In their excellent book on the Frente Amplio in Uruguay, Verónica Pérez Bentancur, Rafael Piñeiro Rodriguez, and Fernando Rosenblatt provide us with the tools to understand how, against many odds, some parties remain vigorous, internally democratic, and mass-based in nature. In so doing, they add to a vitally important literature on party organization. They also restore (at least my) faith in the notion that parties, as organizationally complex institutions that exist as an end in and of themselves, remain relevant, democratizing forces in Latin America, even if there are fewer now than in the past.
The authors’ main goal in the text is to explain the reproduction of activism in the Frente Amplio (FA). The FA has remained a mass-organic party for decades—a puzzling outcome, given that similar leftist parties that were committed to boosting internal participation early on, like the PT in Brazil, have evolved into professionalelectoral parties. The FA, as such, represents a deviant case, bucking empirical trends in the region as well as theoretical expectations.
The authors argue, convincingly, that the FA’s organizational structure helps to explain the party’s sustained activism over time. Specifically, formal rules set up early in the party’s formation created an internal structure that privileged the voice of party leaders and also party activists. FA is constituted by both a factional base, which consists of the allied political organizations that compete formally for power, and an activist base, where the party’s formidable group of volunteer activists operate. Each base functions independently of the other. The party’s statutes assign the activist base a formal voice with which to influence party decisions. Their autonomous structure of territory-wide Base Committees, moreover, keeps them free from the influence of party elites. The separation of powers (if you will) between the factional arm and the activist arm prevents oligarchization. It allows grassroots activists to have a direct, independent role in the party that is unmediated by elites or elite competition. It also prevents grassroots activists from becoming factional leaders.
The formal organizational structure of the party engenders a sense of efficacy among party activists qua activists. This sense that activism matters fosters continued grassroots activity over time. Moreover, party statutes state that the bifurcated structure can change only if the factional and activist arms agree. Consequently, activists are doubly incentivized, first to remain active, since it is their primary channel of influence within the party; and second, to convert party adherents to activists so that their power, vis-à-vis the factional arm, does not wane. The party’s origins created a space for autonomous, efficacious activist influence. Its rules engendered a lock-in mechanism that allowed for the reproduction of that influence over time.
I find the book’s arguments to be compelling and convincing. It is necessary reading for many, including political party scholars, students of democracy, policymakers, Latin Americanists broadly speaking, and social scientists—especially those who may feel drawn to undertake a primarily qualitative, mixed-methods project but are unsure about where to begin.
Indeed, the book is extraordinary in its attention to methodological detail. The authors expertly utilize multiple different types of data, such as interviews, an original survey of party members, and primary documents, including the minutes from every meeting of the National Political Board and the National Plenary over a 17year period. They also engage with different types of data analysis and explain, throughout the text, how certain types of analysis allow them to draw different descriptive and causal inferences. Their explicit reference to process-tracing tests of necessity and sufficiency is especially welcome. It is rare to find such care given to methodology.
The authors analyze FA as a case that defies conventional wisdom in its capacity to retain its mass-organic structure and leftist orientation over decades. It has also been remarkably successful in electoral terms: it won the presidency and retained an absolute majority in both chambers of Congress for three electoral cycles (through 2020). A study of such a unique case of party success is merited, because it sheds light on how a “vibrant political organization” can be created and maintained (20). In this sense, the book serves as a sort of guidebook on how to generate a leftist party that is institutionalized, internally democratic, and sustainable.
So what have we learned? First, the origins of the FA mattered greatly. FA emerged in a particularly volatile time in Uruguayan history. The economy was stagnating, the government was increasingly authoritarian, and labor and popular movements were becoming more active and organizing nationally (30). Its foundational process was interrupted by a coup. Through the first ten years of the party’s life, during the 1970s, volunteers on the ground proved instrumental to party operations, mobilization, and campaigning. By the time of the transition back to democracy, grassroots activists had become integral to party operations. And although an autonomous channel for activists was not created early on, by the mid-1980s, activists nevertheless successfully “claimed, and gained, their place in the decisionmaking structure” (93).
The bifurcated organizational structure forged during the period of party formation endowed activists with a voice in party decisionmaking. Statutes passed shortly afterward made it impossible for that structure to change without the majority support of the activists (99). In all, decisions made during the party’s early years locked in a set of institutional rules that fostered the reproduction of activism. This is not an obvious finding. Our contemporary study of parties often emphasizes the role that informal institutions play in shaping intraand interparty dynamics (see, e.g., Gretchen Helmke and Steven Levitsky, eds., Informal Institutions and Democracy: Lessons from Latin America, 2006). Pérez Bentancur et al. remind us that party statutes still carry their own weight, especially when they engender equilibrium between actors with different interests. This leads to the second lesson: formal rules (still) matter for party organization.
This in-depth examination of the FA also serves to turn classic party theories on their head. The separate channels through which activists and elites operate make it very difficult for the latter to co-opt the former as a way to gain an upper hand in interfactional struggles. The longstanding importance of activists within the party challenges Robert Michels’s iron law. The oligarchization of mass-based parties is not, it seems, as inevitable as once thought.
The experience of the FA also pushes us to rethink Angelo Panebianco’s understanding of selective incentives. By his rendering, the selective incentives that motivate continued individual engagement in a party emanate from party leaders who ably distribute party or government positions or other types of patronage. The authors here find that selective incentives may also be engendered by and reproduced through formal rules. The FA instituted a guaranteed channel through which activists could influence party decisions, and that was sufficient to secure their continued participation over decades. The FA may be but one political party from “a tiny country in South America” (20), but it clearly has a lot to teach us about the potential and promise of highly institutionalized, internally democratic parties, even in (especially in?) twenty-first-century Latin America, where such parties appear to be a dying breed.
Is it possible, though, to reverse this trend? Can we take the lessons from FA and apply them elsewhere? Let’s say I am a progressive, forward-thinking politician with the resources, time, and energy to create a Frente Amplio in my country. Can I do it? I now know that origins matter, but which aspects of the origin story are necessary? Motivated and dedicated activists seem fundamental to forge a party organization that does not ultimately sideline them. From where do such activists come? Are economic and political crises necessary? Is it possible to forge activistfriendly statutes in their absence? In other words, is an FA forged mainly through a particular political-economic context, or, for example, could visionary leadership replace crisis? The origin story of the FA may be difficult to replicate. What does this mean in terms of lessons for the region? Here, the authors are relatively silent.
This book is an exemplary study of institutional stability and continuity. The authors tell a compelling story about why and how the FA has endured as a leftist, mass-organic party despite exogenous changes and endogenous challenges. Indeed, the authors emphasize that the role of activists within the party structure is “direct, significant, and irreversible” (12). I am convinced by their explanation of institutional stability, but there is less room in their argument to contemplate the possibility of change. Yet we know that institutional changes occur, even if only very slowly (see, e.g., James Mahoney and Kathleen Thelen, eds., Explaining Institutional Change: Ambiguity, Agency, and Power, 2009). In fact, the authors acknowledge the possibility of transformation (19), but their argument provides little indication of how this might happen.
One possible mechanism of change might come from a worldwide phenomenon from which even the FA has not been fully immune: a global drop in party membership. Pérez Betancur et al. acknowledge that there “are fewer people today willing to volunteer as [FA] party activists or to invest time in the organization” (7), even as the number of FA activists overall remains clearly above the mean. Nevertheless, if their numbers continue to decline, the activist-elite equilibrium within the FA may be upended, shifting the balance of power in favor of party factions that may be less inclined to retain the activist structure. In this scenario, the reproduction of activism within the FA would become more tenuous. With the FA out of power as of 2020, it is possible that recruiting new activists or retaining current activists may become even more difficult.
It is also possible, of course, that opposition dynamics may take over, motivating activists to reengage with the party and compelling adherents to convert into activists. On the future, the authors, quite rightly, make few claims. With this book, however, they have provided us with a remarkable set of tools with which to assess the FA’s evolution moving forward.
