Labor movements and party system development: Why does the Caribbean have stable two-party systems, but the Pacific does not?

Matthew Louis Bishop, Jack Corbett and Wouter Veenendaal

World Development, 2020, vol. 126, issue C

Abstract: Party system development is often said to be essential for democratization. But if this is a necessary precondition, why do two of the most successful developing regions in terms of democratization, the Caribbean and the Pacific, which are composed similarly of small (island) developing states, display such extreme divergence in their experiences with party democracy? The former has the most stable and pure two-party systems in the world, while in the latter political parties are either weakly institutionalized or absent. Since both have attitudinally homogenous societies and similar institutions, conventional explanations that highlight the importance of social cleavages and electoral systems cannot explain this difference. Employing the framework of a most similar systems design incorporating twenty-three countries, we challenge dominant assumptions about the causes of party system development (PSD) and subsequent institutionalization (PSI) by focusing on their distinctive post-colonial political-economic settlements. Specifically, we process trace the role of labor movements and their manifestation as political parties and argue that this provides the strongest explanation for why the Caribbean has stable party systems, but the Pacific does not. By emphasizing the importance of pre-existing social organizations for the development of parties, our analysis foregrounds the otherwise largely neglected literature on early European party organization and the role of political economy in PSD.

Keywords: Party system development; Trade unions; Small states; Caribbean; Pacific; Historical institutionalism (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305750X19303687
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:wdevel:v:126:y:2020:i:c:s0305750x19303687

DOI: 10.1016/j.worlddev.2019.104719

Access Statistics for this article

World Development is currently edited by O. T. Coomes

More articles in World Development from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().