Political Party Survival in Latin America

This book develops a new framework for explaining how political parties survive severe crises in Latin America. Challenging accounts that equate survival with electoral recovery, it argues that endurance emerges from elite incentives shaped by territorial depth, organizational routines, and shifting strategic opportunities. The analysis centers on Argentina’s Radical Civic Union, showing how subnational structures and legislative footholds anchored elites after national collapse and enabled a gradual adaptation toward coalition-based relevance, culminating in the successful Cambiemos alliance in 2015. Comparative cases from Venezuela, Peru, and Costa Rica reveal why parties with similar histories failed to adapt. The concluding chapter applies the framework to Argentina’s contemporary realignment under Javier Milei, demonstrating how outsider disruption once again pushes the UCR toward strategies rooted in its organizational inheritance. Across these chapters, the book offers a theory of party survival that explains not only why some parties endure without national recovery, but also how they reinvent their political purpose in fragmented political systems.