Party System Development and Indigenous Populations in Latin America

Abstract

The article links the relatively weaker institutionalization of political party systems in certain Latin American countries to the size of the country's indigenous population in order to explain a statistically significant inverse empirical relationship between the two variables. It argues that elites in countries with proportionally significant indigenous populations in the early 20th century organized political parties to dominate subordinate groups in ways that were distinct from those employed by elites in countries with far smaller indigenous populations. The geographic isolation and cultural distinctiveness of such populations provided elites with unique tools for exclusion and domination that enabled them to stall the political participation of indigenous peoples until the late 1980s. A case study of Bolivia's political party system is used to illustrate the hypothesis and to show how indigenous peoples were finally able in the 1990s to enter the formal political system, suggesting that entrenched practices are susceptible to change in response to shifts in the underlying incentive structure.