This chapter turns to the comparison of cases. By analyzing the discontented cases, a clear pattern emerges. The positive cases share few characteristics save one: democratic discontent that arose when sharp economic contractions intensified the imperfections and contradictions of the political status quo. This argument is made using paired comparisons of the positive and negative cases (Canada with the USA/UK, Portugal with Spain, Uruguay with Brazil/Chile) to evaluate competing explanations. The second section of the chapter analyzes how discontent was avoided during the Great Recession by looking for shared features of the three negative cases. It finds that escaping the initial pain of a crisis was not a necessary condition for avoiding discontent. Instead, the key to maintaining democratic legitimacy lay in the political response to the crises, and in the adaptability and health of left-wing parties. In all three negative cases, center-left parties recognized crises as indictments of neoliberalism, rejected its calls for austerity. By responding to popular demands for help in difficult times, these parties deprived cultural conflicts of the oxygen needed for them to rage and avoided major upsurges of discontent.

This chapter analyzes the case of the Frente Amplio (Broad Front, FA) in Uruguay as an unusual organization. Since its founding, the FA has exhibited a dual structure: a coalition of various factions that compose the party and a movement comprising a common grassroots structure (Base Committees). The latter is not necessarily affiliated with any particular faction and it participates in all of the party’s decision-making structures. The FA fulfills the essential functions required to qualify as a political party. These functions manifest themselves in the participatory processes that develop the party’s electoral platforms and also control the nomination of presidential candidates. More critically, the coalition and the grassroots movement tended to influence the policy decisions of the party’s parliamentary caucus when the FA was an opposition party, as well as the decisions of the executive branch when the FA was in government (2005–20). In this process, grassroots party activists exercised significant influence over political decisions that were particularly sensitive for the Left. Regarding vertical interest aggregation, the FA has developed strong, informal links with various social actors, especially with labor unions.

Uruguay’s Frente Amplio (Broad Front, FA) is a mass-organic institutionalized leftist party. It is a deviant case that helps explicate the reproduction of mass-organic party organization and activism. The peculiar internal structure of the FA and the rules that ensure a role for grassroots activists in the highest decision-making bodies of the party are a product of the extraordinary conditions that existed at the time of the party’s birth in 1971. The intense autonomous activism that occurred during this stage acts as a historical cause. The decision-making authority of the grassroots activists, granted incrementally since the FA’s foundational stage, enables activists to block changes that reduce their power, engendering a lock-in effect and positive feedback. These rules grant FA activists a significant voice, which imbues activists´ participation with a strong sense of efficacy. This perceived efficacy operates as a selective incentive for activists to engage with the party. The chapter develops this theoretical argument and justifies the selection of the FA as a deviant case of party reproduction.