Suchergebnisse

Cover -- Contents -- List of Tables and Figures -- Preface -- Abbreviations -- Introduction: Latin America's "Left Turn": A Framework for Analysis -- PART I: THEMATIC ISSUES -- 1 Evidence from Public Opinion -- 2 Economic Constraints and Presidential Agency -- 3 The Left: Destroyer or Savior of the Market Model? -- 4 The Political Left, the Export Boom, and the Populist Temptation -- 5 Social Policy and Redistribution: Chile and Uruguay -- 6 The Diversity of Left Party Linkages and Competitive Advantages -- 7 The Left and Participatory Democracy: Brazil, Uruguay, and Venezuela

Cuando pensamos en los efectos (autocratizantes o democratizadores) de los golpes, la clave radica en la naturaleza del régimen preexistente. Si este fue mínimamente democrático -como en México en 1911, España en 1936, Perú y Venezuela en 1948, Guatemala en 1954, República Dominica en 1963, Brasil en 1964, Argentina en 1966, Chile en 1973, Haití en 1991 y Honduras en 2009 - un golpe militar siempre y necesariamente será antidemocrático. Pero si el régimen anterior es plenamente autoritario -como en Venezuela en 1945 y 1957-58, Portugal en 1974, Ghana en 1979, Filipinas en 1986, Paraguay en 1989, Egipto en 2011 o Zimbabwe en 2017 - el golpe, al tumbar al régimen, crea la posibilidad de una democratización.

Abstract:
The election of left-leaning ex-military officer Ollanta Humala in Peru's 2011 election surprised observers. Peru's economy had boomed under market-oriented governments in the 2000s. Three factors explain Peru's left turn. First, in the politically fragmented and volatile environment created by party collapse, three establishment candidates split the moderate vote, allowing Humala and another extra-establishment candidate, Keiko Fujimori, to make the runoff. Second, economic boom notwithstanding, public dissatisfaction and distrust in political institutions remained high, largely due to state weakness. Finally, Humala's moderate turn helped him win over key middle class voters, while Fujimori failed to distance herself from her father's authoritarian government. Whereas conservatives fear a Venezuela-like scenario and progressives hope for a Brazil-like scenario, the most likely scenario is a moderate but mediocre government. Humala may attempt to replicate Lula, but with no real party, a weak state, and little experience, he is unlikely to match his success.

The election of left-leaning ex-military officer Ollanta Humala in Peru's 2011 election surprised observers. Peru's economy had boomed under market-oriented governments in the 2000s. Three factors explain Peru's left turn. First, in the politically fragmented and volatile environment created by party collapse, three establishment candidates split the moderate vote, allowing Humala and another extra-establishment candidate, Keiko Fujimori, to make the runoff. Second, economic boom notwithstanding, public dissatisfaction and distrust in political institutions remained high, largely due to state weakness. Finally, Humala's moderate turn helped him win over key middle class voters, while Fujimori failed to distance herself from her father's authoritarian government. Whereas conservatives fear a Venezuela-like scenario and progressives hope for a Brazil-like scenario, the most likely scenario is a moderate but mediocre government. Humala may attempt to replicate Lula, but with no real party, a weak state, and little experience, he is unlikely to match his success. Adapted from the source document.

As the recent political meltdowns in Venezuela and Argentina made clear, a vast gap persists between elite behavior and mass attitudes in much of Latin America. Scholarly understanding of this gap—and its political implications—would benefit from more fine-grained, yet theoretically informed, studies of nonelites. Nancy Powers's Grassroots Expectations of Democracy and Economy is one such study. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 41 residents of two lower-income neighborhoods in Argentina's federal capital, Powers examines how poor people understand their own interests. She argues that people experience poverty in vastly different ways, and this variation has important implications for political behavior. Thus, to understand how poor people view the relationship between their own material conditions and government policy, one must examine "the conditions themselves and how people live with them" (p. 33). This kind of inductive analysis has important and well-known limitations, particularly for studies—such as this one—based on a small sample size. Yet given how little we continue to know about the relationship between mass attitudes and macrolevel politics in Latin America, such a "bottom up" approach should be welcomed. To the extent that fine-grained inductive research generates insights that 1) are unlikely to emerge out of larger-n studies and 2) challenge or refine dominant theoretical assumptions, it can be extremely fruitful. This is the case with important sections of the book.

This article examines the capacity of Latin American labor-based parties to adapt to the challenges of economic liberalization and working class decline. It presents an organizational approach to explaining party change, highlighting the ways in which informal and weakly institutionalized structures may contribute to party adaptation. It argues that loosely structured labor-based parties, such as many mass populist parties, possess a distinctive advantage in adapting to environmental change. Though a source of inefficiency and even internal chaos, populist legacies such as fluid internal structures, nonbureaucratic hierarchies, and centralized leaderships yield a high degree of strategic flexibility. The argument is applied to the case of the Argentine Justicialista Party (PJ), a mass populist party that adapted with striking success to the socioeconomic changes of the 1980s and 1990s. The weakly institutionalized nature of Peronism's party-union linkage facilitated the dismantling of traditional mechanisms of labor participation, which resulted in the Pj's rapid transformation from a labor-based party into a predominantly patronage-based party. At the same time, the Pj's nonbureaucratic hierarchy and weakly institutionalized leadership bodies provided President Carlos Menem with substantial room for maneuver in developing and carrying out a radical neoliberal strategy that, while at odds with Peronism's traditional program, was critical to its survival as a major political force. The conclusion places the Peronist case in comparative perspective by examining the cases of five other Latin American labor-based parties.