For much of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, machine politics in Latin America was synonymous with two political parties—the PRI in Mexico and the Peronist party (PJ) in Argentina. In recent decades, both parties have seen significant declines in their political fortunes. At first glance, one might expect that these parties’ electoral defeats would also mean the decline of the networks of party brokers and clientelist exchanges for which they were well known. Rodrigo Zarazaga’s compelling new book reaches an entirely different conclusion. Drawing on over a decade of in-depth ethnographic research in the province of Buenos Aires, “Poverty Shaping Politics: Machine Parties and Their Unexpected Challengers” shows how local intermediaries (brokers) who previously supported the Peronist party shifted to offer their services and support to center-right politicians and candidates running for office in the poor suburbs surrounding Argentina’s capital city in the 2010s. These brokers were ultimately crucial to those newcomers’ success in winning elections and in day-to-day governance. In other words, Zarazaga shows that while hegemonic parties may not be as strong as previously believed, local intermediaries and their networks are even more consequential than we have thought.
In his theoretical development, Zarazaga challenges existing accounts that suggest that machine parties will decline only with economic development and when middle-class voters, believed to be hostile to clientelism, grow in number. Instead, he argues that machine parties can decline even in impoverished areas when two conditions hold. The first is that local brokers personally possess and maintain the connections to and loyalty of poor voters. The second is the emergence of internal factional conflict within a dominant machine party. When these conditions hold, he argues that this creates an opportunity for new parties to come in and purchase the support of local brokers. These brokers can capitalize on the loyalty they enjoy from their neighbors and credibly promise to deliver their votes to new political actors.
Zarazaga goes on to illustrate that argument through an in-depth examination of the process through which voters in slums in some of the poor municipalities that ring the city of Buenos Aires, which had long been Peronist strongholds, shifted to support candidates from the center-right Cambiemos coalition in the 2015 and 2019 local elections. Zarazaga first shows that in these areas of what he calls “segregated vulnerability,” residents’ poverty and isolation make them inaccessible to most political candidates and to the state. In these contexts, local intermediaries maintain deep knowledge of residents’ needs and develop reliable track records of helping residents solve their quotidian challenges. These intermediaries thus earn residents’ trust and can shape their vote choices (often without any coercion). Brokers also maintain strong knowledge about how to influence the electoral process, often (though not exclusively) through legal channels, ranging from campaign advertising to ballot monitoring. These skills are helpful to candidates seeking their votes and to politicians in office seeking to deliver services to these areas with an eye towards future elections. Under these conditions, politicians, regardless of their party affiliations, will want to engage the support of these local brokers.
At the same time, these intermediaries (brokers) need access to resources to continue to serve residents. This need for resources, along with the decline of Peronist party ideology dating to the 1990s, led to what Zarazaga calls the “commodification” of local brokers, in which brokers came to see politics as primarily defined by exchange, rather than ideology. This commodification, coupled with the sense from some brokers that they were being excluded from distributive networks, and then eventually intense intra-party rivalry in Peronist party primaries, opened the door to brokers switching their loyalties. In the 2015 elections in the municipalities surrounding the city of Buenos Aires, some of these brokers began working with candidates from the right and center-right, and more of them switched to working with and for the Cambiemos coalition after the coalition’s victories in various municipalities.
Zarazaga illustrates this process through detailed accounts of what local brokers do on a day-to-day basis, how brokers came to expect payment for their political services, even from Peronist candidates, how internal divisions within the PJ affected brokers’ vote choices, and how Cambiemos candidates came to see the value of local brokers and grew to rely on them through changing political circumstances.
Throughout the empirical sections of the book, the analytical payoff of Zarazaga’s qualitative, immersive-style research becomes clear. Chapters 3 through 8 are full of detailed descriptions, frank quotes from brokers and politicians, and illuminating photographs. Together, these serve to reinforce the logic of the argument and to make the context and content accessible to non-expert readers. To provide just one of many possible examples, Chapter 8 details how Cambiemos-allied local mayors deployed their (new-to-them) networks of local brokers in the 2019 municipal election, when their party’s national and provincial candidates had declined in popularity. Zarazaga uses in-depth interviews and well-chosen photos to show how these politicians saw “ballot clipping” (the process of literally cutting ballots that is necessary to vote a split-party ticket in Argentina) as the most likely way to salvage their campaigns. These right-wing politicians relied on the deep local ties and skills of brokers, many of whom had gained their experience from earlier decades working with the Peronist party, to try to implement this strategy. Throughout the text, Zarazaga’s adept integration of images and quotes is an example that fellow researchers, including graduate students and faculty, will want to follow, and his use of rich qualitative material has the added advantage of making the book accessible to a range of readers, including undergraduates.
In summary, this deeply researched, theoretically novel, and eminently readable book makes the case, as its title states, that poverty does, indeed, shape politics. In areas of segregated vulnerability, local politicians who want to campaign and eventually govern cannot do so alone, but, regardless of their ideology, must rely on local intermediaries to accomplish these tasks. Residents’ poverty and isolation shape the behavior of the politicians who are seeking their support.
While Poverty Shaping Politics offers a compelling account of the decline of a machine party and the shift in allegiances of local brokers, it also generates new questions that I hope subsequent research will take up. At several points in the book, Zarazaga notes the increasing violence that marks daily life and political campaigns in the slums he studies and the links between at least some local brokers and criminal networks. While the role of drug trafficking networks and violence has been amply studied in other large countries in the region, much more work remains to be done to understand the extent to which these violent actors may influence local politics and elections in countries like Argentina.
Finally, the book raises questions about the medium to long-term implications of the commodification of local brokers for the electoral prospects of center-right and right parties. Zarazaga notes in a few places that some of these party leaders, including former Argentine president and leader of the Cambiemos coalition, Mauricio Macri, resisted the reliance on local brokers and the “Peronization” of local politics. These strategies might risk alienating the middle-class and upper-middle-class voters who have traditionally been core supporters of this center-right coalition. At the same time, the surprising election of Javier Milei as Argentina’s president in late 2023 demonstrated, at least at the national level, that a campaign that relied heavily on social media and personal charisma, rather than territorial networks, could succeed in winning over many poor voters who previously formed the core of Peronist support. Future work could usefully explore whether the reliance on local territorial networks results in any durable support for right-wing parties and whether the ever-increasing role of social media in elections may weaken the centrality of territorial networks to local elections.
