Overview

Political parties in Bolivia have rarely been strong organizations with coherent ideological programs and stable followings. Instead, typically they have served as instruments of access to state patronage, their rise and fall being a function of the fate of their leader. The personal nature of political parties, together with their purely instrumental function, accounts both for the lack of a stable party system and for the strange alliances that are sometimes formed between parties with seemingly opposing ideologies.

Political parties emerged in Bolivia only toward the second half of the nineteenth century. Until then the most common means of accessing power was through military force, and the followers of a particular caudillo (military leader) were referred to by his name. Thus the followers of Andrés de Santa Cruz were referred to as crucistas, those of José Ballivián as ballivianistas, and so on. The end of the War of the Pacific (1879–1883), involving Bolivia, Chile, and Peru, ushered in the Liberal-Conservative period (1884–1935), in which party lines were drawn according to the economic interests of large traditional landowners and the silver-mining entrepreneurs of the south. The Liberal Party, by contrast, became associated with la Rosca, a derogatory term referring to the tin-mining oligarchy and the personnel it used to influence policy making.

The 1930s and 1940s saw the rise of three types of political parties, each with a different proposal for resolving the nation's problems. The nationalist revolutionary type, represented by the Nationalist Revolutionary Movement (Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario, MNR), believed that economic and social development could come about only through the creation of a strong centralized state directed by middle-class technocrats and supported by a multiclass alliance. Marxist-style parties originated among the working class, particularly the mine workers, and in the universities. They were broadly divided into Trotskyists, represented by the Revolutionary Workers Party (Partido Obrero Revolucionario, POR) and Stalinists, represented by the Leftist Revolutionary Party (Partido de la Izquierda Revolucionaria, PIR). Finally, nationalist-authoritarian parties, represented by the Bolivian Socialist Falange (Falange Socialista Bolivana, FSB), advocated a corporatist national economic order and a federal political system.

The MNR, which came to power with the 1952 Bolivian Revolution, had a significant impact on the development of party politics and provided a model for the development of many of the subsequent political parties. By forming a multiclass support base, the MNR enjoyed single-party dominance between 1952 and 1964. However, the increasingly conflicting agendas housed under the MNR umbrella soon led a number of factions to break away from the party.

The post-transition period, which began in Bolivia in 1978, was initially characterized by an explosion in the number of political parties, although most of these were small and short-lived. The exceptions were the MNR, the Nationalist Democratic Action (Acción Democrática Nacionalista, ADN) and the Movement of the Revolutionary Left (Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria, MIR), parties that came to dominate the electoral process from 1985 until the end of the 1990s. Despite their dominance of the electoral arena, however, the inability of any one party to obtain an absolute majority in national elections produced a significant trend toward the formation of political pacts and coalitions. Coalition governments did make possible the short-term stability of the democratic process in Bolivia. However, their inability to successfully address the protracted economic crisis—as well as incidents of corruption, abuse of power, and the continued political exclusion of important sectors of the population—eventually led to the delegitimation of traditional political parties.

The disenchantment with the dominant political class, represented by the MNR, ADN, and MIR parties, resulted in two significant changes to the party system. The first was the introduction of reforms to the electoral system. Among the most important of these were the introduction in 1996 of single-member districts to elect 68 of the 130 members of the chamber of deputies and the 2004 Ley de Agrupaciones Ciudadanas y Pueblos Indígenas (Law of Citizen Groups and Indigenous People). These reforms have weakened the traditional political parties and have led to the emergence of a more independent local and indigenous leadership.

The second change, increasingly aided by the reforms already noted, is the rise of antisystemic political parties. These parties challenge existing political and economic arrangements and are headed by populist leaders who draw their support mainly from the marginalized urban and rural poor. Such was the case with the Movement toward Socialism (Movimiento al Socialismo, MAS), the party led by Evo Morales Aima. In December 2005 the MAS made history by not only winning the presidential contest, but doing so with an absolute majority—the first time a party had managed to do this since the transition to democracy in 1978.

See alsoCaudillismo, Caudillo .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bueno Saavedra, Ramiro. Sistema electoral, sistema de partidos y democracia en Bolivia: Efectos políticos del sistema electoral sobre el sistema de partidos (1980–2002). La Paz: Universidad Mayor de San Andrés, Carrera de Ciencias Políticas, Instituto de Investigaciones en Ciencia Política, 2004.

Klein, Herbert S. Bolivia: The Evolution of a Multi-Ethnic Society, 2nd edition. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.

Malloy, James M., and Eduardo Gamarra. Revolution and Reaction: Bolivia, 1964–1985. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1988.

Morales, Waltraud Q. A Brief History of Bolivia. New York: Facts on File, 2003.

Rolón Anaya, Mario. Política y partidos en Bolivia, 2nd edition. La Paz: Librería Editorial Juventud, 1987.

Van Cott, Donna Lee. From Movements to Parties in Latin America: The Evolution of Ethnic Politics. Cambridge, U.K., and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005.

                                       Annabelle Conroy