Deinstitutionalization of the party system in Colombia: political reforms and consequences on small left parties

The first part of this article is constituted by the theoretical framework where it is taken as a reference the hypothesis of Levitsky, Loxton, Dyck and Dominguez (2016), according to which there is a limited impact of the institutional design on construction of parties in Latin America, this article seeks to contrast that hypothesis for the Colombian case. To this goal, the causes and consequences of the deinstitutionalization of the party system, the political reform of 2003 and subsequent, and the way in which they impacted particularly on the smaller left parties are analyzed.