How do Regime Divides Emerge and What Happens When They Fade? Evidence from South America

The military dictatorships of the 1960 and 1970s in South America have left lasting imprints on some, but not all of the region’s party systems. Furthermore, even where they emerged, regime divides differ in strength and persistence across countries. This paper constitutes an effort to theorize and map out these differences. I argue that two distinct paths lead to the emergence of regime divides: Along the first path, the regime question is interpreted in terms of and maps onto the established economic state-market cleavage. Along the second path, new parties – authoritarian successor parties on the right and parties that suffered repression under authoritarian rule on the left – politicize the regime divide. In countries that follow the first path, the regime and state-market dimensions are reinforcing, while they cross-cut each other along the second path. I argue that this difference has consequences for the strength and durability of regime divides, as well as for the overall responsiveness of party systems to voter preferences. I study the interplay of economic and regime divides by combining elite and mass-level data for the eight South American countries (plus Mexico) that experienced authoritarian rule in the period from the 1960s to the 1980s. My analytical approach is to construct latent dimensions using elite and mass-level data to locate parties and voters on the economic state-market and regime divides. This allows for an analysis of the presence, as well the cross-cutting or overlapping nature of the two divides. The degree of responsiveness each of them entails is my indicator for their respective strength, because this indicates the degree to which they shape partisan alignments. In a first step, I show that regime divides were important both at the party system and the mass levels in Chile, Uruguay, Brazil, Bolivia, and Mexico, while they failed to crystallize in Argentina, Peru and Ecuador. I then provide evidence for the hypothesis that regime divides tend to be stronger – and presumably more durable – where they reinforce, rather than cross-cut the economic cleavage.