Between 1940 and 2016 the population of Lima, Peru’s capital city, grew from 563,000 to nearly ten million inhabitants. The political correlates of this massive transformation are the focus of this book. Its author, Henry Dietz, professor emeritus at the University of Texas in Austin and a distinguished observer of Peru, has long been fascinated by Lima. He first arrived there in the 1960s as waves of provincial migrants were flooding in, overflowing the physical infrastructure and overwhelming the capacity of governments to provide basic public services. Like all visitors to Lima, Dietz was struck by the city’s stark social disparities, which, he notes, are reflected in the differences across local districts.

Despite the city’s remarkable growth, social mobility has been limited: longstanding patterns of social segregation have proven relatively enduring. Taking districts of Lima as his unit of analysis, Dietz shows that there has been little movement up or down the social ladder. Today, as in the past, to walk across certain intersections in the city is to move through dramatically different social worlds. To ask the postal address of any denizen of Lima is to find their exact location in the class structure. Deep inequalities have persisted despite large processes of migration and urbanization, rapid economic growth, and persistent demands for political and social inclusion.

Dietz begins his analysis with two initial themes. The urbanization of Lima since the 1940s has, he notes, “at times been rapid, violent, and traumatic, and has resulted in marked social inequalities.” Moreover, equity “has not in general improved; Lima is today a segregated city spatially as well as socially” (3). These findings hold over time, despite rapid growth in recent decades. However, Dietz’s primary concern is the political impact of these changes: “have socio-residential inequality and segregation led to identifiable political behaviors?” (3, italics in original). His answer is affirmative: politically, the story of Peru is captured by Albert O. Hirschman’s “exit” option, as opposed to “loyalty” or “voice.” The masses of urban dwellers in Lima have deserted Peru’s traditional political parties for “outsider, personalist, noninstitutionalized politics” (180).

Population Growth, Social Segregation, and Voting Behavior in Lima is well organized and easy to follow. The first chapter outlines the book’s major themes but also provides a history of Lima, starting in the nineteenth-century Aristocratic Republic. Six chapters follow, each of which offers a snapshot of Lima at the time of a new census: in 1940, 1961, 1972, 1981, 1993, and 2007. An opportunity for longitudinal comparison is provided by the fact that census and electoral data have long been collected in a way that allows for the disaggregation of data by districts of Lima. Each chapter provides a wealth of information, systematically covering demographic changes, education, housing, and occupations. Dietz classifies electoral districts in terms of their socioeconomic status (SES), from low to medium and high. Data drawn from the six censuses since 1940 are matched against roughly 14 presidential elections that were held throughout this period (27), and voting behavior for the corresponding elections is analyzed. Excellent information and analysis of voting trends is mapped onto the analysis of the SES of districts.

The final chapter concludes with a useful periodization of the evolution of the party systems through successive stages, from personalistic parties that won votes on the basis of the personal attractiveness of their candidates to the emergence of organized parties and a party system, the collapse of the parties during the Fujimori period, and the current stage of electoral politics without parties. Dietz parses the links between urban transformation and political change and finds that not every urban trend has immediate political repercussions, nor can all political changes in Lima be traced to its urban logics, but the analysis of a city and its class and spatial organization is a good basis for understanding larger political struggles. The core puzzle of this book, I believe, is why the stunning inequalities in Peru’s capital city are not more consistently reflected in class-based voting and support for the political left among the urban poor.

To get at this puzzle, Dietz poses the question, do “low-income groups tend to support either leftist parties and candidates and/or populist candidates while wealthier groups tend to vote for more well-established and/or conservative candidates?” (5). His answer is that social segregation and inequality may be necessary for class- based voting, but they are not sufficient. Peru’s poor need to see competitive leftwing candidates and parties in order to vote left, and these have often been in short supply. Consequently, Peru’s politics have been largely dominated by outsiders. The political system has not generated robust parties or a durable party system.

Much has been written about the collapse of Peru’s party system and the lack of investment in party organization by Peru’s political class. Scholars have pointed to the impact of media, the informal economy, the weakening of the union movement, the legacies of violence, and the effects of the fujimorato (the decade in office of President Alberto Fujimori, which saw the rise of independents and the collapse of established parties). Dietz alludes to these debates but stays close to his census and electoral data. By focusing on housing, education, and occupational patterns, he shows the persistent patterns of social segregation. The fact that Lima remains a deeply divided city suggests that the potential for class-based voting and radical politics remains latent but not absent. It is not just that the city is unequal and divided; the demands arising from such an extraordinary growth of the population would overwhelm the best-governed city. That said, there have been absolute improvements in education, housing, and occupational mobility. These have not, however, been sufficient to integrate the city and overcome its massive disparities.

Dietz concludes that Peru’s urban poor are likely to continue to exercise exit options, rather than voice or loyalty, whenever confronted by efforts to represent them. As he puts it:

Population Growth, Social Segregation, and Voting Behavior in Lima, Peru is an informative, balanced, and readable account of the politics of a major Latin American city. It makes an important contribution to our understanding of urban politics, voting behavior, and inequality. It reveals what census and electoral data can tell us about inequality and its political effects. It will be useful to graduate students and faculty working on urban politics for years to come.