Intraparty Democracy in Latin America Parties: Elite Perception vs Party Statutes

During past decades, Latin American political parties have been questioned about its institutional work because it is not connected with social benefits. In addition, political parties have complex organizational structures, which separate from social reality. Therefore, social mistrust and disaffection to parties have increased due to they cannot channelize social demands into public policies in political institutions. They have lost the link with citizenry, even with party membership which have decreased. Latin American parties have to face these challenges. Also, intraparty democracy is a solution to mitigate these problems through inclusive mechanisms of decision-making process; or, ethnic and gender quotes, among others. This paper goal is to compare intraparty democracy coherence level through two different dimensions: on one hand, the construction of IPD index vom dem Berge and Poguntke (2017) based in party statutes (PPDB); and, on the other hand, intraparty democracy based in Latin American parliamentarian elite perception (Martínez-Hernández and Olucha-Sánchez, 2018)(PELA).