This book is an ambitious attempt to propose a new, pragmatist theory for how political practices change. Jansen develops and tests this theory through a study of the 1931 presidential election in Peru, a signature moment in that country and, Jansen argues, the entire region, in which “populist mobilization” was successfully used for the first time. Jansen’s pragmatist theory (in the sense of Dewey and James) bears a family resemblance to recent work in comparative historical sociology and path dependence, arguing that changes in political institutions, including cultural ones, cannot simply be read off changes in deeper structural factors, such as modernization. Instead, they depend also on the contingent behaviors and local-level constraints that individual actors face.
In Peru, the adoption of populist mobilization by the two leading contenders (Victor Raœl Haya de la Torre of the Partido Aprista Peruano, or APRA, and Luis SÆnchez Cerro of the Unión Revolucionaria) was not fully predictable in terms of the country’s level of economic development or its class structure, and other candidates adopted nonpopulist strategies. Indeed, Haya de la Torre and SÆnchez Cerro had not deployed these strategies themselves any earlier. But in a moment of opportunity created by the absence of functioning elite parties, and drawing from the resources provided by their followers and their own intellectual journeys, they recognized the possibility for this new form of mobilization and deployed it with a vengeance. The success of their efforts at winning votes and supporters ensured what Jansen calls the routinization of this new set of practices, as future Peruvian politicians, as well as those in other countries of the region, drew from the new repertoire.
This is a lively argument, designed to stimulate debate not only among sociologists but among political scientists and other scholars inclined toward comparative historical analysis. Jansen wants us to think harder about change in political institutions, especially sudden changes in repertoires of action, which have not been well studied in the social movement literature that is usually their home (it tends to focus on slower changes). He also wants us to theorize more carefully about the interplay of agency and structure, for which he proposes a set of conditions that could better guide our causal theories. The book includes long engagements with these literatures in the first chapter and again in the conclusion.
Unfortunately, the book is somewhat short on empirics, and Jansen is able to explore only some of his key arguments in a perfunctory way. Thus, some of his causal mechanisms are not well tested, and in some cases he makes questionable historical claims that deserve clarification.
The book provides solid historical data covering several aspects of Jansen’s theory. In particular, it provides worthy descriptions of the structural changes that partially determined the emergence of populist mobilization in Peru (chapter 2), including incipient industrialization in Lima and other coastal centers, the emergence of small working and middle classes in these areas, and the spread of new forms of civil society and new technologies of communication and transportation. The book is at its best in describing the organization space that was created in Peru’s incipient party system by the earlier dictatorship of Augusto Leguía (chapter 3), a space that was essential for creating a “problem situation” (the pragmatist equivalent of a crucial juncture), in which outsider forces could emerge. And it provides a solid description of the two contending party movements as instances of populist mobilization, which Jansen creates by combining qualitative analyses of their nationalist-populist rhetoric with descriptions of their organizational structures (hierarchical in the case of APRA, movement-based in the case of the Unión Revolucionaria; an interesting implication is that there can be wide organizational differences in populist parties and movements). In addition, the book provides some impressive process tracing, showing the decisions of other actors (old elites and the Communist Party) to reject populist mobilizational tactics. All of this persuades readers that populist mobilization was not an inevitable choice.
However, the book falls short in describing the actual process of innovation—why the two key contenders adopted populist mobilization when they did (chapter 4). Much of this account rests on assertions by the author, with footnoted references, that leaders of these two sides consciously adopted these new tactics in a process of give-and-take that rested partly on experiences before the fall of the Leguia government. While this may be true, Jansen provides little in the way of direct, documentary evidence, especially in the form of quotations. The narrative lacks a blow-by-intellectual-blow account of correspondence and conversation that we want to hear among the party leaders and their campaign lieutenants. In fact, some of the few quotes come from some of SÆnchez Cerro’s earlier letters, which highlight his initial elitism, rather than his switch to populism. Readers will not see the kind of smoking gun that Jansen felt he had discovered in his archival research. In this regard, Jansen would have done well to draw from the literature on qualitative testing in political science, which provides fairly clear standards for thresholds and evidence in comparative historical research.
A similar lack of evidence and explanation haunts some other key aspects of the book. The most noteworthy is Jansen’s argument—which he sees as central to the book and his theoretical account—that Peru’s experience with populist mobilization in 1931 was new for Latin America (albeit not for other regions). This claim highlights the importance of the Peruvian case, but it is also essential for his argument that populist mobilization did not simply diffuse in from elsewhere. Populist mobilization in Peru was a radical innovation.
The problem with this is that populist mobilization—in Jansen’s sense of populist rhetoric at the service of large-scale political mobilization—is evident in earlier moments in Latin American history. For example, Paul Drake’s studies of populism in Chile show that populist rhetoric was an important feature of mobilization experiences in Chile under Arturo Alessandri, beginning at least in the 1920s, if not the 1910s, while David Rock’s studies of the Unión Cívica Radical in Argentina show a similar instance of populist mobilization running from the 1890s to the 1910s. In both cases, self-styled radical parties successfully pursued the political inclusion of the middle class by using the same kind of rhetoric and mobilization that appeared in Peru. Because Jansen does not limit populist mobilization to the participation of working classes—indeed, he recognizes that Peru’s moment in 1931 failed to incorporate women or the indigenous—it is not clear what makes the Peruvian case singular, other than its scope (involving both main contenders in the election).
The book is also lacking in data concerning the routinization of populist mobilization in Peru. While readers who know Peru’s modern history will agree that populist mobilization has continued to play a powerful role post-1931, Jansen never indicates, in his concluding chapter, what those moments were or whether they strongly confirm his theory. Routinization, he argues, depends on how well the new practice resonates with previous ones, how recognized its success is, and if it is repeated with similar effect. Measuring these variables is fairly tricky and would take effort, but Jansen fails to go over a list of the likely instances, let alone a longer description of the processes at work. Indeed, one would think that the violent polarization that followed the 1931 experience would have so traumatized Peruvian politicians and the public that it could not have been publicly attempted for years to follow.
While the emergence of populist mobilization in earlier moments in the region might take some of the shine off a study of Peru in 1931, this does not undermine Jansen’s claim that it was an innovation in this country. Certainly, his evidence shows that populist mobilization involved distinct choices that cannot be read off of typical structuralist causes. The book offers a stirring call for more fine-grained theorizing that admits more contingency. Readers will appreciate Jansen’s walk through the sociological literature and his efforts to achieve conceptual clarity around terms such as practice, mobilization, and populism. But clearly, there is more work to be done in studying populist mobilization in Peru and elsewhere.
