The ongoing neo-Peronist governments in Argentina led by Néstor Kirchner, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner and her proxy Alberto Fernández practise patronage politics in Latin America on a sweeping scale. An ambience of malfeasance and soft authoritarianism pervades a system exchanging public administration positions for electoral services on behalf of political incumbents. In Argentina, ‘machine politics’, or ‘clientelism’ as such practices are also known, has already attracted substantial research. Previous specialists include Steven Levitsky, whose Transforming Labor-Based Parties in Latin America (Cambridge University Press, 2009) shows how patronage brokers of the 1990s in the Peronist movement adjusted to the declining effectiveness of voter regimentation through the trade unions by attaching themselves to voters in residential localities. Female political brokers called manzaneras, because they functioned within city blocks or manzanas, took over from the union bosses of an earlier generation. Javier Auyero too made several outstanding contributions to the subject, starting with Poor People's Politics: Peronist Survival Networks and the Legacy of Evita (Duke University Press, 2001). Auyero's data detailing the workings of local-level patronage stemmed from his prolonged residence in a Buenos Aires shanty town.
In her substantial addition to the subject, Virginia Oliveros reiterates the system's particular salience in Argentina. She analyses how patronage affects party political competition and the functioning of representative democracy. Her most substantive chapter, ‘A Theory of Self-Enforcing Patronage’, examines the system's impact in detail, while laying out the precise form of the services exchanged. She illustrates how patronage brokers foster commitment among recipients to construct an interlocked, self-enforcing apparatus. Her study is based on extensive interviews in three important mayoralties, Tigre (Buenos Aires), Santa Fe city and Salta city. In these venues, topics for discussion include the way brokers deploy the threat of dismissal to exert control and to reinforce incentives towards greater partisan commitment. The author demonstrates that by actively endorsing the system, many patronage recipients, whether permanent or temporary, assist in promoting its collusive, self-sustaining character. Reciprocity and mutual interest rather than coercion represent the hallmarks of the system.
The author focuses her study on middle- and low-level public employees. Around 50 extensive surveys and statistical compilations illustrate such topics as the use of personal connections in hiring personnel and measuring the services of patronage appointees during elections: such services include organising rallies, advancing publicity through party banners, defacing cities with graffiti or funnelling ballots to the voting booths. Oliveros calculates the numbers and proportions of public employees appointed through personal connections compared with appointments by meritocratic criteria, showing the striking degree to which the former figure in the electoral arena. Nevertheless, the allocation of patronage does not necessarily require party membership or ideological identification, since some non-Peronists too serve as public employees. The study reiterates the extent to which women participate in the system both as brokers and as patronage recipients.
Oliveros devotes a brief discussion to the use of patronage in Bolivia and Chile, noting the recent rampant scale of the system in Bolivia under Evo Morales, its recently ousted president; similarly, she alludes only in passing to the long-hypothesised relationship between the proliferation of patronage ties and the limited professionalisation of the Argentine civil service. Both subjects, the comparative question and the issue of institutional weakness, merit fuller treatment. The book shows a tendency towards repetitiveness and lapses into truisms like ‘politicians […] appoint people whom they trust’ (p. 10), or ‘higher levels of perceived corruption […] reduce confidence and trust in democratic institutions’ (p. 14). Yet the book also makes a too self-effacing case for originality. Oliveros claims little more for her work than that it demonstrates that patronage recipients function as ‘active agents’ in the system rather than as the passive pawns of brokers (p. 155).
Abuse of political patronage has been more a norm than an exception throughout history. In deprecating similar practices in Ancient Greece and Rome, Plato and Aristotle followed by Polybius argued for mixed government, the rotation of power and enforcement of social equality through land reform; Polybius proposed the death penalty for election bribery. Endemic in Western Europe for centuries, the system mushroomed throughout the Americas after independence, not least of course in the United States. In early-independence Chile, patronage inevitably obtruded under a system in which citizenship remained practically confined to public employees. In mid-nineteenth-century Brazil, Conservative politician Eusébio de Queirós used public offices to establish his stranglehold over the imperial state. In Mexico, eminent liberal Lorenzo de Zavala denounced jobbery or empleomanía as ‘the epidemic malady of all peoples of Spanish descent’. In nineteenth-century Argentina, most notably under President Julio A. Roca, government patronage appeared in the guise of corrupt preferences in government credits and land grants. During Radical party rule in 1916−30, patronage in new forms became the bedrock of the political system; at that time, the caudillo de barrio flourished as the direct ancestor of the manzanera.
Constitutional reform of the type first proposed by Aristotle and Polybius failed in Latin America. Emancipation could not expunge a political culture coloured by clericalism and by inherited Habsburg and Braganza patrimonialism. In recent times, patronage commonly appeared as an epiphenomenon of underdevelopment. Providing steady employment at relatively high salaries, state jobs became an instrument to cement political loyalty amid recurrent instability and in the absence of a more diverse economy. Throughout the region, sovereignty remained incomplete and political legitimacy fragile; economies proved vulnerable, competition among elites remained intense and social mobility stymied; bureaucracies remained rudimentary and executive power immature. Early twentieth-century Buenos Aires under the Radicals exemplified some of these conditions. Twenty years later, Juan Perón's harnessing of the trade unions occurred under partly analogous circumstances; under the Kirchners too, comparable forms of instability have flourished. Oliveros’ book displays focus and admirable technical skill but would have benefitted from a wider canvas and fuller contextualisation. The question remains whether in Argentina and elsewhere in Latin America representative government can function in any other way than in this debased form of quasi-democracy. Such are the challenges facing Oliveros in forthcoming projects.
