This chapter analyzes recent conservative efforts to build parties in Latin America. Its main case study is Argentina’s Republican Proposal (PRO) party, one of the most important examples of conservative party-building in Latin America. This chapter explains the success of right-wing parties born in nonauthoritarian contexts through the strategic decisions of leaders about whether to invest in high-cost resources (ideational and organizational) that will allow parties to take root in inhospitable contexts. This chapter demonstrates that the competitiveness of right-wing parties has been driven by three factors: programmatic innovation by personalistic leaders; organizational mobilization of both core and noncore constituencies; and an elite fear of the "Venezuela model."

This chapter is based on earlier work on Obligatory Control and Reflexivization in terms of movement. The point here is not to rehash the arguments for movement approaches to control and reflexive binding but to illustrate how movement approaches to construal are consequences of the EMH incorporating the FPG. The EMH/FPG implies that the non-local relation between an antecedent and Obligatory Control PRO (OCPRO) and a reflexive must be mediated by I-merge. In other words, descriptively speaking, such construal relations must “live on” A-chains. As this is effectively what movement theories of OC and Reflexivization have argued, and as the EMH/FPG implies movement theories of both, insofar as such movement theories are successful, to that extent they support the encompassing EMH/FPG theory. I review some arguments showing that movement plausibly underlies such dependencies. However, the discussion is not exhaustive; it is mainly illustrative. The reader is referred to the considerable literature on both topics for the full-scale defense of these movement approaches.

Chapter 16 examines the processing of three types of long-distance dependencies: a forward syntactic dependency, a backward syntactic dependency, and a backward referential dependency. First, backward syntactic and referential dependencies show a processing asymmetry of subject/object gap sentences similar to that seen in forward syntactic dependencies, and they all elicit similar brain responses (Kwon 2008; Kwon et al. 2010, 2013). However, given that views among some typologists that backward dependencies are much more limited in distribution (Dryer 1992) and subject to more linguistic constraints (Lakoff 1968; Kuno 1972; Mittwoch 1983) than forward dependencies, processing of a backward dependency may be more difficult or less efficient (cf., Hawkins 1994, 1999, 2004). Likewise, the parser is “more cautious” in the processing of referential dependencies (Kwon and Sturt 2014). Finally, dependency formation may be affected by the relative importance of linguistic cues in a given language. In Korean, dependency formation is more strongly motivated by discourse context than in English (Kwon and Sturt 2013).

During Argentina’s 2001–02 crisis, new political groupings were created. Most of them were derived from preexisting parties and most failed to survive much beyond that juncture. The Republican Proposal (PRO) is one of the rare cases of successful party building. From a small group centered around an entrepreneur, it was built up with political newcomers from the business world and NGOs and with long-standing politicians – radicals, Peronists – from the traditional Right. Its success marked a break with the historical weakness of center-right parties in Argentina. However, due to the conditions of its emergence and the strategy carried out by its leaders, PRO is more rooted in some parts of the country than in others. In the City of Buenos Aires, its stronghold, and in certain other provinces, it behaves like a fully functioning political party, while in other districts it would be better defined as a diminished subtype, specifically an unrooted party. This chapter focuses on the PRO’s centralized horizontal coordination strategy and the impact of this strategy on the party’s uneven rootedness throughout the country. In this way, the case of the PRO helps elucidate the subnational variations of the theoretical model proposed in this volume.