The Paraná´s Party System: from Personalism to Structuration

Abstract

This work seeks to identify general characteristics of the party system of the state of Paraná, Brazil, i.e., its evolution, main organisations and systemic trends. The text aims at demonstrating that the environment of personalism and growing fragmentation were no obstacles to the system’s consolidation around the historical antagonism between PMDB/PT and PSDB/DEM. In doing so, we suggest that once the personalism of the most important leaders at the state level was consolidated in opposite ideological fields, it slowly moved towards the polarisation of the national dispute, becoming able to define state policies around which regularly orbited some of the parties that are relevant in the local scenario. The never-ceasing PDT´s movement between these two blocs is the counter side of the system, which reserves some space for entering and exiting of the blocks for those parties that do not achieve the capacity of formulation of policies and the promotion of competitive candidates.