Where Politics Is All Too Local

“Decentralization and Political Parties” by Christopher Sabatini, in Journal of Democracy (Apr. 2003), 1101 15th St., N.W., Ste. 800, Washington, D.C. 20005.

Political power has shifted massively to the local level in Latin America in recent decades. New local political parties and leaders have sprung up, neglected wants and needs are being addressed, and many more citizens now feel part of the political process. There’s just one problem: Decentralization has been undermining the established national political parties that are critical to the long-term pros­pects of these countries.

That wasn’t supposed to happen, says Sabatini, senior program officer for Latin America at the National Endowment for Democracy in Washington. Take the Andean countries—Colombia, Venezuela, Bolivia, and Peru. When they adopted decentralization in the 1980s and 1990s, providing for the transfer of money and responsibilities from the national governments and for the direct election of mayors and governors, “most decision makers and foreign donors [such as the World Bank and U.S. Agency for International Development] expected to see a reinvigoration of party systems as national parties sought to respond to local constituents, issues, and leaders. In practice, however, national parties have often floundered.”

Latin America’s national political parties have never been particularly strong. Eco­nomic woes and austerity measures after 1986 cost many parties public confidence and many of the patronage jobs they had used to sustain their power. Venezuela’s two major parties, Acción Democrática and COPEI, embraced state decentralization after riots shook Caracas in 1989. In Colombia, leaders hoped that direct election of mayors and governors “would relegitimize a political system battered by years of civil war.”

But “decentralization struck squarely at long-favored means of maintaining party discipline and cohesion,” Sabatini notes. Local leaders no longer need the help of party higher-ups in the capital to satisfy their constituents or run for higher office. And the creation of thousands of locally elected positions has brought many new politicians, movements, and parties to the fore.

But “the lack of coherent links to national-level issues, institutions, and candidates,” says Sabatini, has made it harder for the national governments to govern and to be held accountable. His remedy: decentralize the national parties themselves, making them better able to meet local demands and establish the missing “links.”