This paper’s point of departure is the assumption that the emergence of party systems that are responsive to the citizenry are an important determinant for successful democratization and the establishment of the rule of law. Because many parties in Latin America and elsewhere use clientelistic appeals to mobilize voters, they fail to adequately represent the policy preferences of their electorate. In this paper, I conceptualize two routes to programmatic party competition. One of these, which I study in more detail, is rooted in specific historical patterns of sequencing and ideological polarization, displaying some similarities with the formation of ideological cleavages in Western Europe. I study this route in a comparative historical analysis of democratization and party system formation in twelve countries. In order to make sense of the failure of party systems to institutionalize in many Latin American countries, this approach pays special attention to the deliberate attempts of political elites in deploying informal institutions – above all of a clientelistic nature – to prevent socio-structural conflicts from materializing. The impact of historical party system formation on contemporary relationships of responsiveness will then be assessed by drawing on new expert data from the Democratic Accountability Project at Duke University. The data will allow an assessment of the scope and limits of path dependency, providing evidence for a second, alternative route to ousting clientelism: This trajectory is more recent and depends on the presence of parties that actively seek to overcome clientelistic patterns of mobilization, the Brazilian PT being a case in point.
