Transforming Labor-Based Parties in Latin America.

By Steven Levitsky. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. 304p. $70.00 cloth, $25.00 paper.

The advent of neoliberalism and the withering of the import-substitution-industrializing state pose essential challenges to labor-based political parties in the Americas. Steven Levitsky asks why some Latin American labor-based parties were able to adapt to these changes and survive while others failed. By presenting the most meticulous and complete study of the contemporary Argentine Peronist Party (or Justicialist Party–PJ) to date, and by placing it in comparative perspective, Levitsky makes an important contribution to the study of parties in the Americas, and more broadly, demonstrates the centrality of informal structures for understanding how political parties function.

Levitsky employs an organizational approach to explain the adaptability of Peronism, focusing on the party's internal dynamics and structure. His deep understanding of the complexity of the internal organization of the Peronist party grows out of an impressive array of interviews with leaders and activists. His study is rich with insights into the real functioning of the party and is backed up by hard data and illuminating anecdotes. He uncovers the underlying “invisible” rules of the game that govern programmatic change and leadership turnover. He shows that the PJ's populist origins provided it with the improbable combination of very strong clientelistic linkages to the masses and low levels of routinized, structured rules. This combination underwrote the party's adaptive flexibility, where the leadership could redirect the party programmatically, shed its trade union orientation, and adopt a middle-class, postmaterialist focus. In doing so the party ensured its survival.

The very informality and flexibility of the PJ allowed it to remake itself when faced with an existential crisis and an unprecedented defeat at the polls in 1983. Responding to economic crisis and increasing pressure from international creditors, Peronist President Carlos Menem took advantage of this organizational flexibility to impose his will and redirect economic policy. The PJ's leadership successfully adopted and sold to the public a new market-oriented socioeconomic model, and at the same time, transformed Peronism from a labor-based to a clientelistic party, where unions became less important and influential. Still, the party's clientelistic structures allowed it to do so without alienating traditional rank-and-file Peronists, who were still provided local arenas of influence and concrete rewards for their continued electoral loyalty. These realities provided for the transformation (rather than obliteration) of the Peronist Party, Levitsky argues, contributing an important measure of stability to the Argentine political system from the transition until the crises of 2001.

These findings are important for students of party systems. Much of the literature heralds party-system institutionalization as the key to governability, representation, and party continuity. Levitsky, on the other hand, makes the innovative and convincing argument that flexible and loosely structured parties may be better equipped to deal with the rapid environmental change wrought by neoliberalism and the decline of traditional working-class politics. While he acknowledges that a lack of institutionalization can facilitate corruption and limit representation, he successfully forces theorists to rethink the almost automatic connection between party institutionalization and stability. He also acknowledges that for the long term, the advent of patronage politics may hold some unpleasant implications for Peronism, as the traditional embeddedness and “cultural” appeal of the party is undermined by its perceived pragmatism and opportunism.

With respect to informal party structures, Levitsky shows that party statutes and formal rules had very little to do with political recruitment, policymaking, and the PJ's real centers of power. Rather, a complex network of informal understandings, agreements, and activities by organizations and actors ensured continuity at the party's base while rapid change proceeded at the national level. Peronism's “base units” and punteros (local leaders with formal, and often informal, ties to party organizations) tended to forgo the party's rules and formal structures to build personal networks of support and influence, while still providing an electoral base for the national party. Those who study Latin American politics may contend that Levitsky uncovers little that is new, because after all, clientelism has been around for quite some time. Still, this is not a run-of-the-mill study of clientelism as just another of Latin America's many political neuroses. Rather, the author shows how clientelism can positively contribute to governability. Nor is his portrayal of “clientelism” the usual static one. He shows how and why clientelism waxed and waned as a tool of the party, and how it was creatively used to replace Peronism's diminishing ideological appeal in the wake of the transformation of labor-based politics.

Levitsky's very useful concluding chapter comparatively analyzes Peronism, discussing the fate of similar labor-based parties in Peru, Venezuela, Chile, and Mexico. The author might have better attempted to tease out additional theoretical generalizations from this comparative analysis. For example, he notes the crucial leadership role played by Menem in turning the programmatic tide of the Peronist party, and points to the failure of Peruvian presidents to take advantage of similar contexts and opportunities for party reorientation. This failure, he argues, shows that “strategic flexibility is no guarantee that leaders will choose appropriate strategies” (p. 245). Is leadership, then, a more important variable than Levitsky suggests? What is more, it would have been useful to discuss the generalizability of the argument concerning the relationship between institutionalization and effectiveness with respect to parties that are not traditionally labor based. Do the arguments presented here apply only to Latin American, labor-based leftist parties? Might one find a similar value in low levels of institutionalization in nonpopulist, non–traditionally labor-based parties either in, or outside of, Latin America?

Despite these observations, Levitsky provides what is clearly the most important recent study of the contemporary Peronist party. But more importantly, this accessible, highly readable, yet theoretically informed analysis opens the way for new avenues of research into the determinants of party change, and into the formal and informal dynamics of the internal working of Latin American political parties.