wing parties in Brazil and Chile, where former authoritarian incumbents benefited extensively
from authoritarian inheritance and yet levels of institutionalisation differed widely across parties. The
comparative analysis demonstrates that right-wing parties were most likely to consolidate where, in addition
to inheriting valuable resources from the dictatorship, they experienced ideologically-driven, violent
conflict during their early years.
Keywords: Authoritarianism; political right; party institutionalisation; authoritarian inheritance
It is often argued that enduring democratic rule is a necessary condition for parties
to institutionalise, building strong territorial organisations, developing partisan ties in the
electorate and acquiring a value of their own, independent from individual party leaders.
According to this view, party institutionalisation should increase as democracies age and
parties compete for voters’ support, election after election.
1
Over four decades into the
Third Wave of democratisation, however, successful party-building efforts have been
more of an exception than the rule in Latin America.
2
* Forthcoming in the Journal of Latin American Studies, 2021.
1
Russell J Dalton and Steven Weldon, 'Partisanship and party system institutionalization', Party Politics,
Vol. 13, No. 2 (2007), pp. 179-196, Noam Lupu and Susan Stokes, 'Democracy, interrupted: Regime
change and partisanship in twentieth-century Argentina', Electoral Studies, Vol. 29, No. 1 (2010), pp. 91-
104, Margit Tavits, 'The development of stable party support: Electoral dynamics in post‐communist
Europe', American Journal of Political Science, Vol. 49, No. 2 (2005), pp. 283-298.
2
Steven Levitsky, James Loxton and Brandon Van Dyck, 'Introduction', in Steven Levitsky, James
Loxton, Brandon Van Dyck and Jorge I Domínguez (eds.), Challenges of party-building in Latin
America, (New York, 2016: Cambridge University Press).

2
If party consolidation has been overall a relatively infrequent phenomenon in post-
transition Latin America, cases of successful conservative party institutionalisation have
been even rarer. Historically, right-wing elites have preferred to invest in nonpartisan
forms of political action, including state corporatism, nonpartisan clientelistic networks
and, at times, support for military coups.
3
This general trend of conservative party
underdevelopment has persisted and even deepened after the democratic transitions.
4
Although the overthrow of democratic regimes seems to be no longer a feasible option
for right-wing elites lacking strong parties, the upper classes that constitute the core
constituency of the right have often engaged in nonpartisan strategies – such as lobbying
elected officials and supporting populist candidates - that have been deleterious for the
quality of democracy.
5
Comparative research has demonstrated that the Latin American right was most
successful at party-building in those instances where there existed one or more
authoritarian successor parties (henceforth, ASPs) that benefited from association with
the previous authoritarian regime.
6
In many cases, conservatives inherited valuable
3
Edward Gibson, Class and Conservative Parties: Argentina in Comparative Perspective (Baltimore,
MD, 1996: John Hopkins University Press), p. 7, Barry Cannon, The Right in Latin America: Elite power,
hegemony and the struggle for the state 2016: Routledge). Gibson defines a party's core constituencies as
those sectors of society that are most important to its political agenda and resources and, thus, exert the
greatest influence on the party’s agenda, regardless of their importance in electoral terms.
4
Cannon, The Right in Latin America: Elite power, hegemony and the struggle for the state, Kent Eaton,
'New Strategies of the Latin American Right', in Juan Pablo Luna and Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser (eds.),
The resilience of the Latin American right, (2014: JHU Press), Juan Pablo Luna and Cristóbal Rovira
Kaltwasser, 'Introduction', ibid. (Baltimore, Kenneth M Roberts, 'Democracy, free markets and the
rightist dilemma', ibid.
5
Juan Pablo Luna and Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser, 'Introduction', ibid., p. 14, Kurt Weyland,
'Neopopulism and Neoliberalism in Latin America: how much affinity?', Third World Quarterly, (2003),
pp. 1095-1115. 466
6
James Loxton, 'Authoritarian sucessor parties and the new right in Latin America', in Steven Levitsky,
James Loxton, Brandon Van Dyck and Jorge I Domínguez (eds.), Challenges of party-building in Latin
America, (New York, 2016: Cambridge University Press), James Loxton and Scott Mainwaring, Life after
dictatorship: authoritarian successor parties worldwide (Cambridge, United Kingdom ; New York, NY,
2018: Cambridge University Press).. Loxton (2016) defines authoritarian successor parties as parties that
emerge from authoritarian regimes, but that operate after a transition to democracy.

3
resources from the dictatorship (e.g., a party brand or a territorial organisation), which
helped them to survive and even thrive under democracy.
7
In this article, I build on the literature on authoritarian successor parties to explain
why strong and highly institutionalised conservative parties emerged after the democratic
transition in some Latin American countries but not in others. By institutionalised parties,
I mean parties displaying the following properties: i) permanent and stable organisations,
embodying a stable and well established set of decision rules and procedures
(routinisation); ii) substantial commitment of party members to the organisation, beyond
their own personal interests (value infusion); iii) strong party brand and consistent
ideological positioning (external institutionalisation).
8
Although I agree with previous research in that parties’ roots in authoritarianism
are an important element in the explanation of conservative party consolidation, I argue
that authoritarian inheritance in isolation is insufficient to produce strong and enduring
conservative parties. This is especially so because parties’ roots in the authoritarian past
involve both benefits, in terms of access to resources, and reputational costs associated
with the systematic violation of political and civil rights by the authoritarian regime.
Regime insiders may prefer to obfuscate their authoritarian past and, thus, avoid such
costs by defecting to new parties or by eschewing the construction of parties and party
brands altogether, developing instead non-partisan, individualistic ties to voters.
The central claim of the article is that strong conservative parties were most likely
to consolidate in the post-transition period where, in addition to inheriting valuable
7
Loxton and Mainwaring, Life after dictatorship: authoritarian successor parties worldwide..
8
Thomas Kestler, Juan Bautista Lucca and Silvana Krause, 'Timing, sequences and new party
institutionalization in South America', Zeitschrift für Vergleichende Politikwissenschaft, (2019), pp. 1-23,
Steven Levitsky, 'Institutionalization and Peronism: the concept, the case and the case for unpacking the
concept', Party Politics, Vol. 4, No. 1 (1998), pp. 77-92, Vicky Randall and Lars Svåsand, 'Party
institutionalization in new democracies', ibid.Vol. 8, (2002), pp. 5-29..

4
political assets from the dictatorship, they experienced ideologically-driven, violent
conflict involving the supporters and opponents of the dictatorship during their early
years. Party-building incentives should be greatest when authoritarian incumbents
perceive these conflicts as a threat to their values and ideals and to their own political
survival, thus fostering strong bonds among party members.
9
Violent political conflict,
such as civil war, persecution or assassination of party leaders, breeds retrospective
loyalty and facilitates the development of durable and clearly distinctive identities based
on members’ shared memories and history.
10
On the other hand, where political conflict
during the dictatorship or the transition period did not play a relevant role in shaping
members’ identities throughout the party’s early years, right-wing political actors had
much weaker incentives to invest in party-building and tended to opt instead for a short-
term electoral survival strategy, which resulted in much lower levels of
institutionalisation.
In terms of its scope conditions, the theory developed in this article applies to a
specific subset of right-wing parties, created throughout the authoritarian regime and the
transition period. Arguably, the latter face challenges and opportunities that are different
from those faced by parties created many years after the transition to democracy (or in
previous democratic eras). Thus, my theory does not apply to cases of conservative parties
created after a new, post-transition party system emerged. In these instances, the
opportunities and constraints faced by party founders tend to be substantially different,
because once parties occupy the policy space and mobilize previously unattached voters
(or rebuild partisan identities from previous democratic eras), new parties tend to have a
9
Steven R Levitsky and Lucan A Way, 'Beyond patronage: Violent struggle, ruling party cohesion, and
authoritarian durability', Perspectives on Politics, Vol. 10, No. 4 (2012), pp. 869-889.
10
Fernando Rosenblatt, Party vibrancy and democracy in Latin America (New York, NY, 2018: Oxford
University Press)..

5
harder time in obtaining electoral success. Transition periods offer greater opportunities
for political entrepreneurs, and especially so in those cases where authoritarian rulers
succeeded in weakening or erasing previously existing partisan attachments.
Based on the above criteria, the argument developed in this article applies to right-
wing parties created during the authoritarian regime or during the transition to democracy
in countries such as Argentina, El Salvador, Bolivia, Chile and Brazil. The theory can
account for variation in institutionalization across authoritarian successor parties (e.g.,
ARENA in El Salvador, ADN in Bolivia) and new right-wing parties lacking roots in the
authoritarian past and in previous democratic periods (e.g., PL in Brazil, UCEDE in
Argentina).
In terms of empirical strategy, I rely on a most-similar systems comparative
design. I compare two countries – Chile and Brazil – where conservative elites benefited
substantially from authoritarian inheritance. These two cases are similar in that the
military and their civilian supporters relied on the discretionary implementation of social
funds by regime allies at the subnational level to solidify clientelistic networks that would
later serve as the basis for the creation of competitive right-wing parties under democratic
rule.
11
Also, in both Chile and Brazil former regime insiders were able to negotiate the
transition in terms that were favourable to them and yet impose on the new democratic
regime a series of institutional biases that secured the overrepresentation of conservative
interests.
12
11
Frances Hagopian, Traditional politics and regime change in Brazil (Cambridge, UK, 1996:
Cambridge University Press), Carlos Huneeus, 'Derecha en el Chile después de Pinochet: el caso de la
Unión Democrata Independiente', The Kellogg Institute Working Papers, University of Notre Dame, No.
285 (2001).
12
Fernando Luiz Abrucio and David Samuels, 'A nova política dos governadores', Lua Nova: revista de
cultura e política, No. 40-41 (1997), pp. 137-166, Timothy J Power, Political right in postauthoritarian
Brazil: elites, institutions, and democratization (University Park, 2000: Penn State Press), Claudia Heiss

6
Despite these similarities, the degree of institutionalisation of the partisan right
substantially differed across cases. Whereas Chile’s major authoritarian successor party,
the Unión Demócrata Independiente (Democratic Independent Union, UDI), was
extremely successful in cultivating stable sources of electoral support, building an
enduring organisation and developing a party brand, in Brazil the former supporters of
the military regime failed to build strong parties. Instead, they dispersed across a myriad
of small, poorly institutionalised party organisations.
13
The article contributes to a recent literature that emphasises the importance of the
legacies of authoritarianism for party and party system institutionalisation.
14
It also
contributes to the literature on authoritarian successor parties in two aspects. First, the
article moves beyond the issue of electoral survival, focusing instead on party
institutionalisation. Moreover, I rely on a multidimensional approach to the
conceptualisation and measurement of party development that can adequately deal with
the oft-observed unevenness in party-building processes. For instance, parties may create
strong and stable organisations, and yet rely on weak brands.
15
Second, whereas the ASP
literature lacks a clear set of hypotheses to explain why authoritarian inheritance leads to
party-building and party institutionalisation in some cases but not in others, the theory
developed here indicates that the presence/absence of foundational conflicts shapes to a
and Patricio Navia, 'You win some, you lose some: Constitutional reforms in Chile's transition to
democracy', Latin American Politics and Society, Vol. 49, No. 3 (2007), pp. 163-190.
13
Huneeus, 'Derecha en el Chile después de Pinochet: el caso de la Unión Democrata Independiente',
Power, Political right in postauthoritarian Brazil: elites, institutions, and democratization.
14
Erica Frantz and Barbara Geddes, 'The legacy of dictatorship for democratic parties in Latin America',
Journal of Politics in Latin America, Vol. 8, No. 1 (2016), pp. 3-32, Allen Hicken and Erik Martínez
Kuhonta, 'Shadows from the past: Party system institutionalization in Asia', Comparative Political
Studies, Vol. 44, No. 5 (2011), pp. 572-597.
15
This lack of attention to the multidimensional nature of party development often leads to imprecise or
incorrect analyses of empirical cases. For instance, Levitsky et al classify Brazil’s PFL as a case of
successful party-building, whereas my empirical analysis demonstrates it is actually a case of failed
institutionalization. Levitsky, Loxton and Van Dyck, 'Introduction'.

7
great extent the impact of authoritarian inheritance on ASP institutionalisation.
16
Finally,
because the parties of the Latin American right have received scarce attention from
scholars, and even less so in comparative perspective, the article makes an empirical
contribution by comparing the trajectories of the major conservative parties of Brazil and
Chile.
17
DEFINING PARTY INSTUTIONALISATION
Most scholars tend to agree that Huntington’s definition has provided the basic
foundation for all subsequent studies of party institutionalisation
18
. He defines
institutionalisation as the process through which organisations acquire value and stability.
Value-infusion implies that party members will have a stake in the perpetuation of the
party organisation, even when its original goals change or are met. Poorly institutionalised
parties, on the other hand, are valued by their members only in instrumental terms. That
is, members will consider the party valuable as long as it is useful in achieving specific
goals.
19
In Huntington’s terms, an organisation institutionalises when it develops a value
of its own, independent of the tasks it may perform at any given time.
20
16
In fact, the literature fails to establish a clear causal hierarchy, in terms of the relative importance of
distinct dimensions of authoritarian inheritance. For instance, some authors argue that the economic
and/or national security achievements of the dictatorship are a crucial element in the explanation of ASP
survival and endurance, whereas others claim that authoritarian ruling parties are more likely to survive
when they rely on programmatic appeals. T. J. Cheng and Teh Fu Huang, 'Authoritarian Successor
Parties in South Korea and Taiwan: Authoritarian Inheritance, Organizational Adaptation, and Issue
Management', in James Loxton and Scott Mainwaring (eds.), Life after dictatorship: authoritarian
successor parties worldwide, (Cambridge, United Kingdom ; New York, NY, 2018: Cambridge
University Press), Michael K Miller, 'Don't Call It a Comeback: Autocratic Ruling Parties After
Democratization', British Journal of Political Science, (2019), pp. 1-25.
17
Luna and Kaltwasser, 'Introduction'.
18
Samuel P Huntington, Political order in changing societies (New Haven, 1968: Yale University
Press)..
19
Levitsky, 'Institutionalization and Peronism: the concept, the case and the case for unpacking the
concept'., p. 79
20
Huntington, Political order in changing societies., p. 68

8
The structural dimension of institutionalisation refers to the scope, density and
regularity of the interactions that constitute the party as a structure.
21
An institutionalised
party should have a stable organisational structure that is present throughout the
territory.
22
However, institutionalisation is not identical with the party’s development in
pure organisational terms. Rather, it requires the development of formal decision-rules
and participatory mechanisms to integrate members, factions and sub-units within the
party structure, thus leading to routinisation of behaviour.
23
Routinisation implies that
party leaders and members are constrained by a stable set of rules that cannot be easily
changed or circumvented.
24
Randall and Svasand argue in favour of further differentiating institutionalisation
into an internal and an external dimension.
25
The latter refers to the party’s relations with
voters and with the broader competitive environment. Building on Randall and Svasand’s
conceptual scheme, Kestler et al define external institutionalisation as the process through
which parties and differentiate themselves from other competitors, by occupying a clear
position in the ideological space, and develop stable links to voters, based on party
identification and “reification”.
26
The development of a distinctive party brand involves
a process of “reification”, through which the party’s existence becomes gradually
established in public imagination.
27
Party brand development and programmatic
consistency are closely related, because when a party adopts distinctive and consistent
policy positions over time, voters are more likely to develop a clear image of their
21
Randall and Svåsand, 'Party institutionalization in new democracies'. 243, p. 12
22
Matthias Basedau and Alexander Stroh, 'Measuring party institutionalization in developing countries: A
new research instrument applied to 28 African political parties', Giga Working Paper n. 60, (Berlin,
Germany, 2008).
23
Kestler, Lucca and Krause, 'Timing, sequences and new party institutionalization in South America'..
24
Levitsky, 'Institutionalization and Peronism: the concept, the case and the case for unpacking the
concept'..
25
Vicky Randall and Lars Svåsand, 'Party institutionalization in new democracies', ibid.Vol. 8, (2002),
pp. 5-29.
26
Kestler, Lucca and Krause, 'Timing, sequences and new party institutionalization in South America'.
27
Randall and Svåsand, 'Party institutionalization in new democracies'., p. 82

9
prototypical partisans and the brand becomes stronger. A strong brand, in turn, fosters
party identification, by allowing voters to more easily evaluate to what extent they
resemble the party’s prototypical partisan.
28
To sum up, my definition of party institutionalisation follows very closely the
conceptual scheme proposed by Randall and Svasand and revised by Kestler et al. It is
comprised of both an internal and external dimension. The internal dimension requires
routinisation and value infusion. The external dimension requires that parties differentiate
from their competitors through consistent ideological positioning and develop stable links
to voters based on party identification and reification.
POLITICAL CONFLICT UNEVEN PARTY INSTITUTIONALISATION AND
THE POLITICAL RIGHT
In post-transition Latin America, party institutionalisation has often proceeded
unevenly across parties, as the political right lagged behind left-wing and centrist parties.
In programmatic terms, right-wing parties across the region differ from both the left and
the centre in that they are much more likely to defend neoliberal reforms and a smaller
role for the state in the economic realm, at the same time they score high on moral
conservatism and thus oppose progressive policies on homosexuality, divorce and
abortion.
29
In some cases, however, conservative elites benefited from the legacy of military
rule to build strong party organisations. In these instances, authoritarian successor parties
28
Noam Lupu, Party brands in crisis: partisanship, brand dilution, and the breakdown of political
parties in Latin America (New York, NY, 2016: Cambridge University Press)., p. 12
29
Nina Wiesehomeier, 'The Meaning of Left-Right in Latin America: A Comparative View ', Kellogg
Working Paper, Vol. 370, (2010).

10
created by the incumbents of authoritarian regimes survived and even thrived after the
transition to democracy.
30
One important element in the success of authoritarian successor
parties under democratic rule is authoritarian inheritance. That is, conservative elites may
enjoy a substantial competitive advantage in the electoral arena by inheriting the political
assets – party brand, territorial organisation, sources of funding and clientelistic networks
- controlled by former authoritarian incumbents.
31
The comparative evidence gathered by
Levitsky, Loxton and Van Dyck in their edited collection actually indicates that all cases
of successful conservative party-building in post-transition Latin America resulted from
authoritarian inheritance.
32
Authoritarian inheritance facilitates party consolidation because it provides party
leaders with resources that facilitate the task of party-building. For instance, a
conservative party inheriting a large territorial organisation comprised of several local
party offices in all regions of the country would be required to invest much less time and
resources to build a nationalised and stable organisational structure under democracy than
any other party needing to build a new organisation from the ground up. Authoritarian
inheritance can also facilitate the long-term task of building a strong party brand. When
authoritarian regimes provide goods that people value, such as economic growth or
political stability, they may be able to obtain broad popular support, despite political
repression.
33
In other words, by associating themselves with the political and economic
achievements of the dictatorship, authoritarian successor parties can more rapidly build a
30
Loxton, 'Authoritarian sucessor parties and the new right in Latin America'.
31
Ibid., James Loxton, 'Authoritarian Sucessor Parties Worldwide', in James Loxton and Scott
Mainwaring (eds.), Life after dictatorship: authoritarian successor parties worldwide, (2018: Cambridge
University Press).
32
Levitsky, Loxton and Van Dyck, 'Introduction'.
33
James Loxton, 'Authoritarian sucessor parties and the new right in Latin America', ibid. , p. 254.

11
distinctive party brand than any newly created conservative party lacking roots in the
authoritarian past.
34
Although dictatorships vary widely in what concerns their performance and their
ability to provide valuable political assets, ASPs will typically enjoy substantial
competitive advantages at the critical moment of the democratic transition when new
parties are being formed. These early advantages tend to cumulate over time, thus
allowing former regime insiders to more effectively survive to electoral competition from
ideologically similar parties disputing the support of the same constituencies. However,
although parties’ roots in authoritarianism are an important element in the explanation of
successful conservative party-building, authoritarian inheritance in isolation is unlikely
to produce strong parties. Former regimes insiders may or may not mobilise the resources
inherited from the authoritarian regime, such as a party brand and a territorial
organisation, to create institutionalised parties under democratic rule.
To the extent that authoritarian regimes exclude the opposition from the state,
either by not holding elections or by holding uncompetitive, incumbent-biased elections,
the parties created by dictators are likely to monopolize access to patronage resources.
For this reason, authoritarian ruling parties will often recruit its members
disproportionately among office seeking, pragmatic activists who seek a political career
or government patronage.
35
Due to their privileged access to state resources, authoritarian
successor parties will often emerge as opportunistic coalitions whose members are
strongly motivated by the rewards of political office.
36
Moreover, parties’ roots in the
34
Cheng and Huang, 'Authoritarian Successor Parties in South Korea and Taiwan: Authoritarian
Inheritance, Organizational Adaptation, and Issue Management', James Loxton, 'Authoritarian Sucessor
Parties Worldwide', ibid.
35
Frantz and Geddes, 'The legacy of dictatorship for democratic parties in Latin America', Brandon Van
Dyck, 'The Paradox of Adversity: New left party survival and collapse in Brazil, Mexico and Argentina',
in Steven Levitsky, James Loxton, Brandon Van Dyck and Jorge I Domínguez (eds.), Challenges of
party-building in Latin America, (New York, 2016: Cambridge University Press)., p. 136-137
36
Frantz and Geddes, 'The legacy of dictatorship for democratic parties in Latin America'., p. 24

12
authoritarian past involve both benefits, especially in terms of access to resources, and
the “authoritarian baggage”, understood as the reputational costs associated with the
political legacies of the dictatorship. In general, the systematic violation of political and
civil rights by the authoritarian regime will likely foster strong negative feelings among
voters, including among those who approve of the regime’s economic achievements,
therefore imposing relevant reputational and electoral costs on ASPs.
37
Former supporters
of the dictatorship may prefer to avoid such costs by defecting from the regime party or
by developing non-partisan ties to voters (e.g., by delivering particularistic, material
benefits to local constituencies), especially when they expect to obtain short term electoral
gains.
In order to explain why right-wing elites in post-transition Latin America built
strong parties in some cases but not in others, one needs to look at factors other than the
availability of resources inherited from the dictatorship. I argue that authoritarian
successor parties are most likely to institutionalise when party members develop a deeply
ingrained, common identity as a result of ideologically-driven, violent conflict involving
the supporters and opponents of the dictatorship at the time of the party’s foundation or
during its early years of existence. This hypothesis builds on the literature that has
highlighted the key role of foundational political struggles in the development of strong
political parties.
38
In the case of ASPs, these conflicts usually oppose the incumbent
authoritarian elite to opposition groups. Party-building incentives will vary not only
depending on the actual duration and intensity of conflict, but also, and even more
important, depending on whether authoritarian incumbents believe that these conflicts
37
Loxton, 'Authoritarian Sucessor Parties Worldwide', (, p. 14.
38
Levitsky, Loxton and Van Dyck, 'Introduction', Levitsky and Way, 'Beyond patronage: Violent
struggle, ruling party cohesion, and authoritarian durability', Dan Slater and Nicholas Rush Smith, 'The
power of counterrevolution: elitist origins of political order in postcolonial Asia and Africa', American
Journal of Sociology, Vol. 121, No. 5 (2016), pp. 1472-1516..

13
represent a real threat to the values and ideals of the regime and to their own political
survival. Writing on dominant party endurance in Africa and Asia, Slater and Smith make
a similar point: elites’ disposition to engage in counterrevolutionary party-building efforts
is conditional on the perception that those engaging in contentious mobilisation pose a
credible threat to their elite status.
39
Violent political conflict is especially effective in producing retrospective loyalty
and in creating durable and clearly distinctive partisan identities because, very often, it
involves trauma, understood as a dramatic political experience shared by party members,
such as persecution or assassination of party leaders. Trauma fosters members’ sense of
common identity and it facilitates cooperation among individuals, while at the same time
reducing the potential for defection.
40
Overall, where party members have experienced violent, polarizing conflict, they
are more likely to frame choices about cooperation or defection in terms of loyalty rather
than material calculations.
41
Moreover, polarizing conflict hardens partisan boundaries
and fosters ideologically based voting.
42
In these settings, defectors have a greater
likelihood of being punished by voters and, therefore, regime insiders have greater
incentives to stick with authoritarian successor parties and invest in their consolidation.
43
39
Slater and Smith, 'The power of counterrevolution: elitist origins of political order in postcolonial Asia
and Africa'.
40
Rosenblatt, Party vibrancy and democracy in Latin America., p. 41.
41
Levitsky and Way, 'Beyond patronage: Violent struggle, ruling party cohesion, and authoritarian
durability', p. 871.
42
Simon Bornschier, 'Historical polarization and representation in South American party systems, 1900–
1990', British Journal of Political Science, Vol. 49, No. 1 (2019), pp. 153-179, Matthew Singer, 'Elite
polarization and the electoral impact of left-right placements: Evidence from Latin América, 1995-2009',
Latin American Research Review, (2016), pp. 174-194.
43
Although the literature does mention that these parties may inherit a “source of cohesion” rooted in past
conflict, this is a relatively underdeveloped dimension in the ASP model that is not given any theoretical
precedence relatively to the other dimensions. See for instance Loxton, 'Authoritarian Sucessor Parties
Worldwide', p. 14.

14
In contrast, where foundational, early political struggles were absent or they did
not involve ideologically-driven conflict and/or violent contestation perceived as
threatening to authoritarian incumbents, one would expect former regime insiders to face
much weaker incentives to invest in party-building. In these settings, the parties created
by authoritarian regimes tended to recruit mostly careerist politicians motivated by the
rewards of political office rather than ideologically-motivated activists. Therefore,
authoritarian elites were likely to pursue a short-term electoral survival strategy, avoiding
both the costs of direct association with the military regime and the costs of long-term
party-building.
CONSERVATIVE PARTY INSTITUTIONALISATION AND
AUTHORITARIAN SUCCESSOR PARTIES IN CHILE AND BRAZIL
I apply the theoretical framework outlined in the previous section to further an
understanding of the distinct trajectories of right-wing parties in Chile and Brazil. The
party systems that emerged in these two countries after the democratic transition have
been among the most stable in Latin America, different from the many instances of party
system erosion and breakdown throughout the region.
44
From 2014 onwards, however,
levels of electoral volatility have substantially increased in Brazil. In Chile levels of
volatility are on the rise since 2017
45
46
. Chile and Brazil also differ in that some of the
major Chilean centre and left-wing parties are extremely old organisations that emerged
44
Juan Pablo Luna and David Altman, 'Uprooted but stable: Chilean parties and the concept of party
system institutionalization', Latin American Politics and Society, Vol. 53, No. 2 (2011), pp. 1-28, Maria
do Socorro Sousa Braga and Jairo Pimentel Jr, 'Os partidos políticos brasileiros realmente não
importam?', Opinião Pública, Vol. 17, No. 2 (2011), pp. 271-303, Scott Mainwaring, Party Systems in
Latin America (New York, NY, 2018: Cambridge University Press)..
45
Mainwaring, Party Systems in Latin America.
46
Electoral volatility in Brazil’s lower chamber elections averaged 28% between 2014-2018 as compared
to 12% in the previous three elections (2002-2010). (Author’s calculations based on official electoral
data obtained from www.tse.jus.gov.br ).

15
before World War II, whereas virtually all the largest Brazilian parties did not exist
previous to the authoritarian regime (1964-1985).
In spite of these differences, the major right-wing parties in both countries are new
parties, in the sense that they organised throughout the final days of the dictatorship and
the transition period and they developed, to a substantial extent, independently from the
partisan loyalties that existed in previous democratic eras. Moreover, in both Brazil and
Chile the political right benefited extensively from association with the authoritarian
regime.
Brazil’s bureaucratic-authoritarian regime was peculiar in that the military
decided to maintain a façade of political pluralism, by creating a two-party system formed
by the ARENA, which represented the authoritarian government, and the opposition
MDB. Institutional rules were heavily biased in favour of the pro-military ARENA, which
left the MDB with the role of a party of largely symbolic protest.
47
During the democratic transition, the party of the military government, now called
Partido Democrático Social (PDS, Social Democratic Party) split in two due to factional
disputes on the nomination of the regime’s presidential candidate in indirect elections to
be held in 1985. A dissident PDS faction comprised of governors from the Northeast
region created the Partido da Frente Liberal (Liberal Front Party, PFL). The PDS and the
PFL not only survived to democratic competition, but they also succeeded in electing
large delegations to the two chambers of the Brazilian congress at least until the early
2000s.
48
47
Alfred C Stepan, Authoritarian Brazil: Origins, Policies, and Future. Edited by Alfred Stepan (New
Haven, 1973: Yale University Press).
48
Power, Political right in postauthoritarian Brazil: elites, institutions, and democratization, Ricardo
Luiz Mendes Ribeiro, 'Decadência longe do poder: refundação e crise do PFL', Revista de Sociologia e
política, Vol. 22, No. 49 (2014), pp. 5-37.

16
Different from the Brazilian case, Chile’s authoritarian regime banned parties and
elections. In the early 1980s, however, general Pinochet started working with his closest
allies in order to build a political party that could defend the regime’s moral and economic
values. In 1983, Jaime Guzmán, a former political aide to Pinochet, created the Unión
Democrata Independiente (UDI). The party originated from Gremialista movement led
by a group of conservative intellectuals who emerged from a student movement at the
Catholic University of Chile.
49
Since the early years of democratic rule, the UDI has disputed the conservative
vote with the Renovación Nacional (National Renovation, RN), which was created in
1987. Although the RN did benefit from authoritarian inheritance in that several of its
elected representatives had been mayors under military rule, it had a much more weak
connection to the military regime than the UDI and its leaders had a more ambiguous
position with regard to the legacies of the dictatorship.
50
Moreover, part of the early
generation of RN leaders were former members of the National Party that competed in
elections in the 1960s and early 1970s and, thus, the party had roots in the previous
democratic period as well.
51
Measuring the institutionalisation of the partisan right: cross-country and within-country
comparisons
49
Huneeus, 'Derecha en el Chile después de Pinochet: el caso de la Unión Democrata Independiente',
Loxton, 'Authoritarian sucessor parties and the new right in Latin America', (, Peter Siavelis, 'Chile: The
Right's evolution from democracy to authoritarianism and back again', in Juan Pablo Luna and Cristóbal
Rovira Kaltwasser (eds.), The resilience of the Latin American right, (Baltimore, 2014: JHU Press).
50
Emmanuelle Barozet and Marcel Aubry, 'De las reformas internas a la candidatura presidencial
autónoma: los nuevos caminos institucionales de Renovación Nacional', Política, No. 45 (2005), pp. 165-
196, Huneeus, 'Derecha en el Chile después de Pinochet: el caso de la Unión Democrata Independiente'.
51
Siavelis, 'Chile: The Right's evolution from democracy to authoritarianism and back again'

17
Below I present party institutionalisation scores for each of the major right-wing
parties in Brazil and Chile. I also calculated scores for the major left and centre parties
in both countries, to allow for inter-bloc comparisons. By “major parties”, I mean all
parties that obtained, on average, at least 3% of the national vote in the four lower
chamber elections held immediately after the transition to democracy.
52
The ideological
classification of parties was created by using the 2006, 2011, 2015 and 2018 waves of the
Political Representation, Executives and Political Parties Survey (PREPPS).
53
I obtained
data for the period previous to 2006 by relying on the Brazilian Legislative Surveys (BLS)
and on Baker and Greene’s extended ideological classification of Latin American
parties.
54
I classified parties by defining equally sized, seven-point intervals for both the
left and the right categories within the 20-point scale created by Wiesihomeier and
Benoit.
55
The centre was defined as a residual category. Parties were classified according
to their mean ideology scores over time.
I estimated scores ranging from zero to one for each of the dimensions of
institutionalisation and for each of the major left, right and centre parties. I measured the
internal dimensions of institutionalisation – value infusion and routinisation – relying on
the comparative dataset created by Bolleyer and Ruth based on the Democratic
Accountability and Linkages Project (DALP).
56
I extended their original
operationalisation by calculating separate measures to account for brand recognition and
parties’ programmatic consistency. Aggregate external institutionalisation was calculated
52
I focus on the major parties because these are their parties for which there is available data on all the
relevant dimensions of party institutionalization.
53
Nina Wiesehomeier and Kenneth Benoit, 'Presidents, parties, and policy competition', The Journal of
Politics, Vol. 71, No. 4 (2009), pp. 1435-1447.
54
Andy Baker and Kenneth F Greene, 'The Latin American left's mandate: free-market policies and issue
voting in new democracies', World Politics, Vol. 63, No. 1 (2011), pp. 43-77.
55
Wiesehomeier and Benoit, 'Presidents, parties, and policy competition'.
56
Nicole Bolleyer and Saskia P Ruth, 'Elite investments in party institutionalization in new democracies:
a two-dimensional approach', ibid.Vol. 80, No. 1 (2018), pp. 288-302.

18
as a simple mean of the scores obtained in each of these dimensions. I operationalised
programmatic consistency by relying on DALP survey questions on parties’ positions on
distinct issue dimensions. Brand recognition was calculated by relying on survey data on
party identification. The operationalisation of each dimension is explained in detail in
Appendix A.
A summary institutionalisation score was calculated for each party as the
arithmetic mean of three dimensions: value infusion, routinisation and external
institutionalisation. Results for right-wing parties in Brazil and Chile are presented in
table 1. Recall that Brazil’s authoritarian successor parties have changed their original
names. The PFL went through rebranding in 2007 to become the Democrats (DEM). The
PDS experienced a series of fusions with other right-wing parties before it adopted its
current name in 2003: Progressive Party (PP). Throughout the article, I utilise the original
names when I analyse the circumstances of their foundation and initial development.
Otherwise, I use the original names followed by the most recent denominations to refer
to these two parties (e.g., PFL/DEM). The same procedure is applied to the Liberal Party
(PL), which changed its name to Party of the Republic (PR) in 2006.

19
Table 1 – BRAZIL AND CHILE – PARTY INSTITUTIONALIZATION SCORES FOR
MAJOR RIGHT-WING PARTIES*
Country/
party
Value
infusion
Rout.
Program.
Consist.
Brand
recognition
External
Inst.
Overall
Inst.
Brazil
PFL/DEM
0.37
0.81
0.59
0.19
0.39
0.52
PDS/PP
0.20
0.50
0.53
0.10
0.31
0.34
PL/PR
0.25
0.51
0.58
0.14
0.36
0.37
PTB
0.54
0.66
0.58
0.24
0.41
0.54
Mean
0.34
0.62
0.57
0.17
0.37
0.44
Chile
RN
0.50
0.63
0.65
0.70
0.68
0.60
UDI
0.61
0.91
0.65
0.42
0.53
0.68
Mean
0.56
0.77
0.65
0.56
0.60
0.64
Sources: DALP 2008/2009; Bolleyer and Ruth (2018); LAPOP 2006; CEP 2005. Author’s
elaboration.
* Authoritarian successor parties are in bold.
As seen in the table, Brazil’s largest right-wing parties are, on average,
substantially less institutionalised than the parties of the Chilean right. Within the group
of authoritarian successor parties, the UDI exhibits the highest aggregate
institutionalisation score (0.68), with a difference of 0.17 and 0.34 points to the PFL/DEM
and the PDS/PP respectively. Brazil’s authoritarian successor parties obtain some of the
lowest scores in the value infusion dimension, a pattern similar to that observed for the
Party of the Republic (PR). These results indicate that the partisan right in Brazil has
mostly failed to create organisations that have a value of their own, independent from any
specific tasks they may perform.
There are also substantial differences between Chilean and Brazilian right-wing
parties in what concerns the development of distinctive party brands. The extremely low
scores obtained on the brand recognition dimension indicate that the political right in

20
Brazil has failed to cultivate mass partisan attachments. In Chile, although voters’
identification with all parties has steeply declined since the return to democracy, both the
RN and the UDI have been able to count on the support of a small yet significant core of
partisan voters.
57
Note, however, that the high score calculated for the RN on brand
recognition likely reflects the fact that the party inherited the rural strongholds of the old
National Party and does not necessarily indicate higher elite investment in brand
development in the recent democratic period.
58
Table 1 also indicates that the institutionalisation of the Brazilian right has been
rather uneven. In particular, Brazil’s major authoritarian successor party, the PFL/DEM,
scores substantially better in the routinization dimension than in any other dimension.
The score of 0.81 is the second highest among all parties selected for analysis. The UDI
is also more institutionalised in the routinisation dimension, but the differences between
the latter and the other dimensions are not as substantial.
One potential difficulty involved in the comparison of levels of party
institutionalisation across countries is that part of the variation showed in table 1 may
relate to fixed or mostly invariant country characteristics, such as the electoral system and
other institutions that may either increase or decrease politicians’ incentives to build
strong parties. For instance, it could be argued that the differences in the
institutionalisation of the partisan right in Brazil and Chile reflect broader differences in
the institutionalisation of the party system as a whole. In particular, one influential
interpretation of Brazil’s party system argues that the country’s institutional mix, which
combines robust federalism and open-list PR with extremely high district magnitudes,
57
Patricio Navia and Rodrigo Osorio, 'It's the Christian Democrats' Fault: Declining Political
Identification in Chile, 1957–2012', Canadian Journal of Political Science/Revue canadienne de science
politique, Vol. 48, No. 4 (2015), pp. 815-838.
58
Rosenblatt, Party vibrancy and democracy in Latin America., p. 106

21
fragments the party system and fosters individualistic campaign strategies.
59
In Chile, in
contrast, the centrifugal tendencies associated with open-list PR that are detrimental to
party development would be likely reduced by the binominal system that existed until
2015 and by the lack of politically autonomous state governments.
If this interpretation were correct, we should not find substantial within-country
differences in levels of party institutionalisation. That is, if the political right is poorly
institutionalised in Brazil because the electoral system and federal arrangements are
inimical to strong parties, then left and centre parties should also exhibit similarly low
levels of institutionalisation. Moreover, within-country differences should be much less
substantial than cross-country differences in institutionalisation.
Figure 1 below shows the mean institutionalisation scores in each dimension for
the major right, left and centre parties in Brazil. The left parties included in the analysis
are the PT (Workers’ Party), the PSB (Brazilian Socialist Party) and the PDT (Democratic
Labour Parties). The centre bloc includes the PSDB (Brazilian Social Democratic Party)
and the PMDB (Party of the Brazilian Democratic Movement).
Figure 1 - Brazil: Mean Party Institutionalisation by Ideological Bloc
59
David Samuels and Cesar Zucco Jr, 'Party-Building in Brazil', in Steven Levitsky, James Loxton,
Brandon Van Dyck and Jorge I Domínguez (eds.), Challenges of party-building in Latin America, (New
York, 2016: Cambridge University Press)..

22
Sources: DALP 2008/2009; Bolleyer and Ruth (2018); LAPOP 2006; CEP 2005. Author’s
elaboration.
The figure reveals that Brazil’s major right-wing parties are, on average,
substantially less institutionalised than both centre and left parties. These differences are
especially large regarding the value infusion dimension. When one looks at individual
scores for Brazilian parties (presented in table A.1 of the appendix), the Workers’ Party
(PT) appears as the most institutionalised party, which is consistent with most scholarly
evaluations. The parties of the right, on the other hand, figure among the least
institutionalised.
Figure 2 presents average institutionalisation scores for the major Chilean parties,
grouped by ideological bloc. The centre parties included in the analysis are the PDC
(Christian Democratic Party), PPD (Popular Democratic Party) and PRSD (Radical
Social Democratic Party). Because the DALP survey did not include the Chilean
Communist Party, data for the left bloc refers only to the Socialist Party (PS).

23
Figure 2: Chile - Mean Party Institutionalisation by Ideological Bloc
Sources: DALP 2008/2009; Bolleyer and Ruth (2018); LAPOP 2006; CEP 2005. Author’s
elaboration.
Figure 2 shows that average levels of institutionalisation for Chilean right-wing
parties are close to country mean scores. In the case of Brazil, in contrast, the political
right scores below the party system average on all dimensions, as seen in figure 1. The
Socialist Party, which is the only party in the left category, is the most institutionalised
party in Chile. This is not too surprising considering the PS is the second oldest Chilean
party.
60
On average, Brazil’s centre and left parties obtain aggregate institutionalisation
scores similar to country mean scores estimated for Chile. This indicates that cross-
country differences in institutionalisation are not especially substantial when one controls
for ideological bloc. In particular, because Brazil’s right-wing parties are significantly
less institutionalised than both left and centre parties, we can rest assured that differences
60
The Socialist Party was created in 1933, twenty-one years after the foundation of the Chilean
Communist Party in 1912.

24
in the institutionalisation of the political right in Brazil and Chile are not a mere result of
system-level differences associated with electoral and federal institutions.
POLITICAL CONFLICT, AUTHORITARIAN INHERITANCE AND
CONSERVATIVE PARTY-BUILDING IN CHILE AND BRAZIL
I argue that differences in institutionalisation among the major right-wing parties
in Brazil and Chile are very strongly related to the interplay of authoritarian inheritance
and levels of perceived and actual political conflict throughout parties’ foundation and
early years. Although it is hard to operationalize the saliency of conflict along the
authoritarian-democratic divide for parties’ early development, I account for systematic
differences across cases by looking at : a) the occurrence of violent, ideologically-
motivated political conflict throughout the party’s foundation and early years; b)
authoritarian elites’ motivation to create the party; c) the positions adopted by party
members in its early yeas with regard to the authoritarian-democratic divide. When ASPs
are founded in a context of polarising, violent conflict and, in addition that, the foundation
of the party is directly or indirectly related to conflict between the opponents and
supporters of the authoritarian regime, one would expect the authoritarian-democratic
divide to be highly relevant for defining the party’s identity and values. Moreover, when
party members adopt clear and consistent positions in favour of defending the legacies
and the values of the authoritarian regime, thus differentiating clearly from the opposition,
this is yet another evidence of the saliency of the authoritarian-democratic cleavage for
the party’s early development.
In the Brazilian case, the electoral successes of the opposition and the regime’s
decaying legitimacy triggered a slow and carefully controlled political liberalisation,

25
starting in the Geisel presidency (1974-1979).
61
Brazil’s liberalisation culminated in a
transition to civilian rule through an indirect presidential election in 1985, within an
electoral college dominated by conservatives. Despite the massive demonstrations that
took the streets of Brazil’s major cities between 1983 and 1984, a constitutional
amendment that would have instituted direct presidential elections by November 1984
did not pass in the lower chamber.
62
Brazil’s authoritarian successor parties emerged mostly because of factional,
disputes within the pro-military party, the PDS, regarding the nomination of the regime’s
presidential candidate. A dissident PDS group, formed mostly by governors from North-
eastern states created the Liberal Front Party (PFL), as reaction to the nomination of Paulo
Maluf as the PDS candidate.
63
Relying on archival data and interviews, Ribeiro found
that a central motivation for the creation of the PFL was the fact that Maluf, in order to
be nominated as the PDS presidential candidate, bypassed state governors and state party
leaders, and bargained directly with the delegates that would vote in the national
convention. Fearing that Maluf’s victory in the electoral college would threaten their
control over regional party branches, various PDS governors decided to leave the party
and work together to defeat the regime’s presidential candidate.
64
The PFL founders sought to distance themselves from the authoritarian regime by
sealing the so-called “Democratic Alliance” in support of the opposition candidate in the
1985 indirect presidential elections, Tancredo Neves
65
. As it became clear that the
61
Thomas E. Skidmore, 'Brazil's Slow Road to Democratization: 1974-1985', in Alfred C Stepan (ed.),
Democratizing Brazil: problems of transition and consolidation, (New York, 1989: Oxford University
Press ).
62
Ibid., p. 30
63
Power, Political right in postauthoritarian Brazil: elites, institutions, and democratization., p. 67
64
Ricardo Luiz Mendes Ribeiro, 'PFL: do PDS ao PSD', Doctoral Dissertation. Department of Political
Science. Universidade de São Paulo, São Paulo., 2016, p. 52-54.
65
Denise Paiva Ferreira, PFL x PMDB: marchas e contramarchas (1982-2000) (Goiânia, 2002: Editora
Alternativa),.

26
PMDB-PFL alliance had the votes to win, politicians affiliated with the party of the
military regime migrated massively to the PFL and even to the PMDB. In the first years
of the democratic regime, the authoritarian elite dispersed across several right-wing
parties, although a substantial share of the ARENA cohort chose the PFL.
66
67
Overall, the organisation of Brazil’s authoritarian successor parties occurred in a
context of low levels of conflict between authoritarian incumbents and the opposition to
the regime. Demonstrations in favour of direct elections in 1984 were mostly pacific and
the few episodes of political violence throughout the transition resulted mostly from
military hard-liner’s resistance to the opening of the regime.
68
Whereas in Chile left-wing
parties had created strong roots in society, mobilising voters along class lines before the
1973 coup, the Brazilian left was rather weak in organisational terms, and especially so
outside the major urban centres.
69
Moreover, the major left parties in Brazil were rather
moderate in comparison with Salvador Allende’s Popular Unity coalition, and Marxist
parties obtained only a tiny portion of the national vote by the early 1960s. By the mid-
1970s, left guerrillas had been decimated or demobilised by the Brazilian military regime.
The legal opposition organised within the MDB (later renamed “PMDB”) was largely
comprised of moderate politicians.
70
66
Timothy Power, 'The Contrasting Trajectories of Brazil's Two Authoritarian Sucessor Parties', in James
Loxton and Scott Mainwaring (eds.), Life after dictatorship: authoritarian successor parties worldwide,
(Cambridge, United Kingdom ; New York, NY, 2018: Cambridge University Press)., p. 234
67
Maria do Carmo Campello de Souza, 'The Brazilian "New Republic": Under the "Sword of Damocles"',
in Alfred C Stepan (ed.), Democratizing Brazil: problems of transition and consolidation, (New York,
1989: Oxford University Press)., p. 355-56
68
Skidmore, 'Brazil's Slow Road to Democratization: 1974-1985'.
69
Gláucio Ary Dillon Soares, A democracia interrompida (Rio de Janeiro, 2001: FGV Editora), Kenneth
M Roberts, Deepening democracy?: the modern left and social movements in Chile and Peru (Stanford,
CA, 1998: Stanford University Press).
70
Marcelo Ridenti, 'Oposições à ditadura: Resistência e Integração', in Daniel Aarão Reis (ed.), A
ditadura que mudou o Brasil, (2014: Editora Schwarcz-Companhia das Letras).

27
The authoritarian elite never perceived the opponents of the dictatorship as
representing an actual challenge to their fundamental interests throughout the transition
process.
71
Indeed, by the end of the regime in the early 1980s, military strategists were
convinced that the return to multipartyism would fragment the opposition among several
small parties, whereas pro-regime forces would hold together, thus favouring continuity
between authoritarian and civilian rule.
72
The unimportance of ideological conflicts between authoritarian incumbents and
the opposition in shaping the identity of Brazil’s major authoritarian successor party -
the PFL – is evident in the fact that the party’s initial manifestos emphasized its
commitment to democratic values and principles, and to the full restoration of democracy,
in a clear attempt at denying the party’s authoritarian roots.
73
But the party’s program was
inconsistent with its actual behaviour in the Constituent Assembly (1987-1988), when the
PFL and other conservative parties supported controversial military policies such as
unpublished decrees and a blanket refusal to acknowledge human rights abuses after
1964.
74
This inconsistency between the party’s program and its legislative behaviour was
also evident in the case of the PDS/PP. Although the PDS/PP opposed the PMDB-PFL
government (1985-1990) after being defeated in indirect presidential elections, it pursued
a systematic strategy of ideological obfuscation by adopting programs and manifestos
that belied its conservative and authoritarian roots.
75
71
Guillermo O’Donnell, 'Transitions, continuities, and paradoxes', in Scott Mainwaring and Guillermo
O’Donnell (eds.), Issues in democratic consolidation: The new South American democracies in
comparative perspective, (Notre Dame, IND., 1992: University of Notre Dame Press), pp. 17-56, Maria
do Carmo Campello de Souza, 'The Brazilian "New Republic": Under the "Sword of Damocles" '.
72
Skidmore, 'Brazil's Slow Road to Democratization: 1974-1985', p. 22
73
Paiva, 'PFLxPMDB: Marchas e Contramarchas (1982-2000) ', p. 58.
74
Scott Mainwaring, Rachel Meneguello and Timothy Joseph Power, Partidos conservadores no Brasil
contemporâneo: quais são, o que defendem, quais são suas bases (Rio de Janeiro, 2000: Paz e Terra).
75
I discuss the case of the PDS/PP in greater detail in the following section.

28
In the case of Chile, the Chilean Communist and Socialist parties had been very
successful in building a strong grassroots organisation in poor urban neighbourhoods that
proved to be extraordinarily resilient throughout the dictatorship.
76
Although party
competition in post-transition Chile has been mostly centripetal, the party system
organised around a regime cleavage opposing supporters and opponents of Pinochet,
whereas in Brazil such divisions were largely absent.
77
By the early 1980s, the regime faced a major economic crisis: in 1982 and 1983,
GDP decreased 13.4% and 3.5% respectively. This severe economic downturn led to the
eruption of mass protests against the Pinochet government that were brutally repressed
78
.
The active participation of the Marxist left in the organisation of the protests challenged
the military’s claim to have reshaped loyalties in Chile. This period also witnessed an
upsurge in left insurrectionary activities, as the Communist party decided to join forces
with the members of the urban guerrilla group MIR (Movement of the Revolutionary
Left).
79
It was in this context of economic crisis, reorganisation of the opposition and
violent political conflict that the Gremialista movement decided to create the Union
Demócrata Independiente (UDI). The founders of UDI understood formation of their
party as an essentially defensive act. UDI party leaders interviewed by Loxton said they
were convinced, at the time, that the project of the military regime was under threat, due
to Pinochet’s decision to introduce more statist economic policies and initiate a political
76
Kenneth M Roberts, Deepening democracy?: the modern left and social movements in Chile and Peru
1998: Stanford University Press), Cathy Lisa Schneider, 'Violence, identity and spaces of contention in
Chile, Argentina and Colombia', Social Research, (2000), pp. 773-802.
77
Timothy Power, 'The Contrasting Trajectories of Brazil's Two Authoritarian Sucessor Parties', Mariano
Torcal and Scott Mainwaring, 'The political recrafting of social bases of party competition: Chile, 1973–
95', British Journal of Political Science, Vol. 33, No. 01 (2003), pp. 55-84.
78
Renato Martins, 'Chile: a democracia e os limites do consenso', Lua Nova: revista de cultura e política,
No. 49 (2000), pp. 65-85.
79
Schneider, 'Violence, identity and spaces of contention in Chile, Argentina and Colombia'.

29
opening in response to the economic crisis of 1982-1983.
80
UDI founders strongly
defended the continuity of the regime’s neoliberal economic policies, and they were in
favour of a transition to a “protected democracy” that would secure military tutelage over
civilian authorities. Thus, UDI’s creation was understood by party founders as a reaction
against a series of political and economic events that threatened the basic values of the
Gremialistas and their own political survival. They feared that political liberalisation
would result in a return to the pre-coup party system, an outcome that was unacceptable
in their view.
81
Societal polarisation and ideological conflict shaped the UDI’s identity to a very
substantial extent. The party’s founders viewed themselves as “political warriors”
fighting against Marxism. The killing of Senator Jaime Guzmán by leftist extremists in
1991 reinforced this self-perception.
82
Because Guzmán had a crucial role in establishing
the party’s worldview, his assassination marked a whole generation of UDI activists. This
shared, traumatic experience contributed to reinforce members’ loyalty to the party,
fostering a sense of common identity.
83
Whereas the UDI’s early development was strongly shaped by political violence
and by ideological conflict opposing supporters and opponents of the authoritarian
regime, these factors had little if any relevance in the case of the National Renovation
(RN). The party was first organised as a political front that included several right-wing
groups in preparation for the 1988 plebiscite that would decide on the continuity of
Pinochet’s rule for an additional term.
84
The right-wing coalition included the UDI, the
80
Loxton, 'Authoritarian sucessor parties and the new right in Latin America'.
81
James Ivor Loxton, 'Authoritarian inheritance and conservative party-building in Latin America', 2014.,
p. 177, Heiss and Navia, 'You win some, you lose some: Constitutional reforms in Chile's transition to
democracy'.
82
Loxton, 'Authoritarian sucessor parties and the new right in Latin America', p. 262
83
Rosenblatt, Party vibrancy and democracy in Latin America.
84
Huneeus, 'Derecha en el Chile después de Pinochet: el caso de la Unión Democrata Independiente'.

30
Worker’s Front (Frente del Trabajo) and the National Unity Movement (MUN). The RN
was officially created in 1987 after the UDI abandoned the right-wing front. Although
several of the early generation members of the RN had occupied government positions
during the dictatorship, the party, as already mentioned, had roots in the previous
democratic period, as some of its leaders were remnants of the National Party.
Whereas UDI founders refrained from accepting any major changes to the 1980
Constitution throughout the transition, the RN was much more willing to negotiate with
opposition parties.
85
UDI and RN clearly differed in terms of their initial platforms:
whereas the former party fully defended Pinochetismo and its legacies, the latter had a
much more critical position toward the regime’s political and human rights records, thus
adopting a more ambiguous position regarding the authoritarian-democratic divide.
86
Not
only the “cultural war” against Marxism was relatively unimportant in defining the RN’s
identity, but also, the party leaders and rank-and-file never experienced with trauma.
87
Despite their connections to the Pinocher regime, RN leaders did not perceive the
reorganization of the political left during the 1980s as a threat to their own political
survival in the same way as UDI founders did. The crucial role of counter-revolutionary
struggles in the formation of UDI’s early identity, which was reinforced by the killing of
Guzmán in 1991, allowed the party to develop a highly cohesive organization, whereas
RN lacked such a source of cohesion.
85
Loxton, 'Authoritarian inheritance and conservative party-building in Latin America', Siavelis, 'Chile:
The Right's evolution from democracy to authoritarianism and back again',
86
Siavelis, 'Chile: The Right's evolution from democracy to authoritarianism and back again'
87
Rosenblatt, Party vibrancy and democracy in Latin America., p. 105-106

31
Conservative party institutionalisation and the long-lasting impact of party origins and
early trajectories
In both Brazil and Chile, the political right has obtained substantial electoral
success after the transition to democracy, obtaining national vote shares ranging from
roughly 30% to 50%. Still, in the Brazilian case the electoral performance of the right-
wing bloc is largely unrelated to the consolidation of right-wing parties in the electorate.
In other words, conservative politicians as individuals have achieved substantial success
in the electoral arena despite the persistent weakness of the partisan right. Figure 3 shows
the evolution of the national share of the two largest right-wing parties in Brazil and Chile
since the time of the transition. These are the PFL/DEM and PDS/PP for Brazil and UDI
and RN for Chile.
88
Figure 3 – Largest conservative parties' share of the national vote in lower
chamber elections, Brazil and Chile, 1986-2018
88
The first democratic congressional elections occurred in 1986 in Brazil and in 1989 in Chile. Brazil’s
lower chamber elections are always held in even years and Chilean elections in odd years.

32
Sources: TSE (www.tse.jus.br); Servicio Electoral de Chile (www.servel.cl).
The figure clearly reveals the electoral decay of Brazil’s major right-wing parties
in the last twenty years and, in particular, the huge electoral losses suffered by the
PFL/DEM from 2002 onwards. In the case of Chile, longitudinal and cross-party variation
in electoral results notwithstanding, the UDI and the RN have consolidated as the most
important parties of the right in the recent period.
Among Brazil’s two authoritarian successor parties, the PFL/DEM was the major
beneficiary of authoritarian inheritance, in that the party absorbed most of the territorial
organisation and party cadres of the pro-military ARENA. According to Power (2000),
ten years after the transition ex-Arenistas represented an impressive 60% of the PFL
delegation in the Chamber of Deputies, whereas only 31% of the PDS delegation was
comprised of former members of the party of the military regime.
Although the political assets provided by authoritarian inheritance greatly
facilitated the task of party-building, the fact the party emerged mostly from factional,
unideological conflicts reduced the incentives to strengthen the party brand. Rather, the
PFL leadership prioritised the short-term goals of maximising votes and winning office.
As the party sought to obfuscate its authoritarian past by joining the Democratic Alliance
and supporting the Sarney government (1985-1990), ex-Arenistas enjoyed continued
access to valuable patronage resources that could be used to grease their subnational
political machines.
89
In stark contrast with the PFL/DEM, the UDI opted for embracing the past and
building a distinctive party brand around the legacy of Pinochetismo . In the transition
election, the party supported the presidential candidacy of Pinochet’s Minister of Finance,
89
Ferreira, PFL x PMDB: marchas e contramarchas (1982-2000), Ribeiro, 'PFL: do PDS ao PSD'.

33
despite the fact that his association with the regime’s policies was seen as a liability,
including by RN leaders who were defeated in the negotiation of a pre-electoral pact
around a single right-wing candidate.
90
Although the UDI gradually moderated its
discourse by downplaying association with the authoritarian regime, the party’s identity
was largely built around the regime cleavage opposing supporters and opponents of the
dictatorship, which allowed it to obtain consistent support from voters that were most
sympathetic to Pinochet and to the military regime.
91
Whereas the UDI succeeded in unifying its leaders and rank-and-file around a
common set of values and principles, and in differentiating itself from other parties, the
Brazilian right was clearly unsuccessful at creating strong party brands and infusing
parties with a value of their own. In the case of the PDS/PP, in particular, the party
leadership deliberately sought to dilute the party brand inherited from the authoritarian
regime by adopting programs and manifestos that appeared far more progressive than the
party ever was. Tim Power found that among the major Brazilian parties, the PDS/PP was
characterised by the largest differences between the party’s ideological position,
according to elite’s perceptual data, and the content analysis of the Manifesto Research
Group.
92
In a clear demonstration of the irrelevance of the democratic-authoritarian divide
in Brazilian politics, the PDS/PP supported the PT administrations headed by presidents
Lula (2003-2010) and Dilma Roussef (2011-2016), both of which had been active
members in the opposition to the military.
90
Barozet and Aubry, 'De las reformas internas a la candidatura presidencial autónoma: los nuevos
caminos institucionales de Renovación Nacional', Siavelis, 'Chile: The Right's evolution from democracy
to authoritarianism and back again'
91
Carlos Huneeus, 'Derecha en el Chile después de Pinochet: el caso de la Unión Democrata
Independiente', (2001).
92
Power, 'The Contrasting Trajectories of Brazil's Two Authoritarian Sucessor Parties', (, p. 239

34
The PFL, on the other hand, struggled to survive while in opposition to the PT
governments. In an attempt at repositioning the party in the electoral market, the PFL
leadership hired a team of political consultants to prepare a rebranding strategy in 2007.
As a national survey showed that voters associated the party with the military regime and
old-style, clientelistic politics, the national executive committee of the party decided to
adopt a new name: Democrats (DEM). But rebranding efforts largely failed and did not
prevent the party’s electoral decline in subsequent elections.
93
Without the federal
patronage resources that had kept the party factions together until then and suffering from
chronically low levels of value infusion, the party was unable to avoid massive
defection.
94
In comparison with both the PDS/PP and the smaller right-wing parties that
emerged during the transition – the PL/PR and the PTB – the PFL/DEM has been more
successful in the construction of a highly nationalised, centralised and stable
organisation.
95
As seen in table 1, the PFL/DEM has the highest score in the routinisation
dimension among these four parties. This indicates that authoritarian inheritance has
likely increased the party’s ability to institutionalise in the organisational dimension. Note
that both the PL/PR and the PTB received a smaller influx of ex-Arenistas in the aftermath
of the transition as compared to both the PFL/DEM and the PDS/PP, and they lacked a
strong connection with the authoritarian regime. Moreover, the party split that led to the
creation of the PFL allowed the latter party to benefit more decisively from authoritarian
inheritance than the PDS/PP.
93
Ricardo Luiz Mendes Ribeiro, 'A decadência longe do poder: refundação e crise do PFL', Universidade
de São Paulo, 2011., p. 61-64, Ribeiro, 'Decadência longe do poder: refundação e crise do PFL'.
94
Ribeiro, 'PFL: do PDS ao PSD'.
95
Pedro Floriano Ribeiro, 'Organização e Poder nos Partidos Brasileiros: uma análise dos estatutos',
Revista Brasileira de Ciência Política, Vol. 10, (2013), pp. 225-65.

35
A comparison between UDI and RN reveals a similar pattern. The RN benefited
to a much lower extent from authoritarian inheritance, as it lacked the organic connections
with the authoritarian regime that characterised the UDI. Since its foundation, the RN has
been divided between a liberal faction, who advocated a "progressive centrism",
dissociated from the authoritarian regime, and hard-line conservatives who had been
appointed to top government positions during the dictatorship. The party has mostly failed
to develop stable and effective decision-making rules, and it has lacked in intermediate
organisations between voters and the national party executive.
96
In contrast, the UDI has
taken advantage of the territorial organisation and clientelistic networks inherited from
the authoritarian regime to secure a strong presence at the grassroots.
97
98
The ambiguous position of the RN regarding the legacies of the authoritarian
regime has been detrimental to the construction of a distinctive, shared ideological
identity that might have induced members to develop strong bonds to the organisation.
As ideological conflicts and political violence played no role in shaping the party’s early
development, the RN has remained susceptible to factional struggles and defection.
According to Rosenblatt, RN was the Chilean party that suffered the largest number of
defections between 1989 and 2009.
99
In sum, although the Chilean political right did not
experience the extreme fragmentation of Brazil’s conservative parties, the RN was more
similar to Brazil’s authoritarian successor parties than to the UDI, to the extent that
96
Barozet and Aubry, 'De las reformas internas a la candidatura presidencial autónoma: los nuevos
caminos institucionales de Renovación Nacional'.
97
Huneeus, 'Derecha en el Chile después de Pinochet: el caso de la Unión Democrata Independiente',
Juan Pablo Luna, 'Segmented party–voter linkages in Latin America: The case of the UDI', Journal of
Latin American Studies, Vol. 42, No. 2 (2010), pp. 325-356.
98
These accounts are consistent with the routinisation scores presented in table 1: the UDI obtained a score
of 0.91 as compared to 0.63 for the RN.
99
Rosenblatt, Party vibrancy and democracy in Latin America., p. 105

36
members’ loyalty to the party has remained low and the party has regularly suffered with
defection.
Conclusion
Within- and cross-country variation in party trajectories is largely consistent with
the central claim of the article, namely that strong right-wing parties are more likely to
emerge after a transition to democracy in the presence of two conditions: a) the party
benefits extensively from authoritarian inheritance; b) the party experiences violent and
ideologically-driven conflict that is perceived by its leadership as threatening to their
values and/or to their own political survival during its early years.
Authoritarian inheritance in both Chile and Brazil was associated with higher
levels of organisational consolidation or routinisation. But the comparative evidence also
indicates that strong roots in the authoritarian past do not necessarily lead to value
infusion and external institutionalisation. Chile’s UDI is the only right-wing party in our
sample of six parties to have succeeded in obtaining medium to high scores in all
dimensions of institutionalisation. Although the UDI and the PFL/DEM are similar in
what concerns authoritarian inheritance, they critically differ regarding the
presence/absence of early political conflicts perceived as threatening by authoritarian
incumbents. The case of the UDI is thus congruent with the claim that conservative parties
are most likely to institutionalise when they inherit substantial resources from the
previous authoritarian regime and, also, their identities are forged throughout violent,
ideologically-driven conflict. In the absence of these conditions, right-wing parties tend
to institutionalise rather unevenly, as revealed by the cases of the PFL/DEM and RN.

37
The RN did not inherit a large territorial organisation from the authoritarian
regime as the PFL/DEM (or the UDI), and it obtained lower scores than both these parties
in the routinisation dimension. Still, it might be the case that the RN and the UDI inherited
a somewhat stronger brand than Brazil’s authoritarian successor parties. Indeed, the
Chilean economy experienced high economic growth during the final years of the regime
- GDP growth averaged 6.4% between 1984-1989 -, whereas the Brazilian dictatorship
ended amidst a deep economic crisis that combined a 10% decline in per capita income
and high inflation between 1983 and 1984.
100
Note however, that the long-term
performance of the Brazilian authoritarian regime was substantially better than that of the
Chilean dictatorship.
101
Moreover, there is no evidence that citizen’s identification with
Brazil’s authoritarian successor parties was substantially lower in comparison with
Chilean ASPs in the initial years of democratic rule. According to national surveys
conducted by IBOPE (Brazil) and by the Center for Public Studies (Chile) two years after
the democratic transitions (1987 and 1991), 4.7% and 3.6% of Brazilian voters identified
with the PDS and the PFL, respectively, whereas 8.1% and 3.5% of Chilean voters
identified with the RN and UDI, respectively.
102
In both Brazil and Chile, ASPs counted
on a much smaller partisan base than the parties that had opposed the military regime,
such as the PDC (37.5%) and the PMDB (25%), according to the same opinion polls. In
100
Albert Fishlow, 'A Tale of Two Presidents: the political economy of crisis management', in Alfred C
Stepan (ed.), Democratizing Brazil: problems of transition and consolidation, (New York, 1989: Oxford
University Press ), Juan Andrés Fontaine, 'Transición económica y política en Chile: 1970-1990', Estudios
Públicos, Vol. 50, (1993), pp. 229-279.
101
Brazil’s GDP increased at an yearly average rate of 6.3% between 1964 and 1984 and during most of
the period, growth rates were positive and above 4% (www.ipeadata.gov.br). In the case of Chile there
was substantial volatility in growth rates, and the average performance was significantly worst: an
average 2.6% growth from 1974 to 1989. Ricardo French-Davis and Oscar Muñoz, 'Desarrollo
económico, inestabilidad y desequilibrios políticos en Chile: 1950-89', Colección estudios CIEPLAN, No.
28 (1990), pp. 121-156.
102
While comparing these figures, one should note that the development of RN’s brand likely reflects the
party’s connection to the National Party, and not only association with Pinochetismo, as already
mentioned earlier in the article.

38
sum, in what concerns the strength of their brands relatively to major competitors, one
can say that ASPs in Brazil and Chile faced similar challenges in their early years.
The case of Chile provides evidence on the ambiguous impact of parties created
under authoritarianism on democratic politics. On the one hand, when these parties
institutionalise and become major players in the post-transition party system, they are
likely to foster continuity between authoritarian and democratic rule. Consistent with this
view, the Chilean transition led to consolidation of an “elite-biased” democracy,
characterised by the persistence of authoritarian enclaves and by severe institutional
obstacles to large scale redistribution.
103
On the other hand, once former authoritarian
incumbents succeed in constructing highly institutionalised and stable parties, they tend
to play an important role in solidifying and structuring the party system.
104
Moreover, the
consolidation of authoritarian successor parties may favour democratic stability by
leading the former supporters of the dictatorship to have a stake in the preservation of the
rules of the democratic game. Indeed, the successful trajectory of the UDI resulted in the
incorporation of the authoritarian sectors of the political right, at the both the elite and
mass levels, to electoral politics.
Where former regime insiders fail to build institutionalised parties, they may
resort to non-partisan forms of political action that are, more often than not, detrimental
to the quality and stability of democracy and to the consolidation of the party system, as
demonstrated by the case of Brazil. The persistent weakness of the partisan right and its
shallow roots in society have created opportunities for conservative populists supported
by personalistic electoral vehicles, with deleterious consequences for party system
consolidation. The two most successful presidential candidates of the right – Fernando
103
Michael Albertus and Victor Menaldo, Authoritarianism and the elite origins of democracy (New
York, 2018: Cambridge University Press).
104
Hicken and Martínez Kuhonta, 'Shadows from the past: Party system institutionalization in Asia'.

39
Collor and Jair Bolsonaro– relied on an anti-system and moralising rhetoric against
traditional politicians and their corrupt practices to win the presidential race in 1989 and
2018, respectively. The election of authoritarian populist and former army captain
Bolsonaro in 2018 is especially telling of the persistent and unresolved legacies of
Brazil’s authoritarian past, as his campaign was explicit in the apology of dictatorship,
and he mobilised the support of politically intolerant voters, with a low commitment to
democratic norms and institutions.
105
Overall, ASP institutionalisation matters for the quality of democracy and for
party system stability, and this is especially the case in the Latin American context, where
authoritarian regimes, with few exceptions, have been established by the most powerful
elites and social forces that constitute the core of the political right.
Acknowledgements
This research benefited from funding provided by the Federal District’s Research
Foundation (FAPDF) in support of a visiting scholar appointment at the Centre for Iberian
and Latin American Studies at the University of California, San Diego (August 2019 -
February 2020). I am grateful to the three anonymous reviewers and to JLAS editors for
providing very extensive and detailed comments throughout the peer-reviewing process.
I am also thankful to Lucio Rennó, Adrián Albala, Gabriel Squeff and Fernando
Bittencourt for their criticisms and suggestions to a previous version of this article
presented at the University of Brasília in March 2020.
105
Mário Fuks, Ednaldo Ribeiro and Julian Borba, 'From Antipetismo to Generalized Antipartisanship:
The Impact of Rejection of Political Parties on the 2018 Vote for Bolsonaro', Brazilian Political Science
Review, Vol. 15, (2021).

40
Appendix A – Measuring Party Institutionalisation in Brazil and Chile
The measures of value infusion and routinisation were obtained from Bolleyer and Ruth
(2018). They used two questions from the 2008/2009 DALP survey to measure the
strength of party organizations. The questions (A1 and A3) focus on the existence of
permanent local offices and local party intermediaries, accounting for both formal and
informal organization. Higher expert ratings indicate that parties have permanent local
offices with paid staff in most districts and that they also rely on local intermediaries to
maintain contact with voters, organize electoral support and voter turnout, and distribute
party resources in most constituencies. The routinisation index was constructed by
normalizing each indicator between zero and one, with higher values indicating higher
levels of routinisation. Mean expert ratings for each party were obtained for each party
and each indicator. The final score is a simple mean of the measures of formal and
informal organization.
Bolleyer and Ruth (2018) measured value infusion by utilizing a question from the DALP
expert survey (question E4) on the importance of the party`s origins or achievements of
historical leaders, or references to party symbols and rituals for the party’s campaign
strategies. This indicator is also a mean of expert ratings normalized between zero and
one.
Parties’ programmatic consistency was operationalised as the mean of two indicators. The
first is a simple mean proportion of valid expert responses to a series of DALP survey
questions on parties’ positions on five distinct issue dimensions. Theoretically, parties
with consistent and easily recognizable positions should obtain a higher proportion of
valid responses. The second indicator uses the mean standard deviation of experts’ ratings
to each issue dimension for each party. These raw scores were normalized between zero

41
and one by using the full distribution of responses to the DALP expert survey, which
includes 88 countries and hundreds of parties worldwide. Finally, I subtracted the
normalized scores from 1, attributing higher (lower) values to parties with lower (higher)
variation in experts’ ratings. A summary programmatic consistency score was obtained
for each party by averaging these two indicators.
The strength of party brands in the electorate was calculated in a similar manner to that
proposed by Basedau et al (2000): I obtained the percentage of respondents who declared
they sympathized with the party and then divided it by the party’s vote in the lower
chamber race. To secure temporal consistency across indicators, I considered the lower
chamber elections held immediately before the DALP 2008/2009 expert survey. The
intuition behind this operationalisation is that a higher partisans to voters ratio likely
indicates that most of the party’s voters do distinguish the party brand, instead of voting
on the basis of alternative, nonpartisan voter-candidate linkages.
I relied on party identification data obtained from the 2006/2007 LAPOP survey for Brazil
and on the 2005 opinion poll of the Center for Public Studies (CEP) for Chile. These are
the sources covering the greatest number of parties. Electoral results for the 2006 (Brazil)
and 2005 (Chile) lower chamber elections were obtained from Brazil’s TSE
(www.tse.jus.br) and from the Political Database of the Americas (pdba.georgetwon.edu).
External institutionalisation was calculated as the mean of party scores on brand
recognition and programmatic consistency.
Table A1 presents a list of all parties included in the analysis and the respective scores
for each dimension. Parties were grouped by country and then rank ordered from the most
institutionalised to the least institutionalised.

42
Table A.1 - Brazil and Chile: Party institutionalisation scores for major parties*
Country/Party
Ideological
position
Value
infusion
Rout.
Program.
Consist.
Brand
recognition
External
Inst.
Overall
Inst.
Brazil
PT
Left
0.95
1.00
0.65
1
0.83
0.92
PMDB
Centre
0.63
0.94
0.64
0.61
0.63
0.73
PSDB
Centre
0.67
0.86
0.65
0.39
0.52
0.68
PDT
Left
0.74
0.63
0.64
0.56
0.60
0.66
PTB
Right
0.54
0.66
0.58
0.24
0.41
0.54
PFL/DEM
Right
0.37
0.81
0.59
0.19
0.39
0.52
PSB
Left
0.48
0.63
0.61
0.09
0.35
0.49
PL/PR
Right
0.25
0.51
0.58
0.14
0.36
0.37
PDS/PP
Right
0.20
0.50
0.53
0.10
0.32
0.34
Chile
PS
Left
0.81
0.79
0.64
0.91
0.92
0.84
PDC
Centre
0.83
0.87
0.68
0.58
0.54
0.75
UDI
Right
0.61
0.91
0.65
0.42
0.53
0.68
PPD
Centre
0.57
0.56
0.66
0.97
0.86
0.66
RN
Right
0.50
0.63
0.65
0.70
0.67
0.60
PRSD
Centre
0.58
0.34
0.67
0.31
0.64
0.52
Sources: DALP 2008/2009; Bolleyer and Ruth (2018); LAPOP 2006; CEP 2005. Author’s
elaboration.
* Authoritarian successor parties are in bold.