Abstract

This review essay concludes that the neo-institutionalist literature shows that the necessary preconditions for programmatic representation do not exist in Latin America. The inability to explain non-programmatic links between voters and political parties limits neo-institutional research. Existing work suffers because it narrows the study of programmatic representation to party institutionalization, because it focuses on formal institutions, and because it relies too heavily upon the use of aggregate data in cross-national studies to study the party systems of the region. This essay suggests that future studies of parties use multi-level comparisons to describe the necessarily heterogeneous linkages that parties craft with different types of voters. It also recommends using political economy to study the informal institutions and historical-institutional trajectories of Latin American political parties.