Lars Schoultz - The Populist Challenge: Argentine Electoral Behavior in the Postwar Era

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THE POPULIST CHALLENGE

THE JAMES SPRUNT STUDIES IN HISTORY AND POLITICAL SCIENCE

Published under the Direction of the Departments of History and Political Science of The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

VOLUME 58

EDITORS

GEORGE B. TINDALL, Chairman

FEDERICO G. GIL

WILLIAM S. POWELL

RICHARD J.RICHARDSON

GEORGE V. TAYLOR

THE POPULIST CHALLENGE

ARGENTINE ELECTORAL BEHAVIOR IN THE POSTWAR ERA

Lars Schoultz

THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA PRESS
CHAPEL HILL AND LONDON

1983 The University of North Carolina Press
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Schoultz, Lars.
The populist challenge.

(The James Sprunt studies in history and political science; v. 58)
Bibliography: p.
Includes index.

1. PopulismArgentina. 2. Social classesArgentina. 3. ArgentinaPolitics and government19431955. 4. ArgentinaPolitics and government1955 5. VotingArgentina. 6. Peronism. I. Title. II. Series.

JL2031.S36 1983 982.06 82-24831
ISBN 0-8078-5059-4

To Nils, Karina, and Jane

CONTENTS

CHAPTER 1
Populism and Social Mobilization in Latin America

CHAPTER 2
Populist Challenge and Liberal Response

CHAPTER 3
Peronist Electoral Support: A Multivariate Analysis

CHAPTER 4
Peronist Electoral Change: An Index of Fluidity

Tables and Figures

TABLES

FIGURES

CHAPTER 1

POPULISM AND SOCIAL MOBILIZATION IN LATIN AMERICA

Forty years have passed since a provident, ambitious colonel blessed with an infectious smile, an extraordinary political intuition, and only the beginning of a middle-aged paunch first strode to the center of Argentinas political stage. Today, the personal drama of Argentine populism is complete. The climaxthe almost magical golden days when El lder and his captivating wife could appear on a balcony of the Casa de Gobierno and be deafened by the roar of delight from half a million descamisados gathered below in the Plaza de Mayopassed into history with the revolution of 1955 or, perhaps, with Evitas death three years earlier. But the final act hardly finished then, however, for until his death in 1974 Juan Domingo Pern remained the protagonist in the Argentine political drama.

A degenerate to his enemies and a saint to his friends, Pern represented truly impressive political forcesin 1973 these counted as much as 60 percent of the vote in a highly fragmented political culture where minority leadership is the rule rather than the exception. Even in exile, Pern obviously inspired fear in his adversaries, providing the large Argentine military establishment with its most common form of gainful employment, the anti-Peronist coup detat. In the generally heated ambience of Argentine politics, Perns ability to arouse and sustain intense political emotion marked him as no ordinary caudillo, although, to be sure, he was a caudillo in every sense of the word. But his political movement endures as more, perhaps much more, than the legacy of the typical strong-willed demagogue. Juan Pern has been dead for a decade, but Peronism still vies with the military for domination of the Argentine political system.

POPULISM IN LATIN AMERICA

The use of a single word to describe a complex system of thought and behavior necessarily involves a certain measure of ambiguity; yet the level of intellectual obscurity reached by the concept of populism is unusually high. Although the word populism is a common descriptive term in discussions of political movements, no one has yet been able to distinguish a populist ideology from other conventional systems of political thought. As Judith Shklar writes:

Populism is a very slippery term. Does it refer to anything more specific than a confused mixture of hostile attitudes? Is it simply an imprecise way of referring to all those who are neither clearly left nor right? Does the word not just cover all those who have been neglected by a historiography that can allow no ideological possibilities other than conservative, liberal, and socialist, and which oscillates between the pillars of right and left as if these were laws of nature? Is populism anything but a rebellion that has no visa to the capitals of conventional thought?

Several attempts have been made to provide an acceptable definition of populism. Peter Wiles would attach the populist label to any creed or movement based on the following premise: virtue resides in the simple people, who are the overwhelming majority, and in their collective traditions. Edward Shils would include those movements that recognize the supremacy of the will of the people over every other standard and desire a direct relationship between the people and their leaders, unmediated by institutions.

Populism may be more useful as an analytic category when employed for groups of political systems with somewhat similar cultural, social, and historical structures. This may be particularly true of Latin America, where populism is widely used to describe a variety of political movements. Even in Latin America, however, fundamental disagreement exists over the nature of populism. To the revolution-oriented Dale Johnson, populism represents little more than the skillful demagoguery of bourgeois elites appealing to certain non-property holding sectors of the middle class, workers, and the enfranchised sectors of the urban mass who are able to control labor and popular organizations, while to the more moderate Torcuato Di Tella, populism stands as the only force on the side of reform in Latin America.

Specific definitions of populism in Latin America are rare. Alistair Hennessy refers only to the ideological aspects of populism when he terms it an organizational weapon to synchronize divergent group interests which may be descriptive of any movement not based on a specific social class.

As these definitions suggest, virtually all discussions of Latin American populism neglect ideology and concentrate instead upon the movements social-class composition. According to many scholars, mass support comes from social strata mobilized by the revolution of rising expectationslarge groups of individuals who find their aspirations frustrated by an inflexible social structure and a relatively stagnant economic system. At times comprising an expanding middle class, intellectuals, students, factions of the military, and classes in ascendance such as newer entrepreneurs, organized labor, and the urban underclass but traditionally composed only of the urban working class with limited middle-class support, these strata become a single disposable mass whose latent political power is ignored by traditional political actors.

Given this tendency to focus upon the composition of populist movements, alongside the shortage of reliable data on mass political behavior in Latin America, the principal focus of most studies of Latin American populism has fallen by default upon elite analysis. Johnson associates populist leadership with elements from the upper or upper-middle classes intent upon the manipulation of the lower strata for the purpose of maintaining or expanding their own power.

Other analyses emphasize elite recruitment by concentrating upon conditions that tend to facilitate the development of iconoclastic leadership elements. Of special interest is E. E. Hagens time-honored concept of status incongruence, modified and offered by Di Tella as a critical explanatory variable. The effect of status incongruence is to create insecure, hostile individuals of relatively high social status who are unwilling to support existing social and political structures.

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