Introduction
There is a scholarly consensus to the effect that the Uruguayan Frente Amplio (FA) is the only mass-organic leftist party in contemporary Latin America.Footnote 1 Its electoral success since 1971 has attracted the attention of scholars who have shed light on new theoretical and empirical contributions in the literature on political parties,Footnote 2 nurtured by different accounts, focused on structural, institutional and strategic factors. In the context of the so-called left turn in Latin America since the early 2000s,Footnote 3 the FA has been compared with other successful Latin American leftist parties such as the Brazilian Partido dos Trabalhadores (Workers’ Party, PT) or the Bolivian Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS).Footnote 4 Even though those and other parties share some important attributes, the FA is usually depicted as the only leftist mass-organic party in the region due to its active grassroots, strong local branches, and robust and durable connections with trade unions and social organisations.Footnote 5 It was born before the third wave of democratisation and still exhibits not only electoral power but also high levels of institutionalisation and grassroots activism. However, despite this growing body of relevant theoretical and empirical work, the origin of the FA remains under-studied.Footnote 6
Most contributions assume that the FA's formation was a natural evolution from a coalition of extant parties and factions that simply evolved towards a political party.Footnote 7 These ‘evolutionary’ accounts overlook the role played by political agency in party formation, stressing instead the transformation from different small parties and organisations into the FA as a party. Other studies stress the importance of the grassroots in the origin of the FA, showing that they played a key role in the process of party formation, as with most political movements.Footnote 8 However, even though the FA appeared as a coalition of small parties, factions and other political groups triggered by high levels of political activism, the factors that enabled the process of party formation remain in the dark: the literature on the FA has as its starting point a party already formed and it does not pay much attention to the process of party formation.
This paper provides an account of the FA's formation, bridging the gap between extant literature on the FA and the puzzle about its origin. To do this, we rely on the explanatory power of electoral coordination theory (see following section) and identify two systemic conditions favouring a successful coordination process that ultimately led to the formation of the FA.Footnote 9 The argument advanced in this article holds that the FA's formation resulted from a process of strategic decisions by leftist political elites, taking advantage of the efficiency gains allowed by the electoral rules to form a new party. In turn, the new party solved a collective action dilemma among left-wing voters, who struggled with a divided supply of options and frequently followed the path of strategic voting to avoid a wasted vote. In this way, the FA's formation was an efficient solution for elites and voters alike.
More specifically, we argue that the electoral coordination process behind the FA's formation was enabled by two systemic conditions: the remarkable stability of the Uruguayan party system (and its related electoral market) that allowed leftist politicians to make plausible calculations of the costs and benefits of unifying the Left under a single party, and the programmatic turn that triggered a process of increasing political polarisation during the mid-1960s. Besides, although we focus on the explanatory power of agency in the process of party formation, we do not discard the role played by other important explanatory factors involved in party formation, such as social and political conflicts or the channelling of specific social interests. Instead, our argument contends that the decision made by political leaders to coordinate under a single label was the fundamental factor behind party formation.
While most recent research has focused on party-building processes and their electoral consequences,Footnote 10 we build on previous contributions, according to which party formation is critical for the way parties are built.Footnote 11 As Angelo Panebianco theorised in his ‘genetic model’, the original party formation process is key for party survival and institutionalisation. However, rather than theorising this link, we depart from considering party formation as a process in itself. In other words, party formation not only does not occur out of nowhere but also deserves a particular treatment. In this context, the FA is a relevant case for students of political parties because the process of party formation established a particular structure and set of functions at the organisational level that have remained stable over time and have been recognised as an important part of its electoral success.Footnote 12
Methodologically, we rely on content analysis and interviews to reconstruct the process that gave birth to the FA. We identify the main individual and collective actors behind the party formation process and then analyse documents, speeches and press interviews that help to reflect their interests, positions and strategies. To support the main argument, our strategy focuses on building a narrative to shed light on the actions carried out by key actors during the FA's formation in 1971.
Although we do not offer a new theory of party formation, we contribute to the literature on several fronts. First, we connect the literature on electoral coordination and party formation. These two fields of study have been, with few exceptions, disconnected, and do not provide a narrative on how party formation occurs.Footnote 13 Second, by focusing on a single case, we reveal how some specific conditions can favour or hinder electoral coordination, thus affecting the formation of new parties based on strategic behaviour. More specifically, we show that the stability of the electoral market and the increasing polarisation observed during the late 1960s paved the way for party leaders to engage in the process of electoral coordination that led to the creation of the FA. Before 1971, Uruguayan left-wing parties, including the Communists, Socialists and Christian Democrats, competed with each other and failed to unify into a single opposition party for the national elections of 1962 and 1966. During these elections, two small coalitions of left-wing parties were formed, resulting in poor electoral performance for both.Footnote 14 These electoral inefficiencies were overcome with the formation of the FA, which won almost 20 per cent of the vote in 1971. Thus, the FA represents a case of complete electoral coordination among left-wing elites after two coordination failures that allow us to compare different events (of the same nature) within a single case.
The rest of the article is organised as follows. The next section lays out the main argument of this article, contending that electoral coordination is critical for the process of party formation. We then offer an account of the origin of the FA in 1971, building upon a historical narrative and providing evidence of two previous coordination failures among left-wing parties in 1962 and 1966. The following section substantiates the role of the two systemic conditions stressed in our main argument. The ‘Concluding Remarks’ discuss implications for future studies on party formation.
Electoral Coordination and Party Formation
Since the mid-1950s, parties have been conceived as products of ambitious politicians who coordinate their actions in the process of party supply in elections or as the consequence of social conflicts in the context of critical junctures.Footnote 15 Yet, given that the two theories pose different questions regarding the process of party formation, they are not in competition but rather complement each other.Footnote 16 As a matter of fact, while electoral coordination asks why parties exist,Footnote 17 conflict-based accounts are better equipped to answer the question of what kind of parties are more likely to emerge and survive within a given structure of conflicts in society.Footnote 18 As Carles Boix argues, explaining why parties emerge as a result of electoral coordination must come before examining the types of parties that will form.Footnote 19
Earlier institutionalists were focused on how parties form and change over time, describing the evolution of parties from different settings (external and internal to legislatures) and from proto-partisan organisations (like factions and fractions) into modern mass parties.Footnote 20 However, these contributions left no micro-incentives to account for party formation. Thus, what explains party formation has remained under-theorised until recent decades. More recently, John Aldrich has decisively contributed to the literature, arguing that parties are products of ambitious politicians who need these institutions to solve collective action and social choice problems affecting their political survival.Footnote 21 Yet, the conditions for party formation in Aldrich lack ideological or policy motivations, basic factors that enable a sustainable process of party formation and survival.
In the same vein, Gary Cox provides an influential theory of party formation, arguing that electoral coordination drives individual politicians to turn themselves into parties to take advantage of the opportunities offered by electoral rules.Footnote 22 In this way, efficiently coordinated parties help solve the collective action dilemma faced by like-minded voters. More specifically, a successful process of electoral coordination (via party formation) creates a focal point in the electoral supply of parties that helps voters skip the problem of choosing among similar uncoordinated parties. In this case, electoral rules are incentive structures that induce (or not) individual politicians (as well as other agents like factions or even parties) to coordinate their efforts for the sake of electoral efficiency. However, unlike Aldrich's, Cox's theory of electoral coordination suggests the role played by factors like policy or ideological preferences and electoral expectations on the scope of electoral coordination.Footnote 23
The process begins with politicians realising that inefficiencies in the supply of parties lead voters to a collective action dilemma (see Figure 1). This observation is the incentive that coordination theory assumes for parties and individual politicians with similar preferences to coalesce into a few electoral alternatives, thus reducing the supply of parties in elections. Yet, as coordination theory argues, some conditions can favour or hinder electoral coordination between politicians. Some are general settings, such as the electoral system, while others are idiosyncratic or case-specific. Among the latter, we argue that two specific conditions were important for the emergence of the FA as a new party that solved the problem of electoral inefficiencies.
Strategic Coordination, Electoral Incentives and Conditions Favouring Party Formation.
First, the scope of electoral stability at the party system level helped factions and politicians to make strategic calculations about the costs and benefits of getting into a coordination process (or not). Indeed, following previous studies, we suggest that moderate to high electoral stability helps establish shared expectations among voters and political elites, thus favouring strategic coordination.Footnote 24 Of course, electoral coordination may happen in unstable electoral contexts, but both theory and evidence show that stable electoral settings enable the conditions that will coordinate and reduce the supply side of parties in elections.Footnote 25 As we show in the following sections, electoral stability was a constant during the period that preceded the FA's formation, so it cannot be considered a sufficient condition for the outcome we are to explain, but rather a necessary condition.
Second, for the process to be successful, party competition must be based on programmatic grounds, because electoral coordination implies the fusion of parties and candidates sharing similar ideological preferences. When polarisation becomes an expression of programmatic politics, a propitious environment exists for the formation of new parties on the basis of coordination agreements. According to Cox, this is the way to prevent ‘like-minded voters … splitting their votes sub-optimally among a superabundance of similar candidates’.Footnote 26 In short, coordination is more likely in programmatic settings where parties compete and exchange upon policy or ideological cues. Of course, coordination also takes place when actors do not share similar preferences. However, theoretical and empirical research shows that coordination is more feasible and stable when agents share policy or ideological preferences, usually in contexts marked by programmatic politics.Footnote 27
Successful coordination implies that the number of parties (or candidates) must be reduced by some form of transaction entailing the resignation of some weak candidates in favour of others with better chances of winning. Implicitly, this reduction comes with the fusion of policy preferences, as candidates without chances to win by themselves are expected to support stronger candidates with similar ideological preferences in the policy space. A complete process of supply-side electoral coordination would be one in which all relevant political groups sharing similar ideological and programmatic preferences (as parties, factions and leaders) are included in the new party. Thus, even though party formation is mainly about maximising votes to win elections, it is grounded in the policy or ideological preferences of those entering the new party.Footnote 28
The reduction in the supply of parties implied in successful electoral coordination has the double advantage of enhancing the chances to win for those individuals and groups of the new party as well as facilitating voting decisions among strategic voters. Pure ideological voters will always vote sincerely, disregarding the electoral fate of their candidates. Yet, other ideologically driven voters are also motivated by strategic considerations that may alter their voting decisions, benefiting those parties with better chances of winning. Thus, party formation seeks to create a focal point attracting voters with similar policy preferences, improving the chances for parties that otherwise would remain electorally inefficient. In Cox's terms: ‘a [party] label must be focal in order to be valuable as a coordination device. It must have established a monopoly on endorsing within a given segment of opinion, having beaten out or coopted all the other would-be coordination devices.’Footnote 29
In sum, our argument stresses the importance of electoral coordination incentives for explaining the formation of a new party. This requires the existence of electoral inefficiencies among parties, factions or individual politicians who appreciate the costs of avoiding coordination with other similar competitors. In addition, coordination can be enhanced by systemic conditions: electoral stability and programmatic party competition. The following section provides a narrative on the FA's formation as a case in which electoral inefficiencies among left-wing voters, parties and politicians drove leftist political elites to coordinate under a single party in the context of a stable and increasingly programmatic party system.
The Formation of the Frente Amplio
The FA was founded on 5 February 1971, amid harsh political and institutional conflict, only a few months before a general election that ushered in the end of a long-standing bipartisan system and two years before the military coup that established 11 years of authoritarianism. The FA originated as the union of small but already established leftist parties like the Partido Socialista (PS), the Partido Comunista del Uruguay (PCU) and the Partido Demócrata Cristiano (PDC), as well as of factions and individual politicians from the ‘traditional’ parties, the republican Partido Nacional (PN; also known as the Partido Blanco) and the right-leaning Partido Colorado.Footnote 30 The agreement setting up the FA was signed in the Legislature, where the bulk of the negotiations between these and other small parliamentary groups had taken place.Footnote 31 The agreement crystallised an earlier informal legislative pact among leftist parties, factions and individual legislators acting as an opposition party to the majority of Blancos and Colorados supporting President Jorge Pacheco Areco and (later dictator) Juan María Bordaberry. Thus, the FA was born in the Legislature amid an already organised opposition to the establishment represented by Blancos and Colorados. From that point of view, the FA's formation resembles the model of ‘internal origin’ theorised by Maurice Duverger.Footnote 32
The formation of the FA resulted from an elite-driven process that represented successful supply-side electoral coordination, gathering together all parties, factions and individual leaders from the Left. It was born in Parliament in February 1971 and rapidly moved to the electoral arena to compete in the November presidential and legislative elections. Once established, the party served as a home for left-wing voters who faced the dilemma of wasting their vote or of voting for left-leaning factions within the traditional Blancos and Colorados. Until 1971, rivalry between Socialists and Communists worldwide had been a major obstacle to the unification of the Left within a single opposition party.Footnote 33
In Uruguay Socialists and Communists emerged during the early democratisation process, along with intense political conflict over the design of political institutions (collegial versus presidential government) and of the building of a welfare state under the Batlle administration (1904–10). The Socialist Party, founded in 1910, became the Communist Party in 1920 following the mandate of the 3rd International of 1919. However, those opposing the Russian mandate split from the Communist Party and reestablished the Socialist Party in 1921. Henceforth, confrontation between the PS and the PCU became a constant until 1971 and a fundamental obstacle to a unified left-wing party.
Unification was largely possible thanks to the singular features of the Uruguayan electoral system. Since the early nineteenth century, Uruguayan parties have been organised around highly institutionalised factions. This unusual internal party organisation preceded and was reinforced by the system known as the ‘doble voto simultáneo’ (double simultaneous vote, DVS), adopted in 1910.Footnote 34 The DVS was devised as a mechanism to vote simultaneously (with the same ballot) for a party and for a specific candidate (or list of candidates) competing within the party. As such, the DVS was an electoral system that allowed simultaneous competition within and among parties.Footnote 35 Such decentralised organisation provides an important pathway for voters to switch between factions without having to vote for a different party, strengthening partisan identification and limiting party system fragmentation.Footnote 36
The DVS allowed for the co-existence of rival factions within the same party, even in the case of deep ideological or programmatic differences. Until 1971, it was the norm to find more ideological proximity between factions of rival parties (Blancos and Colorados) than within the same parties. Both parties had, for long periods (and indeed since the nineteenth century), a more popular and moderate faction facing a more liberal or conservative faction. The formation of the FA left the Blancos and Colorados with more homogeneous preferences in the ideological spectrum. As factions or individual legislators with clear leftist preferences quit both traditional parties (Blancos and Colorados) to form the new FA, both parties lost their left wings.
Paradoxically, although leftist politicians consistently criticised the DVS as the glue behind the electoral strength of Blancos and Colorados, it contributed to the FA's formation as a coordination agreement between different parties and factions that had previously competed in elections for the votes of the same group of left-wing voters.Footnote 37 The DVS facilitated coordination among the parties and factions entering the FA by allowing them to retain their identities within the new party while accumulating their votes. In this way, some specific features of the Uruguayan electoral system allowed previously uncoordinated parties and factions to form a new party, winning the presidency in the 1971 election. In addition, the fact that voting for the national and subnational elections had to be done through a single ticket also pushed left-wing elites to coordinate, under the presumption that winning the capital (Montevideo) was feasible in November of 1971.Footnote 38
Thus, electoral rules are crucial for setting the incentives that encourage politicians to coordinate. The path towards the FA's formation includes two political landmarks in the institutional building process reflecting the inefficiencies in electoral supply. In particular, two electoral coalitions of leftist parties were unable to conflate their programmatic and electoral interests in a single party during the elections of 1962 and 1966. These two failures are key to understanding the process of the institutional building of the FA.
Before the failed attempts of 1962 and 1966, there was a first, tentative rapprochement between the PS and the PCU in 1956. During that year, the leader of the PCU (Rodney Arismendi) made an offer to the PS that they coordinate their efforts under a common party label.Footnote 39 However, Socialist leader Emilio Frugoni declined Arismendi's offer for strategic and ideological reasons. Arismendi tried again, but the Socialists still refused to join the agreement.Footnote 40 Thus, the first attempt to build a unified Left crystallised into a split ticket without any coordination agreement for the 1958 elections.
In 1962, however, the Socialists reached electoral agreement with a Blanco faction (led by former minister Enrique Erro), resulting in the Unión Popular (UP). This agreement was highly controversial among Socialists because of an ideological and strategic struggle within the party: a Latin Americanist and domestic-oriented strategy (led by Vivian Trías) prevailed over the Europeanist and more social-democratic wing led by Emilio Frugoni. Despite Frugoni's opposition, the Socialists supported the creation of the UP; the only condition imposed by Erro on joining this coalition was the exclusion of the PCU. The PS was open to an agreement with the Communists, but Erro was pivotal in frustrating this broader coalition of parties. Faced with the option of coordination, the Socialists did not coalesce with the Communists, assuming their electoral success with a Blanco faction was guaranteed.
Following this coordination failure in 1962, the PCU – along with several small leftist groups and some significant personalities from the traditional parties – promoted the formation of the Frente Izquierda de Liberación (Left Liberation Front, FIDEL). Although the Communists were more oriented towards building a broad coalition among left-wing parties, the majority within the PS and Erro conspired to build a wider coalition to compete against the traditional parties, which usually took more than 90 per cent of the vote. Thus, in the elections of 1962 the Left was divided between two small coalitions led by the PS and the PCU (UP and FIDEL, respectively), producing a collective action dilemma among left-wing voters, and thus facilitating the victory of the Blancos.
Figure 2 gives the votes for the Uruguayan Left between 1925 and 1971, and it helps to show that the FA was more than the sum of its parts. The coordination agreement created a focal point that attracted strategic voters from the Left who did not want to waste their votes on small or losing parties. It can be observed that the share of votes won by the UP in 1962 was 1.2 per cent less than the share of votes won by the PS running alone in the previous election. This PS-led coalition did not perform well in the elections on its own. When compared to the FIDEL coalition led by the PCU, the difference is critical. FIDEL received 3.5 per cent of the total vote, which is higher than the PCU's average of 2.2 per cent for the period 1925–58.
Votes for the Uruguayan Left, 1925–71.
Source: Authors’ elaboration based on data from Unidad de Métodos y Acceso a Datos, Facultad de Ciencias Sociales, Universidad de la República (UMAD-FCS, UDELAR).
During the following election of 1966, FIDEL won 5.7 per cent of the popular vote, which has to be seen as a relative electoral success for this PCU-led coalition.Footnote 41 However, the aggregate result for the Left as a whole shows poor electoral performance: the PS and the UP almost disappeared. Besides, the PDC were stuck with 3 per cent of the total vote, and the overall performance of the Left remained only 2 per cent above the results of 1962. Division in the supply of left-wing parties thus affected strategic voters, who opted to support centre–left options within the Blanco and Colorado parties; this option was facilitated by the features of an electoral system (DVS) that allowed the expression of preferences for parties and candidates or lists within parties at the same time. These centre–left options were usually more attractive to strategic voters, who wanted to avoid wasting their votes.Footnote 42
Since the 1962 elections, strategic considerations within the Socialist party had frustrated the project of a unified Left, and a similar situation emerged in 1966, when the Socialists and the Communists failed to run together. Arismendi, leader of the PCU, stated: ‘Unfortunately, the resolution of the Socialist Party to reject a “Front without exclusions” drives our people to fight in elections in other conditions. The Socialist Party took on itself the heavy responsibility of dividing the Left, which was in practice already united in trade union activity, in solidarity towards Cuba and in the hearts of the broad popular sectors.’Footnote 43
Although the electoral performance of FIDEL was superior to that of the UP, neither experience of coalition formation was successful, as the Left never won more than 10 per cent of the popular vote, even counting votes for the PDC. Between 1962 and 1966, the Left showed a glacial growth of 1 per cent of the total vote, remaining marginal for Uruguayan voters’ preferences until the formation of the FA. As argued above, the FA entailed the formation of a focal point attracting votes beyond the mere aggregation of votes from each of the coordinated members. In 1971, the new party almost doubled the total sum of votes obtained by FIDEL, the UP and the PDC (see Figure 2).Footnote 44
According to the argument put forward above, the process of electoral coordination among left-wing political elites that ultimately led to the formation of the FA starts with glaring electoral inefficiencies originating from an over-crowded electoral supply. The coordination failures of 1962 and 1966, despite the efforts deployed by some leaders, put the Uruguayan Left in a notoriously inefficient place. Leftist leaders were aware of these inefficiencies. For example, the centre–left Colorado faction Agrupación por el Gobierno del Pueblo (also known as ‘Lista 99’, from its ballot ticket number) declared that: ‘paradoxically, the popular and progressive forces … are still segmented, despite the definitive compatibilities which could be the basis of their union’.Footnote 45 The Communists shared that diagnosis, and their leader lamented ‘the repetition of the old struggles and divisions on the Left, which have a sad history’.Footnote 46
The Christian Democrats were also aware of the electoral cost that the Left was paying for dividing the electoral supply to the extent that, in the words of its leader Juan Pablo Terra, voters ‘see us atomised, pulverised, distributed among different parties, frequently paralysed by party discipline, and they understand that this does not constitute an alternative government. It does not form a different, real, possibility.’ Terra continues with a question:
… those of us who disagree with the current government, are we capable of formulating a minimal common programme and uniting our efforts to defend and support the replacement of the current policy with a different one? Because if they continue to see us divided, incapable of supporting a different policy, the public may believe that there is no way out and that we will continue from election to election, rotating the big parties in government until [we reach] total destruction.Footnote 47
Unlike the elections of 1962 and 1966, when left-wing leaders like the Socialist Frugoni or Blanco party member Erro were pivotal in vetoing a comprehensive agreement between Socialists and Communists, the negotiations carried out from 1968 to form the FA were driven by a different pivotal agent: the Christian Democrats, led by Terra. This party was decisive during the process to form the FA and also contributed an important share of the vote during the elections of 1971.Footnote 48 Interviewed by the newspaper Marcha, Terra enumerated the meetings that he had held during the electoral coordination process in 1970:
[With] Senator Vasconcellos, with Listas 99 and 51, [with] the sector led by Senator Rodríguez Camusso, [with the Movimiento] Pregón (represented in the Senate by Dr Roballo), with some leaders without representation in Parliament, with the FIDEL, with ‘the Socialism’ [part of the PS] gathered around [the newspaper] El Oriental (… Drs José Pedro Cardozo and José Díaz), with the Movimiento Socialista (Eduardo Jaurena, Ángel Valdez, etc.), with the Movimiento Nacional de Rocha [a faction of the Blanco party], that is, we have tried to talk with all the sectors that have declared themselves to be against the Pacheco government's line. We have also talked to VIPs (like General Seregni, Dr Quijano, etc.). And although the interviews are not finished yet, we have a fairly complete overview of the situation.Footnote 49
The PCD (founded in 1962) was an offshoot of the Unión Cívica, a Christian centre–right party founded in 1910 that turned to the Left during the early 1960s. Terra was part of this turn, with the clear idea of locating the party on the left side of the spectrum and turning it into a pivotal actor in articulating ideological and strategic differences between the several parts that would constitute the new FA.
What conditions changed between the events of 1962 and 1966 and the formation of the FA in 1971? The first factor driving political agency was a record of coordination failures. Left-wing politicians learned from 1962 and 1966 that splitting the vote was the main cause of failure in elections, as it put left-wing voters in a collective action dilemma. This institutional learning during the 1960s developed within a party system with two systemic features that enabled electoral coordination to take place at the end of the decade. On the one hand, a highly stable party system allowed party leaders on the Left to calculate the potential gains of coordination. On the other, Uruguayan politics had become more programmatic between 1958 and 1966, a process crystallised by the Blancos and Colorados into a new constitution endorsed by a plebiscite during the elections of 1966 and a series of policies implemented by the Pacheco government, directed at reforming the state and the economy.Footnote 50 The consequences of these reforms and the repressive way in which Pacheco governed incentivised the Left to combine under a single label to compete in the elections of 1971.
The following two sections discuss the role of these two systemic conditions in our argument to explain the FA's formation in 1971.
Systemic Conditions Favouring the Formation of the Frente Amplio
Low Electoral Volatility as an Expression of Stability
A prerequisite for electoral coordination is that relevant political actors must be able to make strategic calculations. Those calculations, however, might occur in different electoral settings that could strongly change the path followed by partisan elites and individual politicians. Electoral coordination departs from some basic assumptions about the rationality of political actors as well as about the context in which they operate. Regarding context, the ability of political elites to estimate gains and losses is crucial for the prospect of successful electoral coordination on the supply side of politics.
In order to reasonably estimate gains and losses, political elites should be able to assign an accurate value to the possible outcomes of their actions. In other words, they should be able to properly assess the gains from an electoral agreement. As Cox has noted, political actors’ expectations about the future are crucial to facilitating or inhibiting electoral coordination. For this process, the most useful piece of information in the hands of politicians is electoral history.Footnote 51 However, for history to be informative in political calculations, one condition must be met: there must be some political and electoral stability to allow the politician to perform different calculations as to whether or not to coordinate under a new party. This entails the continuity of relevant party labels as well as stability regarding the share of votes that parties are expected to retain in each election.
Figure 3 shows changes in electoral volatility in Uruguay during the period before the origin of the FA. As can be seen, the level of the Pedersen Index was below 10 per cent during almost the entire period before 1971.Footnote 52 The index captures the net change among parties between any two elections, reflecting the total number of individual vote changes. The higher the value of the index, the more unstable the party system. The peak of 14 per cent in 1958 can be entirely attributed to the re-unification of the PN (or Blancos),Footnote 53 which means that it was definitely not a peak in the change of voting preferences but the partisan elite's decision to reunify the party. As can be seen, electoral stability was a constant in the period prior to the formation of the FA, and this is why we treat it as a necessary but insufficient condition to explain the outcome.
Electoral Volatility (Pedersen Index) in Uruguay, 1928–71.
Sources: Authors’ elaboration based on data from UMAD-FCS, UDELAR.
Before 1971 Uruguayan politics was largely dominated by its two traditional parties: the Blancos and the Colorados.Footnote 54 These parties originated in the first half of the nineteenth century and remained the most popular until the FA was formed. Partly for this reason, Uruguay was renowned for its democratic and institutional stability, reflected in the level of institutionalisation of its party system.Footnote 55 This is true despite an interregnum of 11 years of dictatorship between 1973 and 1984, following which the political landscape was almost identical to that observed before the coup of 1973 (at least in the share of votes between parties).
In sum, political stability – as reflected both in the continuity of the main party labels over time and in their vote shares (captured by the Pedersen Index of electoral volatility) – set the stage for leftist political elites to engage in complete electoral coordination. However, another condition proved to be very important for the process to be successful: the rise in the importance of programmatic profiles, particularly in a context of increasing political and social polarisation that led to a clear delimitation of those programmatic profiles.
Increasing Polarisation as an Expression of Programmatic Politics
Inspired by the Cuban Revolution of 1959 and with the Cold War as a backdrop, the Uruguayan Left started to elaborate on different strategies to increase its political influence.Footnote 56 Unidad Popular was formed in Chile in 1969 following an agreement between Socialists and Communists (amongst others) to support Salvador Allende's bid for the presidency. The agreement was unexpected, as the conflict between the Chilean Socialists and Communists had similar features to those observed in Uruguay and many other countries. Still, by including several leftist parties under the same umbrella, Unidad Popular provided a big push towards electoral coordination, in a path to be followed later by the FA in 1971. Allende was elected president in 1970, making a considerable impact on left-wing elites and increasing the levels of coordination between left-wing political parties and social movements in Latin America.Footnote 57 Uruguay was no exception.Footnote 58
However, electoral results were disappointing during the 1960s, as the Left struggled to achieve sizable electoral support among Uruguayan voters (see Figure 2). During this period, the Blancos and Colorados intensified their partisan offers to voters, disregarding the sustainability costs for the state and the economy.Footnote 59 The Import Substitution Industrialisation (ISI) model collapsed, resulting in a fiscal crisis for the state, while governments responded with patronage, clientelism and public spending on social welfare as a form of political survival. The economic crisis of the 1960s drove the traditional parties towards policy change and to rethinking the role of programmatic politics in party competition.
Two institutional innovations were part of the programmatic turn of the 1960s.Footnote 60 The creation of the Comisión de Inversiones y Desarrollo Económico (Investment and Economic Development Commission, CIDE) in 1960 was an important milestone in the process of designing technically guided policies, backed up by an unprecedented hiring of well-respected scholars and technocrats. Second, the constitutional reform of 1967 marked not only the return to uni-personal presidential government – replacing the collegiate executive of the 1952 Constitution – but also the creation of several institutions reflecting the orientation of Uruguayan political parties towards a more solid programmatic commitment. This is true of a new Oficina de Planeamiento y Presupuesto (Office of Planning and Budgeting), an independent Central Bank, and several institutions to improve the policy-making process.Footnote 61 Since the early 1960s, the Left had blamed the traditional parties for the exhaustion of the ISI model and the consequences of using the state for political purposes. The economic and fiscal crisis therefore left traditional parties with no other option than the programmatic path in the face of the growing influence of left-wing parties and an increasing number of social movements with clear programmatic commitments. As a result, Uruguay's traditional political elites embraced a more programmatic outlook by the mid and late 1960s.
In order to illustrate the scope of programmatic politics in party competition and the related increase in political and social polarisation between 1942 and 1973 in Uruguay, Figure 4 displays data from the V-Dem project,Footnote 62 showing the mean value of experts’ judgments. Political polarisation measures to what extent ‘society [is] polarized into antagonistic political camps’, with values closer to 0 indicating ‘not at all’ and closer to 4 ‘to a large extent’.
Political Polarisation in Uruguay, 1943–73.
Note: Values values closer to 0 indicate no polarisation; values closer to 4 indicate much polarisation.
Source: Authors’ elaboration based on data from the V-Dem project.
As can be seen in Figure 4, political polarisation began to increase in 1958 and continued growing until reaching a maximum in the years before the FA was formed. This rise in political polarisation is embedded in a more comprehensive context of social conflict and economic crisis that led to the establishment of economic measures that, in turn, further exacerbated social and political polarisation. These measures accentuated the programmatic differences between the progressive and left-wing parties and factions, and the core of the Colorado and Blanco parties. Therefore, the timeline suggested in Figure 4 is crucial to support our argument that the rise in political polarisation as a result of a programmatic turn contributed to creating a focal point that facilitated electoral coordination among left-wing elites, such that the turn precedes the origin of the FA and not the other way around, as has been suggested in the literature.Footnote 63
Notice that the growing programmatic scope of Uruguayan politics that emerged during the early 1960s moved actors towards polarisation at the end of the decade as an expression of the same programmatic turn. Vice-President Pacheco's accession in 1968 following the death of recently elected President Óscar Diego Gestido in 1967 contributed critically to polarising the political landscape, facilitating the conditions for political coordination within the left side of the ideological spectrum. Pacheco immediately followed a policy of repressing the opposition with curfews and other emergency measures to contain growing social discontent. His authoritarian style led to a reaction from social and political actors that fuelled growing polarisation between the government – supported by the majority of Blancos and Colorados – and the opposition, represented by leftist parties and minority factions within the Blanco and Colorado party, the labour movement, student organisations and other minor social movements. According to Óscar Bottinelli, ‘the difference between [the events of] 1962 and [the formation of] the FA [in 1971] is how the waters began to divide in Uruguay after Pacheco’.Footnote 64
The parties, factions and individual politicians that were instrumental in the formation of the FA were motivated by their opposition to the radicalisation of Pacheco's government in Parliament. Our analysis of legislators’ voting behaviour leads us to conclude that, as expected by our argument, Pacheco's increased repression facilitated the FA's formation. To empirically substantiate this claim, we looked at the roll-call votes in the Asamblea General (joint sessions of the upper and lower chambers of the Uruguayan Parliament). Because the only legislative activity that involves roll-call voting in Uruguay is the treatment of executive vetoes, we considered all the available votes for the terms of Presidents Gestido (who died immediately after he took power in 1968) and Pacheco, in office until 1971. Specifically, seven roll-call votes were registered between 29 May 1969 and 14 October 1970, just before the formal establishment of the FA in February 1971.
Our analysis shows that all the FIDEL legislators (five deputies and one senator), the three PDC deputies, and a set of left-wing legislators from the Colorado Party (Hugo Batalla, Zelmar Michelini, Amílcar Vasconcellos, Alba Roballo, Sergio Previtali), as well as Senator Francisco Rodríguez Camusso (Blanco party), voted together in six out of seven roll-call votes. Interestingly, our interviews and documentary analysis confirm that, during the same period, the PDC and FIDEL party leaders (Terra and the communist Arismendi), along with the Colorado and Blanco legislators mentioned above, were part of the coordination process within Parliament that led to the FA's formation. Opposition to Pacheco's government in Parliament was part of a broader move by left-wing parties, factions and individual legislators towards forming the new party.
In 1968, protests were violently repressed by the police after Pacheco's government adopted anti-popular economic measures. The increasing political violence led to the reaction of left-wing parties and of some factions from the Colorado and Blanco parties described by Terra.Footnote 65 The main political reaction came from Parliament, where the polarisation induced by Pacheco's anti-popular economic measures triggered left-wing leaders like Terra, Arismendi and Michelini to push for rapid progress in negotiations to form a coordinated unified front.
On 23 June 1968, just ten days after the government approved a set of emergency measures, PDC leader Terra proposed to other left-wing leaders that they form a ‘broad front’ as a political vehicle to resist the current authoritarian turn.Footnote 66 Over the next two years, Pacheco's government intensified repression, dividing society and polarising public opinion and party positions for or against the government. On 7 October 1970, a group of private citizens published a statement expressing their worry about the ‘implementation of a policy so regressive and violent that it has no parallel during the course of this century’.Footnote 67 The same statement called for building ‘an all-encompassing agreement, between all the political forces in the country that oppose the anti-popular and anti-national behaviour of the current government, with the purpose of having a [single, common] programme’.
The declaration explicitly states that the agreement should be based on sufficient coordination to be able to design a single, common programme, and explains the need to defeat the obstacles imposed by the electoral system to achieve electoral success. These events show that the increasing political polarisation produced by Pacheco's policies brought about a need for electoral coordination among the main left-wing actors before the FA was formed.
Under Pacheco's increasingly repressive measures a considerable number of leftist activists were detained and tortured, and people's fundamental political rights were curtailed: newspapers were shut down and political parties banned. Gerardo Caetano and Salvador Neves claim that these actions paved the way for an intensification of the dialogue between legislators who would later participate in the foundation of the FA,Footnote 68 and our interviews and testimonial evidence confirm that a series of meetings took place within and outside Parliament between legislators and political leaders like Terra, Arismendi, Michelini, Vasconcellos, Rodríguez Camusso and Roballo.
The view from crucial actors in the formation of the FA depicts the same narrative. Terra declared that the ‘essential change that the country demands will divide us between pachequistas or supporters of an alternative’ and that
whoever believes in pachequismo must stand with Pacheco, and whoever believes in an alternative must stand with it. With this choice, the country is putting its future on the line. That is why we are seeking to establish the Frente, which we had already proposed in a message on 23 June 1968, in which we insisted on this idea that is now making headway.Footnote 69
Pacheco's measures led other leftist leaders to signal their willingness to coordinate under a new party label. In particular, Arismendi declared that ‘FIDEL's pioneering work for the unity of the Left is bearing fruit today in various sectors’,Footnote 70 which helps to reveal the importance of the previous coordination failures in the eventual formation of the FA. Arismendi claims that ‘the public statements of Lista 99, the PDC, the nationalist group led by Senator Rodríguez Camusso, the fruitful work of personalities gathered around General [Arturo] Baliñas, the opinion of General Seregni’ were all important steps towards the formation of the FA, showing the process of party formation through the complete coordination of the Left. At the end of 1970, this process would turn into a focal point for leftist politicians and voters, validating our expectations.
Regarding the role of Pacheco's authoritarian government in the process, Arismendi declared that ‘the undemocratic brutality of government policy at the service of the oligarchy and imperialism’ as well as the imposition of the Medidas Prontas de Seguridad (‘Rapid Security Measures’, a form of emergency rule) on 13 June 1968 and ‘other persecutions’ were important factors behind the willingness of leftist actors to overcome the obstacles that had stood in the way of the unification of the Left in the past.Footnote 71 Finally, according to Arismendi, pachequismo divided Uruguayan society: ‘on the one hand, the financial, landowning oligarchy, the privileged minority that hands the country over to Yankee imperialism while accumulating millions at the cost of national disgrace, and, on the other, the great masses’.Footnote 72 These words by the PCU's leader show that the escalation of repression by Pacheco's government was as crucial as its policy orientation, leading to an increase in the level of political and social polarisation that set the stage for the formation of the FA.
United with the Socialists and the Communists in their dislike of the orientation of Pacheco's government, political groups from the traditional parties started to show their willingness to participate in the negotiations that ultimately led to the formation of the FA. In December 1970, the Colorado faction led by Michelini (Lista 99) abandoned the party and joined the FA. Michelini declared that ‘the ideological orientations of the 99 are incompatible with the philosophy and policing practices of the current government’.Footnote 73 The fact that the leaders of the Colorado and Blanco parties abandoned them to coordinate with others under a new party label shows not only the ideological incentives to coordinate, but also that politicians were reacting to the rise in political polarisation produced by Pacheco's repressive measures.Footnote 74
Unlike in 1962 and 1966, when the Left failed to coordinate around a single party label, opposition to Pacheco's government after 1968 provided a crucial incentive to the unity of the Left that ultimately gave birth to the FA. Even the name of the new party that the Christian Democrats initially proposed was ‘Frente Amplio de Oposición al Pachequismo’.Footnote 75 The Communists preferred the name ‘Frente Popular’, which the Christian Democrats refused. Finally, the name ‘Frente Amplio’ was agreed upon in a private meeting between Terra and Arismendi.Footnote 76
In sum, empirical analysis informs the different parts that make up our argument and tends to stress leftist leaders’ role in the FA's formation process. The documentary analysis and our interviews point to the importance of political agency in explaining the formation of the FA in 1971.Footnote 77 It was the strategic decisions made by left-wing leaders like Terra, Arismendi and Michelini, among others, that allowed them to engage in a sequential negotiation that initiated a process of complete supply-side electoral coordination. During that process, many meetings took place between the main leaders. Terra said that the proposal made by the Christian Democrats in 1968 to establish the FA
was not a simple expression of opinion, but the beginning of a political process that would be patiently worked on for three years. Copies of that text [the PDC's 1968 proposal] were delivered to representatives of the political groups identified as opposition, and formal interviews were requested, some of which were carried out and others could not be granted or became informal conversations.Footnote 78
As we have shown above, political meetings between leaders were frequent during the period.
Explanations based on political agency must be complemented with contextual factors that affect the outcomes to be explained, either encouraging or hindering specific actions. As we have argued, two important systemic conditions played a key role in the process that gave rise to the FA. First, the remarkable stability of the Uruguayan party system and its electoral market allowed left-wing leaders to negotiate on the basis of clear and relatively stable party shares. Second, the programmatic turn of the 1960s was intensified with the rise of Pacheco, and the subsequent increase in political and social polarisation facilitated the coordination of parties and factions from the same ideological side under the same umbrella. While in 1962 and 1966 the Left was unable to agree on a single party supply in elections, the rise of political repression and human rights violations combined with anti-popular economic policies triggered the left-wing elites’ decision to coordinate the party formation process. Our reconstruction of the process of electoral coordination sheds light on how electoral stability and programmatic politics enabled the formation of the FA.
Concluding Remarks
This article has demonstrated the role of electoral coordination in the process of party formation through the lens of a single case study based on the Uruguayan FA. Although party formation precedes party building, the literature has frequently overstated the latter by assuming party formation as a given fact. The paradox, however, is that party building – not to mention electoral success – frequently lies in how political elites achieve (or not) successful electoral coordination.
The process leading to the formation of the FA was driven by the recognition of electoral inefficiencies by political elites, be it individual politicians, factions, or even established parties. The common denominator between these actors was the assumption that only a coordinating effort between them would improve their chances of doing better in elections. From this point of view, electoral coordination is an efficient solution to the collective action dilemma faced by different agents that underperform by running in elections separately. As we show theoretically and empirically, a process of complete electoral coordination becomes an electorally efficient solution, in contrast to dispersion and split-ticket strategies, and produces a focal point to attract voters.
Electoral coordination requires political agency. This is recognised by those who view party formation as a result of ambitious politicians who create parties to solve collective action problems for individuals, factions and even parties which would do better under a new single umbrella.Footnote 79 Yet, political agency is also recognised as a fundamental factor behind party formation in prominent sociological accounts like that of Seymour M. Lipset and Stein Rokkan.Footnote 80 Their argument has been frequently trivialised as a purely sociological account of party formation without any vestige of political agency. However, it displays clear indications that the translation of the mechanism of social cleavage from society to political competition requires the action of individuals with the aim of building partisan institutions.Footnote 81 The first corollary of this article is that electoral coordination requires political agency; more precisely, the action of politicians performing electoral coordination precedes party formation.
The formation of the FA in 1971 shows the pivotal role of individual agents in charge of conducting the process of electoral coordination. As shown by our data and interviews, the Uruguayan Left failed to achieve an agreement to form a single left-wing party in 1962 and 1966: this demonstrates the crucial role of leadership within parties and factions, who opposed the chances to unify the Left. Additionally, both coordination failures took place in a similar domestic and international context for the advancement of new party formation. Nevertheless, elites failed to form a unified party in either election, resulting in negative electoral results for the Left.
Following a careful process of coordination, the FA was formed in 1971 in the context of a highly stable and polarised party system which would leave the country in the hands of a dictatorship in 1973. With its leadership repressed, incarcerated and exiled, the FA survived 11 years of authoritarian rule, after which it adopted the same structure and organisational functions as those before the coup. Thus, the process of party building evolved after a coordination process whose only purpose was to unify the Left under a single political party.
Acknowledgements
We thank Verónica Pérez Bentancur, Cecilia Rocha, Jaime Yaffe, Scott Mainwaring, the editors of JLAS and three anonymous readers for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this article.
