This article evaluates the effectiveness of OAS mechanisms for safeguarding democracy through multilateral diplomacy, what some scholars have dubbed the interamerican defense of democracy regime. Drawing on a range of international relations theories, this study derives competing hypotheses about member states' responses to democratic crises in the Americas. It then analyzes all instances in which a collective response—that is, an application of Resolution 1080 or the Inter‐American Democratic Charter—was debated in the OAS between 1991 and 2002. Patterns of state behavior suggest that domestic politics, rather than the structural or systemic traits of the interamerican system, best explain foreign policy responses to crises of democracy in the region. The OAS record in confronting such crises is uneven.
Personalistic leadership-the exercise of authority vested in influential individuals based on personal attributes rather than organizational role-is a political phenomenon not limited by time or space. But what do we mean when we say that a political leader or a party is "personalistic"? While the theme of personalist leadership is not absent from political analyses, there is a lack of scholarly consensus on core elements of the concept itself. The goal of this article is to define in clearer terms what personalism is and how it differs from concepts such as charisma, populism, and anti-establishment politics. We introduce a parsimonious definition based on intra-organizational power and identify a party as personalist if two conditions are met: a dominant leader and a weakly structured organization. Finally, we present a more comprehensive typology of parties based on those two criteria and briefly illustrate the utility of our approach for explaining personalist formations as a distinct organizational type.
In this article, 1 we deploy the concept of personalism in a comparative study of two Third Wave democracies, Peru and Bulgaria. What factors explain the prevalence and success of personalistic parties? We analyze in rich detail the personalist parties that emerged in Peru and Bulgaria, focusing on the role of leaders and on parties' organizational development (or lack thereof). Adopting an institutionalist approach, we assess the impact of party regulation and financing, electoral rules, and domestic regime type (as well as international institutions) on these political entrepreneurs. We conclude that institutions did incentivize and constrain personalistic leadership, although other factors were also relevant. And while organized parties are now scarce in both countries, party politics in Peru is even more personality driven than in Bulgaria.
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