Party Institutionalization and Its Relationship with the Quality of Democracy: Paraguay and Uruguay in Comparative Perspective

Abstract

The aim of this article is to explore the relationship between the institutionalization of political parties and the quality of democracy. The main argument of the original research –focused on studying the main political parties in Paraguay and Uruguay– is that this relationship is not always direct and that, in spite of what some political studies hold, partisan institutionalization cannot always be considered a sufficient condition to build up the quality of democracy. To test the hypothesis we analyzed the five most relevant political parties in terms of electoral strength of two Latin American political systems having different levels of quality of democracy. The analysis shows that partisan institutionalization is not necessarily consistent with the level of democratic quality; otherwise, both countries would have shown high levels of quality of democracy, since they have similar levels of partisan institutionalization. Thus, in order to understand the relationship between a country’s level of partisan institutionalization and the quality of democracy, it seems necessary to review and examine different features of the functioning of political parties, different actors and elements of the political system, and even to study the historical path of the political party system.