Cleavage Structures and Party Systems in Latin America Robert H. Dix Comparative Politics, Vol. 22, No. 1. (Oct., 1989), pp. 23-37 Stable URL hitp:/flinks.jstor-org/sicisici=0010-4159% 281989 10% 2922% 3A 1%3C23%3ACSAPSI%3E2.0.CO%3B2-0 Comparative Politics is currently published by Ph.D. Program in Political Science of the City University of New York ‘Your use of the ISTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR’s Terms and Conditions of Use, available at hup:/www,jstororglabout/terms.hml. ISTOR’s Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at hutp:/wwwwjstor.org/journals/PhD html ch copy of any part of'a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the sereen or printed page of such transmission, ISTOR is an independent not-for-profit organization dedicated to creating and preserving a digital archive of scholarly journals. For more information regarding JSTOR, please contact support @ jstor.org. hupulwww jstor.org/ Wed Jul 12.09:49:26 2006Cleavage 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 2BComparative 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 aRobert 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