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Cleavage Structures and Party Systems in Latin America
Robert H. Dix
Comparative Politics, Vol. 22, No. 1. (Oct., 1989), pp. 23-37
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Wed Jul 12.09:49:26 2006Cleavage Structures and Party Systems
in Latin America
Robert H. Dix
In a seminal article in 1967 Seymour Martin Lipset and Stein Rokkan posed a series of
central questions for the comparative study of party systems. The first set of questions
cconcemed the genesis of the system of cleavages within the national community, including
the timing oftheir appearance and theit relative salience and durability. A second group of
{questions focused on the translation of cleavages into stable party systems, including the
{question of why conflicting interests and ideologies in some cases favored the emergence of
broad aggregatve coalitions, and in others fragmentation. The final set of questions bore on
the behavior of voters within the various pany systems. What were the characteristics of
those voters mobilized by the several partes, and how did economic and social change
translate into changes inthe strengths and strategies ofthe parties? The authors stessed that
all these and related questions were to be addressed diachronically that is, in historical
perspective."
‘While Lipset and Rokkan, as well as most of the many others who have asked similar
comparative questions, have focused almost exclusively on the competitive party systems of
Europe and the Anglo-Saxon diaspora (the United States, Australia, Canada, and New
Zealand, it seems high time that questions like those raised for industrialized countries now
also be posed for Latin America, particulary since Latin America constitutes the area ofthe
‘world that most closely approximates the developed West in culture, levels of economic and
social development,? and experience with competitive party systems. Only by examining
such questions outside the regions of the ancestral homes of political parties and party
systems can we expand our generalizations about the historical development of political
partes beyond the evidence of a particular time and place. It is also at least highly plausible
‘hat Latin America’s experience with the construction of systems of competitive party
politics will prove more relevant to the future trajectory of such politics in other pars ofthe
so-called Third World than will tha ofthe developed West
‘This article is an attempt to begin the systematic analysis ofthat experience.® Among the
questions we pose will be the following. Has the development of western party systems
proven to be the prototype for the evolution of competitive party systems in Latin America?
‘What are the kinds of parties and the patterns of competition among paris in Latin America,
and how have they emerged over time? Have the West's past experiences with the onset of
‘mass politics and the politics of industializaion been more or less replicated in
contemporary Latin America? How might one account for any differences? What follows is
therefore meant essentially as an exploratory exercise in delineating some broad patterns of
similarity and difference between the party systems of Latin America and the developed
West.
‘AC the same time, our enterprise will be a good deal more modest in scale and in
2BComparative Politics October 1989
supportive detail than that undertaken by Lipset and Rokk. In part this i a function of the
relative paucity of unevenness of the kinds of reliable electoral data, opinion surveys, and
single country studies concerning Latin America in comparison to what is available for the
so-called western of industrialized countries. Too, the electoral process in Latin America
frequently suffers from constrains that hamper analysis. Parties (sometimes major ones as,
at times, the American Popular Revolutionary Alliance, APRA, in Peru) may be barre from.
presenting candidates, or fraud and other conteols may obscure fully accurate results, as in
Mexico, not to mention Paraguay. The democratic experience has also been briefer. more
recent, and more sporadic in the Latin American case and has often been interupted by
periods of military and other authoritarian rule that have effectively suspended competitive
Politics altogether. Moreover, Latin America’s parties may come and go with staring
rapidity and may form ever-changing alliances or combinations of sometimes confusing
complexity. Some have barely deserved the designation “party” to begin with. Finally, and
pethaps most fundamental, parties by no means encompass the full spectrum of groups
competing for governmental power. In many Latin American countries the armed forces oF
guerrilla insurgencies, on occasion allied with one or another political party or even a
foreign country, employ armed force to compete for power, necessarily making elections
less definitive than has usually been true of western Europe, Noth America, and
Australasia
"Nonetheless, itis our purpose to expand the comparative horizons of the study of party
systems by incorporating the Latin American experience, particularly in regard to the
evelopment of those systems over time and the impact on them of the onset of mass
politics
Patterns of Party Development
At first glance the historic cleavage lines of Latin American polities would appear roughly to
parallel those of the European past, albeit with notable time Tags: the center versus the
periphery, the secularizing state versus the church, the landed elite versus commercial and
industrial interests, and finally, in the wake ofall the others, the class strggle of workers
against their employers.® Thus throughout most of the nineteenth century, and well into the
twentieth in many cases, the political divisions of Latin America tended predominantly to be
those of conservatives versus liberal, altough they bore other names in some places and
almost everywhere showed a marked propensity for fctionaism and fragmentation, often
centered around particular individuals, families, or regions. The conservative parties tended
to reflect the interests and altitudes of those who favored strong central government,
protection of the Catholic church and is socal and economic prerogatives, and defense of
the interests of traditional landowners. Liberals, onthe other hand, could usually be found
advocating federalism, disestablishment of the church, and the defense of commercial
interests, often including the advocacy of free trade.®
‘One contrast to the European pattem was that the ethnic, cultural, and intereligious
imensions of politics in much of the West were largely absent in the Souther Americas.
‘Thus, while center-periphery struggles led in some places (Argentina and Colombia, for
example) to almost endemie civil war for much ofthe nineteenth century, they didnot entail
aRobert H. Dix
struggles between national and provincial or subnational cultures with different languages or
religious attitudes as they did, say, in Norway, France, Spain, Belgium, and Canada. Nor
\was the conflict over the church ever among different religions in the Latin American case.
As in southern Europe, the questions related rather to church control over education, the
registration of births and deaths, and, not leas, the ownership of land, wth liberals typically
wanting to open up entailed church estates to the operation of market forces.
However, there is @ more important consideration forthe understanding of contemporary
Latin American party systems and their contrasts with western patterns. For if western party
systems evolved more or less incrementally, with parties based on newly salient cleavages’
being added to the existing system, in time shunting aside parties founded on previously
prominent cleavages, reducing them to minor party status, or interacting with them in
‘complex ways, this has been the case only exceptionally in Latin America.
Chile's party system, until its effective suspension by the military coup of September
1973, did substantially follow the classic continental European pater.’ In Argentina, 100,
the current governing party, the Radical Civie Union (UCR), traces it roots tothe 1890s,
Ecuador and Panama have also exhibited some evolutionary continuity, albeit much more
tentatively. However, in these countries the fragmentation and even virtual disappearance of
the traditional parties and the volatility of newer ones have tended to blur the patterns,
characteristic of Chile and Argentina, whereby new parties were added to the system in
response to newly mobilized classes. Effectively, ther current party alignments constitute
ew party systems.
Yet the great majority of Latin America’s party systems do not fall into the kind of
‘evolutionary pattern typical of the West. Thus, in a pattern that might be dubbed
“discontinuous,” the parties and party systems of perhaps a dozen Latin American countries
have emerged more oles de novo, usually after a revolution ora long period of dictatorial
rule, with few perceptible links to the prerevolutonary or predictatoial past." Most of the
traditional conservative and liberal parties simply ceased to exist, leaving no visible
progeny.
‘True, ina few instances one can find some traces of linkage. Thus in the Brazilian case
the tiny Republican Party ofthe post-1946 republic could trace its lineage to the dominant
Republicans of the Old Republic (1889-1930), and some of the rural political bosses of an
earlier era became pillars of the later so-called Social Democratic Party (PSD).* Yet the
Parties, as wel as the party system, of the pre-1930 period were essentially destroyed by the
advent of Getulio Vargas to power in 1930. When democracy was restored in 1945, the new
party system bore lite resemblance tothe ol.
Rather, then, than the European model of party development suggested by Lipset and
Rokkan, whereby the principal differences among contemporary party systems canbe traced
to distinctive configurations of early cleavages (centerperiphery, church-state, and
landowners-commercia/indusrial interests), variations among many of Latin America’s
party systems reflect divergent responses 10 the expanded political mobilization of the last
several decades.
Just a sciking, though fewer in number, are those “continuous” Latin American party
systems (Colombia, Honduras, Paraguay, and Uruguay) that simply have not evolved or
changed much at all over time, despite their countries’ marked increases in social and
political mobilization and the emergence of new social classes. Liberals and conservatives
28