Parties may be inevitable, but they are not immortal. That major political parties sometimes expire is a subject not heavily explored in political science, particularly within the study of American politics. Noam Lupu’s new book Party Brands in Crisis, however, demonstrates how parties can suffer catastrophic decline within just a few years.

Lupu’s study focuses chiefly on the party systems in Latin America, especially Argentina and Venezuela, although he buttresses this primary work with broader examinations of electoral results, public opinion surveys, and experiments conducted throughout the Americas and more broadly around the globe. How, Lupu asks, did strongly competitive and historically grounded parties like Argentina’s Radical Civil Union (UCR) and the two largest parties in Venezuela—Democratic Action (AD) and the Independent Political Electoral Organization Committee (COPEI)—suddenly disintegrate around the turn of the twenty-first century?

The answer, Lupu argues, is an interaction between party performance and brand maintenance. As he notes, the parties that died had faced governing crises previously and survived them. Voters will punish governing parties for economic downturns and scandals, but those parties generally live on to fight another day. Loyal partisans will stick with their party even in difficult times. (U.S. President Herbert Hoover, for example, still managed to pull 40 percent of the vote in his 1932 reelection bid, in a year in which the American economy lost a quarter of its value.)

What these Latin American parties faced on top of that was strong pressure to change their policy stances imposed by dire economic circumstances. When, say, a radical leftist party suddenly adopts market-oriented policies to stave off hyperinflation and economic collapse, it becomes unmoored from its most loyal voters. A party that is indistinguishable from its opposition in terms of policy is thus highly vulnerable when political conditions turn against it. Loyal partisans will abandon such a party, and the party may quickly cease to exist. That is, the party that stands for nothing may fall for anything.

Argentina provides a particularly strong example for Lupu’s thesis. The UCR and the Peronists were the dominant parties for decades, capturing more than 80 percent of the vote between 1946 and 1999. And UCR certainly suffered at the polls in 1989 during a hyperinflation crisis, for which it was largely blamed. But termed-out President Raúl Alfonsín, along with his chosen successor Eduardo Angeloz, didn’t depart hugely from party ideals in their economic reform proposals, and the opposing Peronists offered stark contrasts. These allowed UCR partisans to stick with their party during the elections, limiting the damage to the party. By contrast, the 2003 elections saw Radical and Peronist leaders shifting positions to address another economic crisis and forming a number of odd cross-party coalitions. Voters, even loyal partisans, had a difficult time discerning what the parties stood for. The UCR, which had won the presidency just four years earlier, pulled a mere two percent of the vote. Today, notes Lupu, “the UCR has become one of many small opposition parties unable to field competitive presidential candidates” (p. 61).

The qualitative evidence provided by Argentina’s and Venezuela’s party systems is very helpful to Lupu’s argument and fleshes out some of the motivations of policymakers and voters. Lupu nicely supports these accounts with a variety of quantitative examinations of the countries under study. Regression tables showing the increasing importance of retrospective evaluation and the declining importance of party identification, for example, are especially compelling.

The later empirical chapters go a good deal further, examining a key causal link in Lupu’s story: the idea that voters are more likely to become party adherents as they perceive greater differences between the parties. This empirical work is much more abstract and divorced from specific national examples, but nonetheless serves the central thesis well. Survey results from a broad array of nations suggest that as voters perceive fewer differences between the parties, they will abandon their party and leave it more vulnerable to the harsh penalties of retrospective evaluations.

Lupu’s account leaves a few questions unaddressed. For one thing, just how representative are Argentina’s and Venezuela’s examples of party systems generally? To be sure, the book nicely grounds the research in more universal theories of party brands and electoral evaluations, and much of the empirical work goes well beyond those specific examples. Nonetheless, there are some features of those two nations' party systems that seem unusual. For example, as the electoral evidence (figures 4.1 and 5.1) demonstrates, support for these major parties (the Peronists and the UCR in Argentina; the AD and COPEI in Venezuela) seems to rise and fall together. When one is popular, so is the other, suggesting they are not necessarily pulling support from each other. Is the main schism in the political systems between the major parties and more peripheral ones? Would we see similar party collapse in a system where the parties were more directly opposed to each other or where there were essentially no minor parties?

Relatedly, are the dire economic circumstances faced by these countries, involving substantial international pressure for debt repayment and occasional bouts of hyperinflation, likely to be faced by other nations? Or are these circumstances unique to this particular region and time period?

Another concern centers on majority and minority party status. If parties die due to a combination of voter unattachment and retrospective evaluation, shouldn’t only majority parties suffer the consequences? Shouldn’t minority parties benefit from harsh assessments of the majority? The simultaneous demise of Venezuela’s AD and COPEI parties is a rather unusual circumstance, given President Rafael Caldera’s associations with both parties, but more broadly, are opposition parties vulnerable as well?

Also, given the examples Lupu provides, are left-wing parties more susceptible to failure than right-wing ones? If inflationary concerns force governing parties to adopt market-oriented reforms, isn’t this more of an abandonment of principle for one type of party than another?

Additionally, and importantly, Lupu is somewhat unclear about just what causes partisans to abandon their chosen party. Is it a result of their party rapidly abandoning its core policy stances, or of their party and its opposition converging on positions? These are not exactly the same thing—a party can become closer to its opposition without changing a single platform plank if the opposition party moderates, for example. But the book treats these two trends as synonymous; the theoretical discussion largely focuses on the dangers associated with a party compromising its brand, while the empirical tests mainly seek to measure differences between the parties. For parties wishing to understand how to avoid catastrophe, and for scholars seeking to understand such phenomena, this is obviously an important distinction.

Finally, Lupu could perhaps have further examined the normative implications of his research. The consequences of weak or declining parties are certainly noted, with citations to a number of worthwhile publications, but Lupu has some particular findings he could more explicitly offer to this discussion. Notably, the death of Venezuela’s major parties paved the way for the rise of Hugo Chávez, whose previous coup attempt had been rebuffed by a more functional political system. Such evidence suggests not only that parties help manage a democracy, but that democracies are terribly fragile in the absence of parties.

Overall, there is a great deal to recommend in Party Brands in Crisis. The lessons here go well beyond the immediate examples from Latin America and inform party scholarship around the globe. Even for countries with relatively stable party systems, Lupu reminds us that individual parties survive in part by maintaining their brands. By making promises to voters and working to fulfill those promises, they ensure not only their survival but that of democracy as a whole. This book additionally reminds us of the value of not only parties but also partisanship, which is widely (and unfairly) blamed for many of the ailments of democratic legislatures. Finally, Lupu’s work informs us of the fragility of the entire democratic enterprise. Party Brands in Crisis is not only a good read but an important and timely one.