Henry Dietz first lived in Lima in 1963 and has been returning there ever since, and his vast knowledge and affection for the city shine through in this book. A political scientist, Dietz's previous work focused on the political participation of Lima's poor; this book also highlights this group's voting patterns. But this book is highly interdisciplinary, providing an extraordinary wealth of data on Lima since the 1940s, tracing change and continuity in its demography, educational levels, occupational categories and housing quality. The book includes evocative photographs of various parts of Lima across the decades and engaging vignettes about it from novels.
The core argument of the book is that, despite vertiginous population growth and dramatic improvements in educational achievement, occupational mobility and housing quality, Lima is spatially and socially as segregated today as it was in the 1940s. Carefully applying data from Peru's censuses, Dietz shows that the gap between Lima's wealthy and poor districts remains severe. And yet, Dietz shows too, lower socio-economic status (SES) limeños have rarely come together in elections behind leftist candidates – contrary to much conventional wisdom in political science.
Why have lower-SES limeños not mobilised behind the political Left? To grapple with this puzzle, Dietz applies Albert Hirschman's influential concepts of exit, voice and loyalty. Assessing the vote in lower-SES districts in not only presidential but also municipal elections, Dietz shows that lower-SES voters did indeed cast their ballots for leftist candidates when these candidates were viable – namely, during the 1980s, when the leftist coalition Izquierda Unida (United Left, IU) was robust. After 1989, however, IU fell apart, and, like lower-SES voters throughout Peru, lower-SES limeños chose to exit from the country's traditional parties.
Among the many contributions of this book is its rigorous measurement of SES across Lima districts and over time. Dietz reports that data for income are not available in some of Peru's censuses and that these data are not reliable, and accordingly he innovatively builds a measure based not only on education and occupation – conventional variables – but also on housing. Dietz's careful assessment of Peru's census data, reporting on consistencies and inconsistencies, will be very valuable for other scholars who would like to use this data.
The book is structured chronologically, correlating with the year of a census; there is a chapter each for 1940, 1961, 1972, 1981, 1993 and 2007. Dietz reports population size, educational levels, occupational categories and housing patterns (water, sewerage, electricity, ownership or rental, and number of rooms) by district. A particularly surprising and interesting fact is that the growth rate in Lima's population was the highest in the 1961–72 period (p. 91). Dietz establishes clusters of districts based on their SES levels and highlights those districts with changes in SES levels over time. Ultimately Dietz correlates the SES-demarcated districts with their votes in respective elections.
In each chapter (except the chapter for the 1972 census, when Peru was under military rule), Dietz provides a knowledgeable analysis of the political parties and elections of the era. Dietz underlines the paucity of viable leftist candidates and the common proclivity of votes on the basis of personal leadership qualities rather than ideology (pp. 65, 109, 169 and 176). These sections are also valuable overviews of the key issues of the era – whether it was the limitations of electoral democracy in the 1960s; the birth of a more inclusive democracy in 1981, after the military government; the election and government of Alberto Fujimori in the 1990s; or the breakdown of the traditional parties after 2000.
Valuable as the book is, it also raises questions that I hope Dietz will explore in a future volume. First, like most Latin American capitals, Lima is disproportionately large and dominant in its country (p. 2); why is this the case and how do the reasons compare across Latin American countries? Second, why did Lima's growth rate skyrocket in the 1960s, and why did it remain high subsequently? Concomitantly, given that many of Lima's poor are migrants, how do they compare with the poor who stayed behind in what are at times derisively referred to as ‘las provincias’ (‘the hillbilly provinces’). In the twenty-first century, when viable leftist candidates have been on the ballot (Ollanta Humala in 2011; Verónika Mendoza in 2016; Pedro Castillo in 2021), lower-SES limeños have been less likely to vote for these candidates than lower-SES Peruvians elsewhere (pp. 152−3). Why is this the case? Does absolute poverty matter more than relative poverty? Do lower-SES Peruvians yet perceive themselves as upwardly mobile?
The book would also benefit from greater precision in its analysis of the breakdown of Peru's institutional parties. On the one hand, there is no dispute whatsoever that Peru's traditional parties broke down during the 1990s and that limeños have chosen ‘exit’ from parties. But, as Dietz points out, one of the two major traditional parties, Fernando Belaúnde's Acción Popular (Popular Action), was personalist in any case. And, in the twenty-first century, how should Keiko Fujimori's Fuerza Popular (Popular Force) be understood? The party is ‘personalist’ in the sense that Fujimori is a sine qua non, but it is also institutionalised and disciplined, with Keiko the runner-up in three consecutive presidential elections and the party securing the most or second-most seats in the three legislative elections.
Yet it is not necessary that the book answers these questions for it to be a major contribution. There is no other study that integrates perspectives from demography, geography, history, sociology and political science to examine the evolution of this major city and its voting patterns. Dietz demonstrates incontrovertibly that, even under conditions of stubborn inequality, lower-SES urban residents are not necessarily poised to vote for the Left. And the wealth of data on Lima's growth, educational levels, occupational categories and housing quality will be a treasure trove for scholars for decades to come.
