Presidentialism and party competition in Latin America

In this article, I test the effects of presidential systems on party competition as a dimension to study the Quality of Democracy. I do this by focusing on how the patterns of government alternation and formal-constitutional presidential power affect party competition for 12 Latin American presidential countries. Specifically, in this study, I focus on democratic years for each country from 1974 to 2019. Using party fragmentation as a proxy to measure competition, I run regression analyses to test my two hypotheses. The findings strongly support one of my hypotheses, as I confirm that higher levels of presidential powers lead to the access of more parties to the legislative arena, and hence, more party competition. Additionally, I use a selection of countries to compare the levels of party competition as a dimension to measure the Quality of Democracy, and to look at how the independent variables affect this in each particular case.