Party Systems Must Match the Real Cleavage

Per Lipset and Rokkan's cleavage theory, a viable party system must map onto the main political cleavage that actually defines a society; Bolivia's pre-2003 left-versus-right system was built on a false cleavage because Bolivia never had an industrial revolution and thus had no self-identified working class and few capitalists, so the system collapsed and was replaced by parties organized around the real cleavage—ethnic, identitarian, and geographic identity.