Our study has characterized and explained patterns of programmatic party system structuration in twelve Latin American countries in the late 1990s in some detail. With data from this region, our analysis develops and explores, but does not comprehensively test, a more general argument about the formation of party systems that foster programmatic competition. Politicians and citizens can build programmatic parties only with great effort. Such effort results in programmatic partisan alignments only where politicians can construct “stakes” around widely shared but contested political-economic strategies of development and distribution or around conflicts concerning sociocultural or political governance.

Creating “stakes” that structure programmatic competition, in turn, requires voters and political entrepreneurs to possess capabilities and to seize opportunities to engage in electoral competition. Programmatic conflicts do not appear spontaneously but require a great deal of work over long periods of time. Once political-economic or sociocultural alignments lock into party system alignments, however, they can weather even episodes of profound exogenous shock and dislocation, such as times of authoritarian rule or new political-economic challenges. Such shocks were in evidence in Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s, when many electoral democracies reverted to military rule, and in the “lost decade” of the 1980s that spelled the end of import-substituting industrialization strategies.

But patterns of programmatic party competition are not forever: they do not “freeze” permanently.