Party Opposition and Semocratic (Dis)loyalty in Latin America (1978-2010)

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to contribute to studies on democracy and parties in Latin America focusing on opposition’s loyalty to the political regime. Returning to the theoretical contributions of Linz (1987) and Mainwaring and Pérez-Liñán (2013), it is
proposed a descriptive typology for the study of the loyalty of the opposition parties in the context of Latin American competitive regimes postdictatorship (1978-2010). The typology is composed of two dimensions: the normative preference for the political regime and the radicalization. The combination of both dimensions results on three types of opposition parties: loyal, semi-loyal and disloyal. Finally, the article illustrates the empirical distribution for the region where loyalists represent more than half of all cases while semiloyal and disloyal cases around a quarter each. It is also observed that countries differ according to the proportion of loyal,disloyal and semiloyal years.