About Studies on political parties in Colombia

This balance expresses partly the vast literature on political parties in Colombia. The text is organized into four issues. The first one, talks about the works dedicated to study the origins of our parties and refers to a complex and non-linear process marked by tensions and dilemmas even within the literature itself. The second section includes some approaches about one of the most prolific issues of our political science literature: the clientelism; there are shown the differences between the first studies and the latest analysis of this phenomenon. In a third stage, there are collected the attempts, still very limited, of the systematic studies or monographs about the parties or the prominent studies on one or another of their aspects. The text ends, with some considerations about the ways in which analysts have come to the partisan organization and the questions that have elucidated, in one way or another, "the inside" of the parties.