This essay documents growing partisan social uprootedness across Latin America over time, manifested in diminishing social trust toward parties, debilitation of links between parties and social collectivities, lowering levels of partisanship, and rising incidence of personalism in the electorate. It focuses on some unrecognized and undertheorized causal factors behind partisan involution in the region, putting emphasis on mutually reinforcing processes. First, it identifies forces endogenous to the traits of origin of diminished parties that foster their uprootedness and decay; second, it lays out some of the manifold ways that the weakening of political parties fuels regime malperformance, in a mutually reinforcing vicious circle; third, it outlines the existence of mutual feedback loops between political agency and structure; fourth, it identifies various agential sources of party decay. There are strong theoretical and empirical reasons to expect continued party deinstitutionalization across Latin America going forward.

本文记录了随着时间的推移，拉丁美洲日益增长的党派社会连根拔起，表现为对政党的社会信任度降低、政党与社会集体之间联系的削弱、党派斗争水平降低以及选民个人主义的发生率上升。它侧重于该地区党派内卷背后的一些未被认识和理论化不足的因果因素，强调相辅相成的过程。首先，它确定了与衰落的政党的起源特征内生的力量，这些力量促进了它们的连根拔起和腐朽;其次，它列出了政党的削弱助长政权绩效不佳的一些多种方式，形成一个相辅相成的恶性循环;第三，它概述了政治机构和结构之间存在的相互反馈循环;第四，它确定了政党衰败的各种代理来源。有很强的理论和实证理由可以预期，未来整个拉丁美洲的政党去机构化将继续下去。