“…At the same time, high party institutionalization does not necessarily optimize democratic outcomes, because highly institutionalized parties may inhibit democratic competition and stifle the emergence of party challengers, whether that high institutionalization takes the form of multiple cartelized parties leveraging their access to state resources (Katz and Mair, 1995) or single dominant parties whose recruitment channels are the main alternative for those with political ambitions (Greene and Sánchez-Talanquer, 2018: p. 216). There also may be a curvilinear relationship between institutionalization and responsiveness, with institutionalization aiding party persistence in the face of electoral defeats (Wills-Otero, 2016: p. 759), but very high institutionalization hampering parties’ adaptability to changing circumstances (Levitsky, 1998: p. 81; Rodriguez and Rosenblatt, 2020). For all these reasons, scholars conceive of party institutionalization as a matter of degree, not as a threshold property, with different levels possibly having different implications for parties and party systems.…”