Thursday, August 9, 2007

Peronism Without Peron: Unions, Parties, and Democracy in Argentina

Peronism Without Peron: Unions, Parties, and Democracy in Argentina
Blake, Charles H

James W. McGuire. Peronism Without Peron: Unions, Parties, and Democracy in Argentina. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997. Tables, figure, abbreviations, notes, bibliography, index, 388 pp.; hardcover $49.50.

In the first chapter, James McGuire aptly quotes Diamond and Linz's 1989 assertion, "our understanding of democracy in many Latin American countries is handicapped by a lack of systematic knowledge of some of the parties" (p. 3). McGuire's book is a worthy addition to a series of solid monographs on party formation and evolution in the region that have worked to fill that void over the course of the 1990s. Such works include Kathleen Bruhn's Taking on Goliath (1997), Michael Coppedge's Strong Parties and Lame Ducks (1994), Edward Gibson's Class and Conservative Parties (1996), Carol Graham's Peru's APRA (1992), Margaret Keck's Workers' Party and Democratization in Brazil (1992), and Timothy Scully's Rethinking the Center (1992).

Peronism Without Peron explores a series of failed attempts to convert the Peronist movement into an institutionalized political party. McGuire weaves a readable narrative of these events from periodical and archival sources and a comprehensive reading of Argentine analysts. His account puts forward two main contentions. First, the party-building projects were blocked largely by the machinations of two personalist leaders (Juan Peron and Carlos Menem), rather than by factors external to the movement. Second, this failure to create a depersonalized Peronist political party has made democratic consolidation more difficult. The analysis of personalist parties has clear relevance for many countries in the region, beyond Argentina.

The book begins with a conceptualization of the role of party institutionalization in democratic consolidation. McGuire works from a reasonable premise:

People who come to value party activity thus acquire a more direct and salient instrumental stake in the survival of elections and legislatures than do people who subordinate party activity to pressure through class organizations, to wheeling and dealing with government officials, or to an "anything goes" approach to empowering a plebiscitarian leader." (p. 2)

The second chapter provides a useful discussion of the limits to party institutionalization in Julio Roca's PAN and in Hipolito Yrigoyen's UCR that set the backdrop for the emergence of Peronism.

McGuire then analyzes the period 1943-1955. Peron rose to the presidency in 1946, governing until the 1955 military coup sent him into exile for nearly two decades. McGuire's explanation of the failure of partybuilding rests squarely on Peron's unwillingness to smile on the creation of a "pool of organizational resources that potential rivals might use to challenge his leadership" (pp. 57-58). At the same time, McGuire details several reasons why Peron did not need to reexamine that stance: he was a prolabor authority (willing to promote wage hikes) in an antilabor context; many major labor leaders had minimal ties to existing political parties; and Peron relied mainly on the resources of the organized labor movement to drive his election and reelection efforts. The Peronist Party was more the product of elected authority than the means to electoral triumph. This distinguishes the Peronist Party from parties with similar support bases that institutionalized during years in opposition or proscription, such as APRA in Peru or AD in Venezuela (pp. 65-66).

Given that observation, it is not surprising that the centerpiece of the book is an analysis of the effort to create a depersonalized expression of Peronism during the years 1955-1966. In this first decade of Peron's exile, Peronist-inspired political parties were alternately illegal or tenuously legal-a situation that Guillermo O'Donnell famously dubbed an "impossible game" for democratic rule, given that a third (or more) of the electorate had Peronist leanings.

In this context, metalworker and union leader Augusto Vandor tried to reorganize the Peronist movement as a union-led political party that would no longer function primarily as an electoral vehicle for Peron himself. The chief incentives for this effort were the resolute proscription of Peron throughout the period (which opened the door for successors), a desire to enhance the power base of the labor movement by controlling a popular political party, and the very real opportunity for a variety of Peronist politicians and labor leaders to gain elective office if they would run as neo-Peronist candidates (that is, if they would accept Peron's exile). Faced with this challenge, Peron responded with actions that made it more difficult to pursue the neo-Peronist project.

McGuire explains Peron's successful parry of Vandorism by focusing on the dynamics of the best-organized arm of his movement, organized labor. In the most detailed section of the book, McGuire analyzes the major factions of the labor movement and traces how a decidedly heterogeneous group of rival union leaders emerged to back Peron in an effort to prevent a further expansion of Vandor's power-culminating in the electoral defeat of the Vandorist candidate in the 1966 gubernatorial race in Mendoza. McGuire explains this dynamic using Kenneth Waltz's work on "balancing behavior" among nation-states in international relations theory. "Applying Waltz's model, one could represent Vandor (on the scene in Argentina) as the stronger great power, Peron (exiled in Madrid) as the weaker great power, and Alonso, Olmos, Framini, and the hard-liners as peripheral states" (p. 140).

The twin events of the return to democracy and the Peronist candidate's defeat in the 1983 presidential elections ushered in what McGuire reasonably terms the second major effort at party building, "renewal" Peronism. The narrow victory of a more personalist figure, Carlos Menem, over Antonio Cafiero in the 1988 primary elections marked the end of the renewal project-particularly after Menem won the 1989 presidential elections. McGuire argues that Menem's plebiscitarian style resonated better with Peronist voters, and that the "balancing behavior" of key union leaders (especially metalworkers' chief Lorenzo Miguel) helped Menem to defeat the major architect of the renewal movement.

McGuire proceeds to an analysis of the first Menem administration (1989-1995). The discussion deviates somewhat from previous chapters in that the main focus is on the dynamics of market-oriented economic reform. McGuire details Menem's strategies for implementing the reforms, as well as the varied reactions of factions in the labor movement. Along the way, he describes Menem's efforts to minimize the institutionalization of the Partido Justicialista. The underlying explanation is similar to his account of the first Peron administration: Menem did not rise to national power on the back of a political party but through the critical support of certain labor leaders and his own skill at exploiting the weak flanks of his electoral opponents.

Once Menem was in power, victory over hyperinflation became the triumph-analogous to wage hikes under Peron-that gave Menem the leeway to govern without a visibly acute need for a stronger political party. In considering the implications of Menem's first term for democratic consolidation, McGuire asserts that the decline in organized labor's economic, organizational, and political power might promote democratization because of a decline in the prospects for distributional conflict (p. 260-61). Conversely, he criticizes the Menem administration's reluctance to invigorate political institutions in government (especially the legislature and the judiciary) and out of government-to whit, the Partido Justicialista itself.

In closing, McGuire tries to highlight the importance of his analysis for thinking about democratic consolidation. He argues that organized labor's failure to hitch its wagon to an institutionalized political party is particularly problematic in Argentina, given labor's greater strength relative to other countries in the region. He asserts that competing explanations of democratic failure are insufficient-thereby creating a case for the need for his "distributive conflict-party institutionalization approach" as a complement to explanations based on economic dependency, critical junctures, political culture, and interventionist militaries (pp. 272-81).

It is decidedly difficult to find fault with this conclusion. Political parties clearly play a vital role in the creation and evolution of contemporary democracies, just as rising levels of distributional conflict place difficult pressures on democratic (and nondemocratic) political systems. These sorts of assertions have been part of the political development literature for years. They predate the renewed scholarly focus on democratization that emerged in response to successive events over the last two decades in Southern Europe, Latin America, Asia, Eastern Europe, and Africa. McGuire himself (pp. 8-9) discusses one earlier seminal study, Samuel Huntington's Political Order in Changing Societies (1968), to which one could add the work of Dankwart Rustow and many others. The uncontroversial nature of McGuire's propositions constitutes perhaps the lone disappointing element in what in many other respects is a satisfying and well-constructed analysis.

Just as McGuire labels the defeats of Vandorist and renewal Peronism as missed opportunities for the institutionalization of a Peronist political party, the last chapter represents a missed opportunity for theory building on the issue that is central to the main body of the book: the dynamics of party building. McGuire's explanation of the failed institutionalization of Peronism plausibly focuses on three sets of factors: organized labor's nonparty resources (which reduced the urgency of party building), the emergence of two major personalist politicians who opposed institutionalization (Peron and Menem), and rivalries within organized labor. Yet while McGuire builds a contextualized explanation of failure, some readers may finish the book with a desire for more direct consideration of potential paths to successful labor party institutionalization in Argentina and elsewhere.

For instance, where organized labor is relatively weak before the emergence of a labor party, should we expect to see more institutionalized labor parties (as the converse of McGuire's Argentine analysis would imply)? If personalistic leaders tend to oppose party institutionalization (which would seem to be true almost by definition), under what conditions are less personalistic leaders likely to become dominant? In analyzing Vandorism, McGuire discusses the role of proscription as one enabling condition. Yet amid the contemporary "third wave" of relatively open electoral competition, proscription's relevance is less empirically significant (and few would call for embracing proscription as a strategy for promoting institutionalization).

In discussing renewal Peronism, electoral defeat precedes reorganization. Is electoral defeat the driving force behind party institutionalization in a democracy, or might other conditions obtain in the current context? Similarly, under what conditions is leadership competition within organized labor less problematic for labor party formation or democratization? These are difficult questions about political party dynamics that in the next decade scholars (including McGuire) will be better positioned to address by building on fine case studies such as this one.

McGuire's narrative details the incentives for and against party building among Peronist labor leaders and politicians at different points in time over the past half-century. The book is a sweeping achievement in its ability to provide a fairly detailed account of such a long period in a readable monograph that can be appreciated by Argentine specialists and nonspecialists alike. In particular, McGuire's skillful handling of the baroque world of factions within the Argentine labor movement solidifies his growing reputation as a leading expert on Argentine labor relations and on Peronism more generally.

Charles H. Blake

James Madison University

Copyright Journal of Interamerican Studies Fall 1998
Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved

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