Latin American Intraparty Democracy: How Parties Organise in the New Century

At the beginning of the new century, the Latin American political parties were in a deep institutional crisis as in the rest of the world. The distance between militants and party elites was widening breaking the links between the two bodies. Therefore, one of the challenges to avoid the deepening of the existing party crisis was the establishment of another kind of organizational structure with intra-party democracy (IPD) measures, which could generate synergies among the different party bodies. The aim of this paper is to improve the understanding of how organizational structures and decision-making processes operate in Latin American parties. Using Von dem Berge and Poguntke’s (2017) conceptualization and measures of IPD in its three forms (assembly, plebiscitary and open plebiscitary), the paper concludes that the vast majority of Latin American political parties under study have a mixed of assembly and plebiscitary forms of IPD. Open plebiscitary IPD is considered a rare exception. The challenge of this article is the application of IPD measures to the Latin American presidential systems and determinate if these systems are similar and compare the results to those previously obtained for other regions.