Regime Change and Partisan Stability in Twentieth-Century Argentina.

In countries that have shifted between dictatorship and democracy, what effect does each regime have on voters' partisan attachments? If competitive elections and party mobilization are the motors driving partisan identification, we would expect attachments to grow during democracy and erode under dictatorship. But some observers of today's new democracies have suggested that party affiliations become frozen during authoritarian interludes only to be destabilized under democracy, when party leaders have a chance to hold power, squabble with each other, and disappoint voters. We examine these questions in the context of Argentina, one of the world's most frequently interrupted democracies. Using surveys and disaggregated ecological data over the sweep of a century, and controlling for factors that may mask underlying processes of partisan identity formation, we show that democratic processes, when they are allowed to run their course, do produce a growing stability in people's electoral choices, a stability that erodes during authoritarian interludes. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]