CIAO DATE: 09/02

Transforming Labor-Based Parties in Latin America: The Argentine Justicialista Party In Comparative Perspective

Abstract

This article seeks to explain the success or failure of Latin American labor-based parties in adapting to the contemporary challenges of economic liberalization and working class decline. It focuses on party organization, and specifically, on informal and underinstitutionalized organizational forms. The article’s central claim is that underinstitutionalized organizational structures may facilitate party adaptation in a context of environmental crisis. Thus, mass populist parties, which lack the bureaucratic constraints that tend to inhibit change in better institutionalized labor-based parties, may possess a distinctive advantage in the neoliberal period. Although these parties’ deep roots in society provide them with relative electoral stability, other populist legacies, such as fluid internal structures, non-bureaucratic hierarchies, and centralized leaderships, yield a high degree of strategic flexibility. The article applies this argument to the case of the Argentine Justicialista Party (PJ), a mass populist party that adapted with striking success in the 1980s and 1990s. In the coalitional realm, the poorly institutionalized nature of the PJ’s partyunion linkage allowed reformers to easily dismantle traditional mechanisms of labor participation, which contributed to the PJ’s rapid transformation from a labor-dominated party into a patronage-based party. In the programmatic realm, the PJ’s non-bureaucratic hierarchy and under-institutionalized leadership bodies provided President Carlos Menem with substantial room for maneuver in carrying out a neoliberal strategy that, while at odds with Peronism’s traditional program, was critical to the party’s survival as a major political force.

Full text (PDF format, 47 pages, 106kb)