Levitsky, Steven. Transforming Labor-Based Parties in Latin America: Argentine Peronism in Comparative Perspective. New York: Cambridge University Press. 2003. Tables, figures, bibliography, index, 290 pp.; hardcover $70, paperback $25.
Studies of parties in Latin America have traditionally focused on party histories, ideology, formal organization, and above all, the party system. With a few rare exceptions, scholars have only recently begun to study the internal workings of parties in Latin America in ways that build on the research being done in the advanced industrial democracies. Steven Levitsky's study of Argentina's Partido Justicialista (PJ) stands at the forefront of this new trend. His book is primarily a case study of the Peronist party over the past half-century, focusing mainly on changes since the transition to democracy in 1983. His analysis of the PJ's organization and program finds that the party's extraordinary ability to adapt and survive is not so much a product of the challenges it has encountered in its environment but a result of its organization: thanks to its charismatic origins and lack of formal internal rules, the party enjoys an extraordinary level of flexibility.
The result of his work is a book that not only adds to our understanding of one of Latin America's most notorious parties, but provides useful theoretical insights for the study of parties and politics across all regions. His work sets high standards of research, conceptualizing, and theorizing, and it gives impetus and direction to the study of political parties in Latin America.
Most of the book's argument is laid out nicely in the first chapter, and those readers most interested in the theoretical contributions will want to focus on this part. Here, Levitsky focuses on the concept of party institutionalization, suggesting the need to distinguish two competing and independent attributes; namely, value infusion (how much an organization comes to be valued for its own sake) and routinization (the degree to which formal rules define organizational life). While the former may contribute to party stability, the latter does not necessarily. Indeed, low routinization may give parties significant flexibility in the face of external challenges by allowing for faster renovation of party leadership, change in the program and electoral strategy, and reform of the party organization. [End Page 171]
Studies of parties in the advanced industrial democracies have tended to overlook this aspect of party organization because of the relatively high levels of routinization that are common in these countries, but routinization varies significantly outside these countries in other regions, such as Latin America. It is this dimension of party organization, Levitsky suggests, that explains the PJ's ability to adapt and survive during the past two difficult decades.
Levitsky emphasizes the significance of routinization by combining it with the classic dimension of party organization described by Panebianco (1988), the degree of mass linkages (whether a party possesses a large membership and activist base, especially among the poorer segments of society). In the process, he produces a new typology of party organization with four types: mass populist, mass bureaucratic, personalistic electoral, and electoral-professional. The PJ belongs to the mass populist category, thus presumably enjoying the adaptive advantages provided by this kind of organization. A party like AD in Venezuela would fit the mass bureaucratic type. A party like Fujimori's Cambio 90 would belong to the personalistic electoral type, and a party such as the Partido por la Democracia in Chile would represent the electoral-professional type.
The next section of the book, chapters 2 through 6, fleshes out this argument by describing and analyzing the Peronist party organization and the changes it has experienced since its founding in the 1940s. Those readers most interested in learning about the PJ will want to focus on these chapters, which reveal Levitsky's considerable skill at field research and his talent for constructing readable and theoretically focused narratives.
Chapters 2 and 3 will be especially helpful for those unfamiliar with the early history of the party; these chapters are mostly a static description of how the party worked under Perón (it was essentially a completely unroutinized organization at Perón's service) and how it has worked since Perón's death and the most recent transition to democracy. Initially dependent on its linkages to labor, the party became a somewhat more routinized organization in the 1980s, but then grew highly dependent on access to patronage in order to coordinate party activities. Although a unified formal organization has existed since the late 1980s (one that officially uses direct elections to choose party candidates), real power rests with party officials in government office who freely use their access to patronage to control local networks of the party faithful.
Chapters 4 through 6 are the substantive core of the book, providing a highly detailed, chronological account of the challenges that Peronism confronted in the 1980s and 1990s as deindustrialization depleted the party's labor base. Levitsky shows how the party's low routinization allowed it to carry out its two crucial adaptations: a shift from party-union [End Page 172] linkages to more clientelistic linkages, and the implementation of promarket reforms during the 1990s under the presidency of Carlos Menem.
Thus Levitsky tests his theory by exploring two ways in which routinization made a crucial difference for organizational survival. The account is remarkable not merely because of the confirmation it provides for his theory, but because of the close look it offers into the party's inner workings and its transformation, particularly in the 1980s. The analysis makes sense of the party's low ideological content, the unstable alliances among party leaders, and its extraordinarily weak or meaningless formal organization. As elections change the configuration of patronage access, the party is constantly restructuring.
The concluding chapters (7 through 9) tie up loose ends, draw out some of the implications of the argument, and make an attempt at comparative analysis. These are the weakest chapters of the book in terms of empirical content, writing, and analysis, but they make a few bold claims worthy of response. Levitsky first contests the idea, from the literature on party dealignment (see Dalton and Wattenberg 2000), that mass-based organization in political parties is disappearing. He provides data demonstrating that the number of base-level units in most areas of the country has grown while the level of party membership has remained high. He acknowledges, however, that these base units are increasingly built around the provision of selective incentives rather than affective ties, a change implying that the quality of mass participation is not very high.
Levitsky also suggests that the Peronist adaptation and successes of the 1980s and 1990s were a crucial contribution to the stability of democracy in the country; the situation could have been much worse, as in Venezuela or Peru. This counterfactual argument seems plausible, although (as Levitsky affirms) it should not distract us from the weaknesses of the PJ and its notorious excesses while in power. Finally, in chapter 9, Levitsky briefly attempts to apply his theoretical argument regarding the importance of party routinization by looking at labor-based parties in several other countries, including Venezuela, Peru, Chile, and Mexico. He contends that the success or breakdown of these parties roughly correlates with their degree of presumed organizational flexibility. He is obviously unable to provide the kind of detailed process tracing that he does with the Peronist party, but his comparison suggests the kind of analysis that future scholars could undertake.
Overall, the book makes several important contributions. The research on the Peronist party organization and its changes over the past several decades is first-rate, based on an extensive set of interviews and party elite surveys. As Levitsky suggests, this is a significant contribution to the literature on Latin American parties. Ideally, as other scholars provide similar analyses of party organization in the future, their work [End Page 173] will facilitate the kinds of comparative analyses already being performed in the study of advanced industrial democracies; indeed, such analyses will allow us to compare Latin American parties with those of the North. Such comparison need not be a slavish attempt to fit Latin American parties into inadequate conceptual boxes, but it can reveal additional aspects of party organization that go unnoticed in the study of parties in Western Europe or the United States.
Levitsky also contributes to the theoretical literature on party organization. His discussion of party institutionalization makes a useful distinction, and the resulting typology of party organization is especially helpful; it will help us appreciate the differences between Latin American parties and those of other regions. This kind of conceptualization facilitates measurement and avoids stretching, and is an auspicious continuation of some of Levitsky's earlier conceptual work.
Likewise, while his theory is not earth-shattering, it makes a significant point that both builds on previous work and invites additional testing and theorizing. In particular, Levitsky makes a strong case that party organization strongly determines party adaptation, a serious concern in the present period of (neo)populism, economic crisis, and party system breakdown. Weberian-style routinization is not necessarily a blessing in the current environment, while a deeply rooted, independent popular identity probably is. Although this argument might not be a cause for optimism among scholars of Latin America (the degree of routinization is not something that anyone can fix overnight), it does help us understand and predict cases of party and party system decline, and it speaks to current debates among scholars and politicians in Latin America about the kind of party organizations that should be adopted in the third wave of democratization.
Levitsky's argument also has several important weaknesses, although none of these jeopardizes the contributions mentioned above. For one, he does not really demonstrate the effects of party routinization on economic reforms. Previous studies indicate that hyperinflationary crises were an important catalyst for market-oriented reforms in the 1980s and 1990s, especially the comprehensive "shock therapy" packages that were instituted in countries such as Peru and Argentina. Although the causal mechanisms for this relationship are still not entirely clear (compare Weyland 1998a, 1998b; Rodrik 1994), the correlation between economic crisis and successful reforms is very strong. The problem is that Argentina was one of these cases of hyperinflationary crisis, and the coincidence means that critics can always argue that the country's economic reforms were really the product of the crisis rather than of Peronist party organization.
Levitsky acknowledges this potential argument (pp. 154-57) but suggests that party organization was still an essential condition for [End Page 174] reform. Much of his counterargument rests on survey data of national and local Peronist leadership indicating that a large percentage of the leadership moderately or strongly opposed reforms; if opposition was high, the argument goes, then economic crisis apparently had little effect on party leadership attitudes.
This survey data is a valuable contribution by Levitsky. Without comparing Argentina more directly to other noncrisis cases by using similar measures and indicators, however, and without data on Peronist attitudes from before the hyperinflationary crisis, the reader cannot be certain that these averages represent high levels of opposition. Similar survey data from other countries or periods might reveal that these levels of opposition were actually relatively low, and that the level of internal party opposition to reforms could have been much greater. (My own familiarity with the national leadership of AD in Venezuela suggests that this was probably the case.) I tend to agree with Levitsky that party organization plays at least some role in reform implementation, but this book alone cannot convincingly test this argument. There is room here for additional analysis.
The lack of comparison inherent in the book's research design brings a second but less significant risk, that Levitsky may be missing other aspects of party organization that are equally significant for party adaptation and survival. Just as scholars studying only the advanced industrial democracies have tended to ignore the issue of institutionalization, so it is possible that Levitsky may have missed some crucial aspect of party organization that a broader analysis would reveal. For example, he hints that Argentina's federalism has played a strong role in shaping the way party organization works (by enhancing the autonomy of provincial party leaders). Comparison with other countries might reveal that this is actually a crucial determinant of the party's flexibility--or that it is completely irrelevant.
Likewise, Levitsky never considers the unseen role that reelection might play in enhancing the power of local party leadership in Argentina. Comparing Costa Rica, Venezuela, and the United States, Carey (1998) assigns considerable importance to reelection in determining the nature of party organization.
While Levitsky's analysis of organizational flexibility ascribes primary importance to the party's bases of financing and its clientelistic linkages, other analyses of party organization have found that control over candidate nominations plays an even more crucial role (Carey 1998; Wuhs 2002). Comparative analysis would allow us to reconcile these arguments.
None of this means that routinization is not a real characteristic of party organization, but it reminds us that there are tradeoffs inherent in any research design. Levitsky has chosen to sacrifice cross-space comparison [End Page 175] in order to provide greater detail and cross-time comparison. This strategy yields important contributions, but it necessarily qualifies some of the findings.
On a more minor note, Levitsky seems to overstate the continued lack of routinization in the PJ. As he acknowledges, important changes in routinization have taken place. With the death of Perón, it was possible to create a unified formal organization, implement internal primaries, and persuade formerly nonelectoral branches of the party to join the electoral game. The party is still far from being formally bureaucratized, but it has clearly made some shifts in that direction, a change that verifies Panebianco's ideas (1988) regarding the inevitable evolution or destruction of charismatic parties. It will be interesting to see how the PJ evolves in the future. If opportunities for clientelism are eliminated (either by the Peronists themselves, in order to address fiscal realities and tie the hands of competing factions, or by their competitors when they are in office), then the party will have to rely increasingly on its formal organization to get things done. Similarly, the party's mass organizational base may decline. The party's current level of activism seems strongly rooted in the opportunities provided by neoliberal reform (especially privatization receipts) and in the negative side effects of those reforms (unemployment, selective impoverishment). These are not a stable basis for mass organization. Greater economic stability and development should gradually eliminate some of these incentives for party membership and activism.
Although some of Levitsky's analytical claims are circumscribed
by his choice of case and method, on the whole he delivers what he
promises. His book fills a gap in the literature on Peronism and has
important implications for parties throughout the hemisphere during a
time when traditional, institutionalized parties seem to be increasingly
challenged. He demonstrates that detailed studies of party organization
are feasible in Latin America, that they provide extremely relevant
information for explaining politics, and that they can productively
build on existing concepts from the study of parties in the advanced
industrial democracies. Above all, Levitsky's work is a call for more
scholars to study party organization in Latin America.
Brigham Young University
References
Carey, John M. 1998. Term Limits and Legislative Representation. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Dalton, Russell J., and Martin P. Wattenberg, eds. 2000. Parties Without Partisans: Political Change in Advanced Industrial Democracies. New York: Oxford University Press. [End Page 176]
Panebianco, Angelo. 1988. Political Parties: Organization and Power. Trans. Marc Silver. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Rodrik, Dani. 1994. The Rush to Free Trade in the World: Why so Late? Why Now? Will It Last? In Voting for Reform: Democracy, Political Liberalization, and Economic Adjustment, ed. Stephan Haggard and Steven B. Webb. New York: World Bank/Oxford University Press. 61-88.
Weyland, Kurt. 1998a. Swallowing the Bitter Pill: Sources of Popular Support for Neoliberal Reform in Latin America. Comparative Political Studies 31, 5: 539-68.
----. 1998b. The Political Fate of Market Reform in Latin America, Africa, and Eastern Europe. International Studies Quarterly 42, 4 (December): 645-74.
Wuhs, Steven Todd. 2002. Opposing Oligarchy? Mexican Democratization and
Political Party Transformation. Ph.D. diss., University of North Carolina,
Chapel Hill.
