ABSTRACT
This chapter explains why contemporary Latin American party systems are so diverse in spite of their common point of departure in the nineteenth century conflict between liberals and conservatives. It has more in common with Juan Linz's study of the party system of Spain than it does with Lipset and Rokkan's survey of other European countries. It is an attempt to describe the dynamics of the alternative universe of party evolution to which the Spanish case belongs. One of the claims of this chapter is that party systems became established only in countries where it was expected, at the time that mass parties were first being formed, that the new parties would play an important role in government. Provided that there is party system, the next question is which cleavages does it reflect? The second claim of this chapter is that the answer to this question depends in part upon what happened to the old cleavages that predated mass participation.
