Why the Left Fails? Electoral Success in Contemporary Transformative Left Parties

After the collapse of the Soviet Union many communist and radical left parties experienced a period of electoral decline worldwide. Nevertheless, with the beginning of the new millennium many parties to the left of social democracy have enjoyed a process of revitalisation. In Latin America, the first decade of the new century was marked by the victory of several left-wing parties in countries such as Bolivia, Ecuador and Venezuela with agendas of deep transformations. On the other hand, the economic recession resulting from the 2008 financial crisis created an propitious environment for the emergence of radical left-wing parties such as Podemos in Spain or Syriza in Greece. However, although some of these Transformative Left organisations, as labelled here, have managed to consolidate over time and even govern for extended periods, this family of parties is still characterised by poor electoral results and organizational fragility. What then explains the success of contemporary Transformative Left parties (TLPs)? Why do parties with similar ideologies and seemingly shared qualities achieve such dissimilar results? This study, precisely, seeks to understand how contemporary parties to the left of mainstream centre-left parties have managed to successfully build endurable and strong organisations capable of ensuring estable electoral bases over time in the context of the new millennium. This article also seeks to address the Eurocentric character that has characterised much of the literature on left parties. The Latin American left has proven to be one of the most successful worldwide, achieving important electoral victories at the beginning of the century, but also in recent years through more contemporary parties such as the Chilean Frente Amplio, the Colombian Pacto Histórico or the Movimiento de Regeneración Nacional in Mexico. In addition, despite the many differences between Europe and Latin America, the Left in both regions has experienced similar processes related to the decline of the labour movement following the introduction of pro-market reforms from the 1990s onwards. In order to answer the research question, this study relies on a mixed approach based on the use of a Qualitative Comparative Analysis or QCA, a set of techniques designed to identify the different configurations of necessary and sufficient conditions behind an outcome of interest. Through the use of this methodological approach I seek to identify the different “paths” followed by TLPs in Latin America and Europe to achieve electoral success. This article will draw on 34 cases from Latin America and Europe from 2000 onwards. It also addresses five main explanatory conditions identified in the related literature for the electoral success of TLPs: the historical context in which parties emerge, the strength of the centre-left, whether the parties have a communist heritage, the strength of their social ties, and their ideological profile. Finally, the results show that the electoral success of the TLPs can be explained to a large extent by historical and political contextual factors. However, these contextual settings cannot explain electoral success on their own, but only when accompanied by other conditions related to what the parties stand for.