Explaining the Chile–Uruguay Divergence in Democratic Inclusion: Left Parties and the Political Articulation Hypothesis

Abstract This article develops a political articulation-based explanation of divergence in democratic inclusion between two champions of liberal democracy in Latin America: Chile and Uruguay. Political articulation scholars depart from the traditional reflection models of political parties as mere expression of preexisting social cleavages, highlighting the relative autonomy of parties’ practices and their strategic role in structuring state-society relations. My work extends this current trend in comparative-historical sociology to the Latin American Left turn after the demise of the market-fundamentalist Washington Consensus, empirically identifying a set of strategies that boost Left parties’ capacity to articulate on a specifically class basis. These strategies, I argue, are endowed with causal efficacy, driving democratic variation beyond the restrictions and opportunities of the institutional environment. Combining process tracing account of historical sequences with my own analyses of labor statistics, protest events, and party linkages and manifestos, I show that differences in Left parties’ ability to build linkages with labor and advance its institutional representation as a class actor are at the root of the divergence in political inclusion between these two countries. This finding has substantial implications for contemporary democratic theory: after neoliberalism, strongly organized mass parties of the Left may not be a necessary condition for a given democracy’s stability and consolidation, but they may be a sufficient condition for a particular democracy’s realization of the normative ideal of political equality.