Political leaders around the world increasingly rely on personalist parties to win elections and govern. While existing scholarship assumes that personalist parties do not build territorial organization, in fact they vary substantially in terms of organizational strength. In this paper, we move beyond existing structural explanations of party-building and focus on the role of party elites’ preferences to explain the source of this variation. Through a mixed-method approach combining process-tracing of the case studies of Venezuela’s MVR/PSUV and Ecuador’s Alianza PAIS and statistical analysis of Latin American parties, we find that party elites’ past political experiences shape whether personalist parties successfully invest in party organization. Party officials who were socialized in radical-left parties are more likely to advocate for party-building and their presence within party cadres is associated with stronger party organization.
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