Does Party Politics Matter? : Regional Integration in Mercosur

Abstract

This dissertation examines the membership decisions in the Common Market of the South (Mercosur) in South America. Decisions about the accession of new member states and the suspension of established ones touch the very core of integration processes. I argue that party politics matters for such decisions. To study the role of party politics in membership decisions, I develop two mechanisms through which party politics may affect the preferences of political parties at the national level and, subsequently, membership decisions. The first mechanism is rooted in the policy-seeking model of party behavior and holds that parties prefer to cooperate with ideologically like-minded governments. The second mechanism builds on the office-seeking model of party behavior and assumes that parties’ membership preferences are determined by the domestic competition for office benefits. While the first mechanism results in a left/right cleavage of membership preferences at the domestic level, the second one leads to the formation of a government/opposition divide. I test the two mechanisms against the null hypothesis that membership decisions are driven solely by the national context resulting in unitary country-specific membership preferences. In order to analyze the impact of partisan politics on the decision-making processes, I divide the process into three stages – preference formation at the domestic level, interstate bargaining and domestic ratification/domestic reactions – and develop hypotheses for each. To account for the bargaining dynamics at the interstate level and its interlinkages with the domestic level, I rely on two-level game theory. Empirically, I analyze the accessions of Venezuela and Bolivia and the suspensions of Paraguay and Venezuela and hence the whole universe of membership decisions made by Mercosur thus far. In three of the four case studies – Venezuela’s accession and suspension and Paraguay’s suspension – I show a division in membership preferences among domestic political parties. Bolivia’s accession, by contrast, was predominantly consensual, counting with cross-party support in the majority of the member states. Nevertheless, party politics is the reason why Bolivia has not yet acquired full membership to Mercosur as it seems to be behind the non-approval of the accession protocol in the Brazilian Congress. Of the two mechanism of party politics, ideological congruence turns out to be the decisive one: In general parties supported the accession of a country led by an ideologically like-minded government while opposing the accession of an ideological dissimilar one. With suspension it was the other way around, here parties were averse to suspending a country governed by an ideologically like-minded government, but supported suspension of an ideological dissimilar one. A comparison of the cases further revealed the conditions under which party politics matters for membership decisions showing inter alia that a certain degree of democratic ambivalence in an accession/suspension candidate is conducive to party politicization. Thus, besides contributing to research on Mercosur, (comparative) regional integration, and party politics this dissertation also speaks to studies on democratic backsliding in regional organizations.