Dix Cleavage

The City University of New York

Cleavage Structures and Party Systems in Latin AmericaAuthor(s): Robert H. DixSource: Comparative Politics, Vol. 22, No. 1 (Oct., 1989), pp. 23-37Published by: Ph.D. Program in Political Science of the City University of New YorkStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/422320 .Accessed: 04/08/2011 13:54

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Cleavage Structures and Party Systems in Latin America

Robert H. Dix

In a seminal article in 1967 Seymour Martin Lipset and Stein Rokkan posed a series of central questions for the comparative study of party systems. The first set of questions concerned the genesis of the system of cleavages within the national community, including the timing of their appearance and their relative salience and durability. A second group of questions focused on the translation of cleavages into stable party systems, including the question of why conflicting interests and ideologies in some cases favored the emergence of broad aggregative coalitions, and in others fragmentation. The final set of questions bore on the behavior of voters within the various party systems. What were the characteristics of those voters mobilized by the several parties, and how did economic and social change translate into changes in the strengths and strategies of the parties? The authors stressed that all these and related questions were to be addressed diachronically, that is, in historical perspective.'

While Lipset and Rokkan, as well as most of the many others who have asked similar comparative questions, have focused almost exclusively on the competitive party systems of Europe and the Anglo-Saxon diaspora (the United States, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand), it seems high time that questions like those raised for industrialized countries now also be posed for Latin America, particularly since Latin America constitutes the area of the world that most closely approximates the developed West in culture, levels of economic and social development,2 and experience with competitive party systems. Only by examining such questions outside the regions of the ancestral homes of political parties and party systems can we expand our generalizations about the historical development of political parties beyond the evidence of a particular time and place. It is also at least highly plausible that Latin America's experience with the construction of systems of competitive party politics will prove more relevant to the future trajectory of such politics in other parts of the so-called Third World than will that of the developed West.

This article is an attempt to begin the systematic analysis of that experience.3 Among the questions we pose will be the following. Has the development of western party systems proven to be the prototype for the evolution of competitive party systems in Latin America? What are the kinds of parties and the patterns of competition among parties in Latin America, and how have they emerged over time? Have the West's past experiences with the onset of mass politics and the politics of industrialization been more or less replicated in contemporary Latin America? How might one account for any differences? What follows is therefore meant essentially as an exploratory exercise in delineating some broad patterns of similarity and difference between the party systems of Latin America and the developed West.

At the same time, our enterprise will be a good deal more modest in scale and in

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Comparative Politics October 1989

supportive detail than that undertaken by Lipset and Rokkan. In part this is a function of the relative paucity or unevenness of the kinds of reliable electoral data, opinion surveys, and single country studies concerning Latin America in comparison to what is available for the so-called western or industrialized countries. Too, the electoral process in Latin America frequently suffers from constraints that hamper analysis. Parties (sometimes major ones as, at times, the American Popular Revolutionary Alliance, APRA, in Peru) may be barred from presenting candidates, or fraud and other controls may obscure fully accurate results, as in Mexico, not to mention Paraguay. The democratic experience has also been briefer, more recent, and more sporadic in the Latin American case and has often been interrupted by periods of military and other authoritarian rule that have effectively suspended competitive politics altogether. Moreover, Latin America's parties may come and go with startling rapidity and may form ever-changing alliances or combinations of sometimes confusing complexity. Some have barely deserved the designation "party" to begin with. Finally, and perhaps most fundamental, parties by no means encompass the full spectrum of groups competing for governmental power. In many Latin American countries the armed forces or guerrilla insurgencies, on occasion allied with one or another political party or even a foreign country, employ armed force to compete for power, necessarily making elections less definitive than has usually been true of western Europe, North America, and Australasia.4

Nonetheless, it is our purpose to expand the comparative horizons of the study of party systems by incorporating the Latin American experience, particularly in regard to the development of those systems over time and the impact on them of the onset of mass politics.

Patterns of Party Development

At first glance the historic cleavage lines of Latin American politics would appear roughly to parallel those of the European past, albeit with notable time lags: the center versus the periphery, the secularizing state versus the church, the landed elite versus commercial and industrial interests, and finally, in the wake of all the others, the class struggle of workers against their employers.5 Thus throughout most of the nineteenth century, and well into the twentieth in many cases, the political divisions of Latin America tended predominantly to be those of conservatives versus liberals, although they bore other names in some places and almost everywhere showed a marked propensity for factionalism and fragmentation, often centered around particular individuals, families, or regions. The conservative parties tended to reflect the interests and attitudes of those who favored strong central government, protection of the Catholic church and its social and economic prerogatives, and defense of the interests of traditional landowners. Liberals, on the other hand, could usually be found advocating federalism, disestablishment of the church, and the defense of commercial interests, often including the advocacy of free trade.6

One contrast to the European pattern was that the ethnic, cultural, and interreligious dimensions of politics in much of the West were largely absent in the southern Americas. Thus, while center-periphery struggles led in some places (Argentina and Colombia, for example) to almost endemic civil war for much of the nineteenth century, they did not entail

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Robert H. Dix

struggles between national and provincial or subnational cultures with different languages or religious attitudes as they did, say, in Norway, France, Spain, Belgium, and Canada. Nor was the conflict over the church ever among different religions in the Latin American case. As in southern Europe, the questions related rather to church control over education, the registration of births and deaths, and, not least, the ownership of land, with liberals typically wanting to open up entailed church estates to the operation of market forces.

However, there is a more important consideration for the understanding of contemporary Latin American party systems and their contrasts with western patterns. For if western party systems evolved more or less incrementally, with parties based on newly salient cleavages' being added to the existing system, in time shunting aside parties founded on previously prominent cleavages, reducing them to minor party status, or interacting with them in complex ways, this has been the case only exceptionally in Latin America.

Chile's party system, until its effective suspension by the military coup of September 1973, did substantially follow the classic continental European pattern.7 In Argentina, too, the current governing party, the Radical Civic Union (UCR), traces its roots to the 1890s. Ecuador and Panama have also exhibited some evolutionary continuity, albeit much more tentatively. However, in these countries the fragmentation and even virtual disappearance of the traditional parties and the volatility of newer ones have tended to blur the patterns, characteristic of Chile and Argentina, whereby new parties were added to the system in response to newly mobilized classes. Effectively, their current party alignments constitute new party systems.

Yet the great majority of Latin America's party systems do not fall into the kind of evolutionary pattern typical of the West. Thus, in a pattern that might be dubbed "discontinuous," the parties and party systems of perhaps a dozen Latin American countries have emerged more or less de novo, usually after a revolution or a long period of dictatorial rule, with few perceptible links to the prerevolutionary or predictatorial past.8 Most of the traditional conservative and liberal parties simply ceased to exist, leaving no visible progeny.

True, in a few instances one can find some traces of linkage. Thus in the Brazilian case the tiny Republican Party of the post-1946 republic could trace its lineage to the dominant Republicans of the Old Republic (1889-1930), and some of the rural political bosses of an earlier era became pillars of the later so-called Social Democratic Party (PSD).9 Yet the parties, as well as the party system, of the pre-1930 period were essentially destroyed by the advent of Getulio Vargas to power in 1930. When democracy was restored in 1945, the new party system bore little resemblance to the old.

Rather, then, than the European model of party development suggested by Lipset and Rokkan, whereby the principal differences among contemporary party systems can be traced to distinctive configurations of early cleavages (center-periphery, church-state, and landowners-commercial/industrial interests), variations among many of Latin America's party systems reflect divergent responses to the expanded political mobilization of the last several decades.

Just as striking, though fewer in number, are those "continuous" Latin American party systems (Colombia, Honduras, Paraguay, and Uruguay) that simply have not evolved or changed much at all over time, despite their countries' marked increases in social and political mobilization and the emergence of new social classes. Liberals and conservatives

25


-or factions and splinters thereof--still predominate, as they have since the last century, and while third parties of some significance have from time to time emerged, they have so far scarcely shaken the party alignments inherited from history. Not least, party identification tends to be intense and to have deep roots in the distant past. Thus Paul Lewis portrays a Paraguay where "party identification is practically universal," where "membership in one of them is almost always a lifetime commitment," and where to switch party allegiances connotes virtual treason to one's friends and family. 10

The trajectory of party system development in Latin America has therefore differed from that of the developed West in part because the former has largely lacked the cultural, ethnic, and interreligious cleavages that have characterized the latter, but most of all because the vagaries of political history have in the Latin American case all but eradicated those parties that took form prior to the onset of mass politics (or, in several other cases, paradoxically forestalled the emergence of new parties altogether by freezing in place the historic party pattern). Only in a handful of instances, notably Chile and, less clearly, Argentina, has party development even roughly followed the western model.

The Advent of Mass Politics

If both the nature and significance of the patterns of cleavage that prevailed prior to the onset of mass politics mark the development of Latin America's party systems as different from those of the industrialized western countries, the coming of industrialization and universal suffrage likewise had quite divergent impacts.

In the western case (albeit with the notable exceptions of the United States and Canada) the admission of the middle and working classes to effective political participation in the second half of the nineteenth and early decades of the twentieth century saw the attendant formation of parties that have been variously termed "parties of integration," "class-mass parties," or "socialist working-class parties." Socialist and Communist parties were typical of the new style of party.11 Ideologically such class-mass parties tended to be Marxist, or at least to adhere to programs that spelled out quite explicitly the desirability of a future where the state owned the means of production. The focus was on the class struggle, and the appeals of such parties were primarily to the organized industrial working class.

The coming of universal suffrage and high levels of political mobilization in Latin America, on the other hand, some decades later than in the European case, did not eventuate in the kind of class-mass parties familiar from the industrializing period in the West, but in something it seems fair to call a Latin American version (or rather several versions) of the "catch-all" party. Indeed, such catch-all parties, broadly conceived, have continued to be the predominant type of party in the Latin America of the 1980s. In most contemporary Latin American party systems, single class parties (whether working class or bourgeois) have tended to be relatively peripheral, or mere adjuncts to party systems that instead revolve around an axis of one or more multiclass parties.

The catch-all party is one that eschews dogmatic ideology in the interests of pragmatism and rhetorical appeals to "the people," "the nation," "progress," "development," or the like, that electorally seeks (and receives) the support of a broad spectrum of voters that extends the party's reach well beyond that of one social class or religious denomination, and

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that develops ties to a variety of interest groups instead of exclusively relying on the organizational and mobilizational assets of one (such as labor unions).

In short, whereas the catch-all party came into prominence in Europe in the postindustrial era of development and in the wake of a politics substantially structured by parties with their principal roots in, and appeals to, one or another social class (or religious denomination), the Latin American catch-all party has surged to the front as the preeminent party form during the industrializing stage of development and in lieu of (prior to?) the emergence of class parties of the European stripe.'2

Apart from broad characteristics that together mark them as catch-all,'3 there are, to be sure, distinctions among Latin American catch-all parties as well. Some are essentially personalistic instruments of caudillos, often but not necessarily military in background. Examples include Argentina's Peronists, Peru's National Odrifsta Union (UNO), the political vehicle of former military dictator General Manuel Odria, and Ecuador's National Velasquista Federation (FNV), the party that served as the political instrument of the late Jose Maria Velasco Ibarra. Still others tend to be more structured and enduring, with a more consistent democratic vocation. The programs and ideologies of such parties, while sometimes couched initially in dogmatic terms, very quickly become highly pragmatic in an effort to attract broad, multiclass support and confront the real problems of governing.14 Examples are numerous, but include Peru's APRA, Venezuela's Democratic Action (AD), Costa Rica's Party of National Liberation (PLN), and the Dominican Revolutionary Party (PRD). Mexico's Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) and Bolivia's National Revolutionary Movement (MNR) (at any rate prior to its fragmentation) would also fit this category of catch-all party. Yet a third type of Latin American catch-all party tends to be squarely based on the middle class and to be led by upper middle class professionals. In fact, it may begin as a "bourgeois" party. But when such parties successfully reach out to peasants, workers, or slum dwellers, as Chile's Christian Democrats did in the 1960s, or to a broader electorate, as Argentina's Radicals have in the 1980s under the leadership of Raul Alfonsin or as Peru's Popular Action Party (AP) once did under former president Fernando Belatinde Terry, they go beyond a single-class constituency to become genuine catch-all parties.

Notwithstanding the differences among them, all merit the designation catch-all in that they are pragmatic or eclectic in program and ideology, multiclass in their support, and oriented to broad-based electoral appeals that go beyond the mobilization of a committed constituency. In contradistinction to the pattern of western party development, catch-all parties, rather than the class-mass party, have generally been the immediate successors to traditional elite-centered parties and politics in Latin America.

The Evidence

Electoral returns from a variety of countries--some of it based on ecological evidence, some on survey data-as well as evidence on the social composition of party leadership confirm the general argument.

In Venezuela, two parties, the social democratic AD and the social Christian COPEI, have together won at least 85 percent of the vote since 1973. Yet demographic variables do

27


not account for the voting intentions of the Venezuelan electorate. If one were to select at random one hundred Herrera (COPEI) supporters and place them in a room, and then repeat this procedure with Pinerua (AD) supporters, the two groups would look very similar."5 Polls in two states (one carried by AD, the other by COPEI) prior to the 1978 election showed each party to be favored by a significant proportion of each economic stratum: no less than 25 percent and no more than 45 percent for either party in every one of four social categories (upper, middle, working, and poor).'6 Clearly, both qualify as catch-all parties.

Similarly, a 1976 survey in Costa Rica found that voting for the National Liberation Party (PLN), that country's dominant party, was only slightly related to such variables as rural-urban residence, housing conditions (a surrogate for social class), and age. Party identification tied to events of the brief 1948 civil war appeared to be a far better predictor of the PLN vote.7

Even such parties as Argentina's Peronists (today formally known as the Justicialist Party), while perhaps appealing disproportionately to the working class, are, when looked at more closely, in reality quite heterogeneous and genuinely multiclass. Thus between 26 and 49 percent of the lower middle class (in the federal capital) voted for Peronist candidates in the five elections between 1960 and 1973. In fact, the proportion of the upper middle class, as well as of the upper class, voting for Peron ranged as high as 31 and 30 percent respectively in September 1973. The Radicals, too, though getting somewhat more support from the middle class (both lower and upper) than elsewhere, ranged rather evenly across the social spectrum, with 22 percent of the working class vote and 28 percent of the upper class vote in the September 1973 election.'8

The leadership of catch-all parties confirms their socially eclectic nature. Some, such as Argentina's Peronists, Colombia's ANAPO, Peru's National Odrifsta Union, and the short-lived movement that adhered to the political banner of former Chilean dictator Carlos Ibdifiez del Campo in the 1950s, were not only led by former military officers but, at least in their formative stages, had a number of active or retired military officers in other prominent leadership positions.19

Landowners and businessmen have also made up significant proportions of the national leadership of many catch-all parties. For the Peronists, 12 percent of their legislators in 1946 and 20 percent in 1963 were landowners,20 while industrialists were among the prominent confidants and advisers of Peron's first regime, despite its allegedly working-class base.21 While Venezuela's AD drew disproportionate electoral strength from rural areas as well as from organized labor, especially during the 1960s, its founders and top leadership cadres have largely been comprised of lawyers, educators, medical doctors, and professional politicians.22 Bolivia's MNR in its heyday showed a similar pattern.23

Some scholars, like Gliucio Ary Dillon Soares, have argued that the politics of development are the politics of class and ideology and that Brazil during the years 1946-64, prior to a military coup that restructured the party system, was a case in point. Thus in the election of 1960 there was a clear and consistent tendency for voter preferences for the National Democratic Union (UDN) to decline and for the Brazilian Labor Party (PTB) to increase as one "descended" the occupational scale from persons with professional and high level administrative jobs to unskilled manual workers. At the same time, it should be noted that neither the PTB nor the UND found majority favor in any social grouping in what was then a genuinely multiparty system and that the support of each was in reality quite

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heterogeneous. Thus among manual supervisory workers the UDN held 32.5 percent of the party preferences, and the PTB only 28.5 percent. Indeed, the UDN had more than 18 percent support among "unskilled manual" workers and more than 20 percent among the "skilled manual" category, while the PTB had over 10 percent of the electoral allegiance of the top two social categories.24 In fact, rather than a class party in any usual sense, and despite its name, the PTB was essentially a vehicle by which such elitist politicians as Getulio Vargas and Joao Goulart sought to control organized labor to the government's advantage. The most heterogeneous among the major parties, the PTB, attracted wealthy landowners, middle level government employees, artisans, members of the new urban upper class, and leftist intellectuals, as well as an important rural following in the states of Amazonas and Rio Grande do Sul.25

Following the end of military rule in 1985, the Party of the Brazilian Democratic Movement (PMDB) has at least temporarily become the overwhelmingly preponderant (and clearly multiclass) party in Brazil, winning more than half the seats in the chamber of representatives in the election of 1986. Meanwhile, the heirs to the tradition of the old PTB have divided into two parties, while a third, more authentically Workers' Party (PT), has formed as well.26 None has so far prospered electorally.

Parties such as Argentina's Peronists and Brazil's PTB have surely had something of the class party about them, notably in the disproportionate support received from the working class. Yet the heterogeneity of such parties-both in their electoral support and in their leadership--and the failure of the majority of the working class to support them clearly mark them as something other than a typical European working-class party. Often they can be better categorized as catch-all parties in Kirchheimer's meaning of the term.

Indeed, evidence concerning the social base and leadership of party after party-with Peru's APRA, Chile's Christian Democrats, and Mexico's PRI only the most prominent among them-could be invoked by way of further demonstrating that throughout most of Latin America the catch-all party has tended to preempt the class-mass party as the predominant party form.

Latin America's Non-Catch-All Parties

There are of course a number of non-catch-all parties in Latin America in the 1980s. They include the Communist parties of the hemisphere, as well as a myriad of Marxist variants and splinter groups that retain a highly ideological content and direct their appeals especially to workers, although sometimes to peasants or nonproletarian slum dwellers as well. The Communists are the single party in Cuba and, prior to the 1973 coup that brought the military to power, were an important presence in Chile, regularly winning between 11 and 16 percent of the vote in congressional elections in the years between 1961 and 1973.27 Some might also wish to classify Nicaragua's Sandinistas as a Marxist party dominant in its system, although its membership and appeals are broader than those of most class-mass parties. Elsewhere, although Communist parties exist--legally or not--in every country, they are generally marginal to electoral politics.

There is also a scattering of "bourgeois" parties that appeal largely to business or middle class constituencies, some strictly regional or provincial parties (Argentina has had a

29


number, for example), occasional parties representing various narrowly defined issues or causes, and a host of parties centering on the ambitions of an individual or clique that make little real effort to develop a broad-based appeal. Parties such as these generally have been either quite small or ephemeral or both.

Parties of rather greater significance that also do not fall strictly into the catch-all category are for the most part of one or two types. The first is the traditional "vertical" party that continues to dominate such political systems as the Colombian, Uruguayan, Honduran, and Paraguayan. Yet in key respects they resemble catch-all parties, or provide a functional surrogate for them. They are nonideological and pragmatic, and they successfully mobilize the support of a broad array of groups and social classes, from landowners and industrialists to shopkeepers, peasants, and workers. They are perhaps less than catch-all, on the other hand, in that at election time they rely more on the mobilization of committed constituencies linked to the party by clientelistic ties or by a kind of inherited loyalty than on searching out new supporters among the uncommitted and undecided.

A second variety of party that falls outside the catch-all designation even while exhibiting certain of its attributes includes certain parties or coalitions of the left. Some of these are breakaways from the Communist party (for example, the Movement toward Socialism, MAS, in Venezuela); others, like the Broad Front that has participated in Uruguayan elections both before and after the recent period of military rule (1973-84), contain the Communists as one element but include as well such parties as the Christian Democrats. Such parties or electoral fronts are a good deal more ideological than the typical catch-all party and tend to appeal to a more restricted social base. Yet they often garner proportionately more support from the middle and even upper classes than they do from workers,28 while populistic appeals often take precedence over the mobilization of union or other class constituencies. In fact, Chile's Socialist Party, presumptively one of Latin America's clearest examples of a class-mass party, has at various times in its history taken on many of the attributes of populism.29 These parties, too, then, although not strictly catch-all parties, share certain of their qualities.

If not all significant Latin American parties fall under the catch-all rubric, neither are catch-all parties equally dominant in all party systems. The traditional or so-called continuous party systems have had little place for them.30 And the pre-1973 Chilean party system (as well as its presumptive postmilitary successor) saw a catch-all party like the Christian Democrats sharing the political stage with significant parties of both working-class and bourgeois orientation.

Yet it remains the case that the pragmatic, multiclass party is overwhelmingly the predominant party type in the Latin America of the 1980s. Indeed, in the great majority of Latin American countries one or more such parties garner the larger proportion of the vote. Around them, more often than not, the whole system of parties revolves. Moreover, as we have noted, even the traditional vertical parties, as well as a variety of putative class parties or coalitions, manifest distinct catch-all aspects or tendencies. Thus it seems clear that the preponderant party form in contemporary Latin America comes considerably closer to reflecting the characteristics of the catch-all party than to replicating the more ideological, class-centered mass parties of the West's initial decades of mass mobilization. If the mass politics of an industrializing Europe tended to be exclusivist in class and group terms, in Latin America they have instead been mainly inclusivist.

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Some Explanations

Why is it, though, that in Latin America inclusivist parties have proven to be the archetypical parties of the era of industrialization and mass mobilization instead of the class-exclusivist parties more typical of the western experience? Why, in short, has the class-mass party failed, at least so far, to play much of a role in the politics of Latin America?

It might seem plausible to suggest that there has been an incentive to form broad-based multiclass parties in Latin America's presidential systems in order to maximize the chances of capturing the all-important office of chief executive. There may be something to this-a comparison of congressional and presidential elections does show some tendency for presidential candidacies to be fewer than the number of competing congressional party slates in the same election. The difference is not usually great, however-the incentive to coalesce is seldom strong enough to prevent multiple candidacies for the office of president."3 Moreover, such coalescence as does occur is usually temporary, joining distinct parties for electoral purposes only, and does not as a rule lead to the long-term merger of parties. Political explanations must in this case, it seems, give way to sociological ones.

However, explanations such as relative affluence and the absence of feudalism and rigid status barriers prior to the advent of industrialization--among the explanations used to account for the absence of class parties in the United States32-can not very well be used to account for the relative weakness of such parties in Latin America. Neither affluence nor relative social equality can be said to have been hallmarks of the Latin American condition.

Certainly, at least a number of the Latin American countries are urban, industrial, and literate enough to have sizable, articulate working classes potentially capable of forming the basis of class-centered political parties. To take only the "upper middle income" countries among them by World Bank criteria (Chile, Brazil, Panama, Uruguay, Mexico, Argentina, and Venezuela), they range in the mid 1980s from 69 to 85 percent urban (except for Panama, which is only 50 percent urban). The comparable range for today's "industrial market economies" is 56 percent (Austria) to 92 percent (Great Britain).33 Contemporary Latin America is therefore virtually as urban as the now-developed West, and certainly more so than the West was at a comparable stage of industrialization.

Data on industrial employment for 1980, meanwhile, show that between 25 and 34 percent of the labor force in the same Latin American countries is employed in industry (again with Panama as an exception at 18 percent). The comparable range for today's "industrial market economies" is 29 to 44 percent, a meaningful, yet hardly drastic, difference.34 Thus, while Latin America's work force is less "industrial" than those of the "industrial economies," the proportion of industrial workers in at least a number of the Latin American countries is surely high enough to sustain class-mass parties of the kind characteristic of earlier stages of the West's industrialization.

The nature and timing of social mobilization in Latin America has nonetheless been quite different from that of Europe. Whereas in the industrialized West those employed in the secondary sector, in industry and related occupations, succeeded agricultural and other primary sector employment as numerically predominant, in Latin America the tertiary or service sector has done so. Secondary sector employment has never predominated in Latin

31


America, and presumably never will; as agricultural employment declines, the service sector has expanded more rapidly. The massive inmigration to Latin America's cities in recent decades has to some extent found employment in industry, of course, but domestic services, (often temporary) construction work, and petty entrepreneurship have absorbed the bulk. The more advanced countries of today's Latin America, still far from fully industrial, yet with the agricultural sector a rapidly diminishing proportion of the work force, have seen their service sectors reach proportions approaching those of the postindustrial West.35

Individuals so employed are much less susceptible to union organization and class-oriented political appeals in the western sense than are industrial workers. Indeed, evidence from a number of Latin American (and other) countries shows that the urban migrants, so often residents of the shantytowns that ring the burgeoning cities, tend to see their present and future in terms of individual, rather than class or group, mobility, thereby adhering to what Alejandro Portes has called a "migrant ethic."36 Their demands tend to center on acquiring a bit of land on which to construct a dwelling and on such amenities as sewers and transportation for their barrios, rather than on grievances against a factory boss, much less against the capitalist system itself. Such is not the kind of social situation in which class solidarity thrives.

The union movement, moreover, even where it has been quite large and robust, as in Argentina and Venezuela, has been socially very heterogeneous, containing high proportions of white collar workers. The latter are not necessarily less militant-the contrary is often the case-but the diversity of perspectives and of class outlooks of, say, teachers, government employees, and metallurgical workers has a tendency to dilute the kind of tightly knit working-class subcultures that once flourished in the industrial countries. Thus in Argentina as of 1970 only four of the largest seventeen unions were industrial (metallurgical, textile, garment, and automotive workers), one was comprised of railroad workers, and two of workers in construction. All of the others were either white collar unions (including two of the three largest, teachers and commercial employees) or workers and employees of government or services of various kinds.37

In some countries the campesinos have been politically mobilized as well, almost in tandem with the industrial proletariat, in societies where agricultural employment, though declining, is still important. Indeed, a number of the catch-all parties--Venezuela's AD, Mexico's PRI, and Bolivia's MNR among them-have had peasants as a principal organizational and electoral support base, despite their close ties to industrial and mining labor and the urban middle class.

Taken together, these facts make clear that the industrial working class has comprised but one element, and not necessarily the most important, available for mass mobilization in the newly industrializing countries of Latin America. Generally underemployed urban migrants, an expanding class of white collar workers, and campesinos have also constituted groups available for mobilization and electoral appeals. Any party that seeks to win a plurality, let alone a majority, of the vote has had to encompass them, or a substantial part of them, as well, yet their demands and outlooks have seldom been those of a Marxian industrial proletariat.

Latin America's would-be industrialists and the modernizers among middle class professionals were meanwhile impelled by their own weakness in competition with traditional landed and commercial elites and by their common interests in development to

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seek political allies among such groups, thereby adding another ingredient to at least some of the political coalitions we have termed catch-all parties. As noted earlier, such individuals are frequently found among the leaders of such parties in Latin America.

Still other factors might be adduced to help account for the weakness of class-mass parties in Latin America and the corresponding prevalence of the multiclass catch-all party during Latin America's industrializing phase, among them the fact that the working class tended to be granted the suffrage relatively early and "from above," by elites seeking political allies or pursuing a strategy of cooption, thus precluding a prolonged consciousness-raising struggle for political participation.38

Yet the fundamental determinant of the difference in the types of parties thrown up by the twin processes of industrialization and the introduction of mass suffrage in Latin America and the West, respectively, would seem to lie in the heterogeneous composition of the "masses" in Latin America, in contrast to the high salience of class conscious industrial workers in the West, and the consequent incentive for political leaders to form broad-based parties to encompass them.

Therefore the situation of Latin American countries as late developers (or "late-late developers," as Albert Hirschman has called them)," particularly the telescoping of their urbanizing and industrializing processes and the alliance of diverse groups and classes behind certain broad goals of development and nationalism, seems best to account for the contrasts in the nature of western and Latin American mass parties during the early to middle levels of their respective eras of industrialization.

Conclusion

We have argued that, broadly speaking, the development of Latin American party systems has diverged from that of the now-developed West in two fundamental respects. First, whereas in the western case early patterns of cleavage and party development cast the basic mold for contemporary party systems, with the (albeit important) partisan manifestations of the worker-employee cleavage subsequently appended to them, in the Latin American case this has been true only in a small minority of instances (notably in Chile and Argentina). In most Latin American countries the party past has been rendered largely irrelevant to the present by history. The majority of Latin American party systems (here called discontinuous) at best bear only traces of a past that precedes the contemporary era of economic development, urbanization, and universal suffrage. (On the other hand, in a few Latin American countries with so-called continuous party systems the original form of the party system has paradoxically become set in concrete, as it were, seemingly resistant to the impact of rapid economic and social change and broadened political participation.)

Our second principal argument has been that, when mass politics did appear in Latin America, they tended to take the form of the inclusive, multiclass party of rather eclectic, pragmatic ideology and appeals. Even those systems where the parties of an earlier era still hold sway may be said to be dominated by parties of a multiclass appeal and ideological pragmatism, even while their origins and structures may differ from the purer versions of catch-all parties. The parties of integration (or class-mass parties) so familiar in European politics during its era of economic development and mass politics have, by and large, not

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Comparative Politics October /989

appeared in Latin America. Our argument therefore supports Leon Epstein's contention that "large-membership working-class parties are a product occurring only at certain stages of social development in certain nations."4

Whereas Epstein saw such conditions as receding in contemporary Europe,41 it may be that in Latin America (as in the United States, albeit for different reasons) they have never really arrived, and may not do so in the future. In fact, it might be suggested that the catch-all parties which Kirchheimer saw as having succeeded the class-mass party in postwar Europe in tandem with the advent of "postindustrial" society simply appeared in Latin America without the intervening stage, for reasons rooted in the nature and timing of Latin America's process of late development.

By the same token, there are manifest differences between Europe's catch-all parties and the Latin American versions of such parties, reflecting their distinct origins and styles and above all the distinct functions they have performed in their respective societies and time frames.

If most of the West's catch-all parties have evolved from the socialist or religious parties of the prewar period, most of Latin America's parties have been created de novo, the consequence of traumatic breaks in their party systems (although the Christian Democrats of Chile had their origin in the youth wing of the Conservative party, while Argentina's Radicals, which emerged in the late nineteenth century to challenge the dominant oligarchy of the day, arguably only in the 1980s have evolved into a full-fledged catch-all party).

Typically, they have centered around key personalities, not only in their formative years, but often for a long time thereafter as well. Victor Radl Haya de la Torre (APRA, Peru), R6mulo Betancourt (AD, Venezuela), Jose (Pepe) Figueres (PLN, Costa Rica), and Juan Peron (Justicialists or Peronists, Argentina) are but a few of those founding fathers who remained leaders of their parties for decades. Unusual in the western case, among Latin America's catch-all parties-even the most institutionalized among them-dominant personalities have frequently played major roles and provided a significant cohering element to otherwise quite opposing groups and classes.42 Rather than confronting the problems and conditions of postindustrial societies, the policies and programs of the Latin American catch-all parties have tended to be the agents of economic development and to stress the mobilization of "the people" above or across deep-seated cleavages in support of broad national, even nationalist, goals. The Latin American versions of this type of party have therefore tended to play a mobilizational role with respect to the entry of new groups into political life, a role more akin to the class-mass parties of western experience. Indeed, even such non-catch-all parties or coalitions as Uruguay's Broad Front and Chile's Socialists have at times shown marked tendencies toward class and group inclusion (that is, toward populism), rather than toward the exclusivism of strictly class-based parties.

Most important, whereas Kirchheimer's catch-all parties were a largely postindustrial phenomenon, reflecting the assuaging of class tensions and the consolidation of the welfare state, along with a certain "bourgeosification" of the working class, Latin America's catch-all parties have emerged relatively early in the industrializing process and in the initial stages of mass politics.

We end by affirming the conclusion of Ergun Ozbudun, summing up a volume that examined competitive elections in a variety of developing countries: far from being confined to postindustrial societies, "catch-all parties seem to be the norm, rather than the exception,

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in Third World countries."43 The point is even more critical for politics than for scholarly understanding of political institutions in developing countries, at least if Ozbudun is also correct in arguing that "the success of democratic politics in developing societies is strongly associated with the presence of broadly-based, heterogeneous, catch-all parties,"44 a point with which we would agree but which we have not directly sought to develop here. Even more than it is the politics of class and ideology, the politics of development is the politics of cross-class coalitions and programmatic pragmatism.

NOTES

I wish to thank my colleague John Ambler as well as two anonymous readers for their perceptive substantive and editorial suggestions on the draft of this article.

1. Seymour M. Lipset and Stein Rokkan, "Cleavage Structures, Party Systems, and Voter Alignments: An Introduction," in Seymour M. Lipset and Stein Rokkan, eds., Party Systems and Voter Alignments (New York: The Free Press, 1967), pp. 1-64.'

2. Cf. World Bank, World Development Report 1987 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), pp. 202-3. Latin America in the context of this article encompasses the nineteen independent countries of the western hemisphere with an Iberian heritage and colonial background.

3. Of course, this is not literally the beginning of all cross-national study of party systems in Latin America. However, seldom have such studies sought explicitly and systematically to address the questions raised here, and none of which I am aware has endeavored, except perhaps in passing, to analyze the evolution of Latin American party systems in juxtaposition to the experience of the West. Among the previous comparative studies of Latin American party systems is Ronald McDonald, Party Systems and Elections in Latin America (Chicago: Markham, 1971), currently being revised and updated for a new edition. A comprehensive and very useful compilation of country-by-country, party-by-party descriptions is Robert J. Alexander, ed., Political Parties in the Americas: Canada, Latin America and the West Indies, 2 vols. (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1982).

4. The classic statement of the tentativeness of Latin American political systems is Charles Anderson, Politics and Economic Change in Latin America (Princeton: Van Nostrand, 1967), chap. 4.

5. See Lipset and Rokkan, "Cleavage Structures." 6. Of course liberals and conservatives were not always consistent in what they advocated. Liberals, for example,

once in power, often became staunch promoters of central authority, in practice at least, if not in doctrine. Moreover, there were indeed conservative merchants and liberal landowners. In fact, the very designations conservative and liberal at times appeared to be mere labels, adopted by one or another caudillo in order to enhance his image or legitimacy.

7. Conservatives and Liberals (with their various factions and permutations) were by 1857 supplemented by the Radicals (much in the French tradition of that designation), then by the Democrats, a small "petit bourgeois" party (1887), the Communists (1921), the Socialists (1933), and much later, in part as a breakaway of the Conservatives' youth wing, the Christian Democrats, not to mention a myriad of other, mostly ephemeral, parties of varying ideological hues. The Conservatives and Liberals merged to help form the National Party in 1966.

8. In a case like Brazil, such traumatic interruption has occurred several times, first when the Liberals and Conservatives of the empire disappeared with the advent of the republic in 1889, then when the dictatorship of Getulio Vargas put an end to the Old Republic in the 1930s, and again when the authors of a military coup brought an end to the party system of the Second Republic in 1964 and effectively decreed a two-party system comprised of a government party and an opposition. In an effort to divide its opposition the military subsequently (1979) opened the system to a variety of parties that have competed under civilian rule since 1985.

9. See Riordan Roett, Brazil: Politics in a Patrimonial Society, rev. ed. (New York: Praeger, 1978), pp. 65 and 69. Despite the name, the PSD was not a social democratic party in the European sense.

10. Paul H. Lewis, Paraguay under Stroessner (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980), pp. 145-50. For a comparable discussion concerning Colombia and its "hereditary hatreds" that led to some 200,000 deaths in interpartisan violence as late as 1946-1966, see Robert H. Dix, The Politics of Colombia (New York: Praeger, 1987), pp. 92-94. For Uruguay see Juan Rial, "The Uruguayan Elections of 1984: A Triumph of the Center," in Paul W.

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Drake and Eduardo Silva, eds., Elections and Democratization in Latin America, 1980-1985 (San Diego: Center for Iberian and Latin American Studies, University of California, San Diego, 1986), pp. 262--64.

11. For these terms see, respectively, Sigmund Neumann, Modern Political Parties (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956); Otto Kirchheimer, "The Transformation of the Western European Party Systems," in Joseph LaPalombara and Myron Weiner, eds., Political Parties and Political Development (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966), pp. 177-200; and Leon Epstein, Political Parties in Western Democracies (New Brunswick: Transaction, 1980). Analogous in some respects were parties like Germany's Catholic Zentrum, where religion replaced social class as an integrating force.

12. The classic depiction of the catch-all party is found in Kirchheimer. I do not mean to imply that there were no important parties with a multiclass following in prewar Europe (for example, Great Britain's Conservatives), nor that all of Europe's putative class parties appealed almost exclusively to the industrial working class (France's Socialists did not, for example). Rather, tendencies and contrasts are at issue, the central question being why Latin America has failed to develop sizable Communist parties or such ideological, working-class-oriented parties as the prewar Social Democrats of Sweden or Germany and the Labor parties of Great Britain and Norway.

13. The use of the term catch-all is not critical here, as long as the point is carried that Latin America's mass parties tend to be cross-class and nonideological in nature. Some Latin Americanists might prefer the term populist to refer to many (although perhaps not all) such parties.

14. For an excellent example of this process with regard to Peru's APRA, see Frederick B. Pike, The Modern History of Peru (New York: Praeger, 1967), and Grant Hilliker, The Politics of Reform in Peru: The Aprista and Other Mass Parties (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971).

15. Robert E. O'Connor, "The Electorate," in Howard Penniman, ed., Venezuela at the Polls (Washington, D.C.: American Enterprise Institute, 1980), pp. 86-87.

16. Ibid., pp. 80-81. 17. Mitchell A. Seligson, "Costa Rica and Jamaica," in Myron Weiner and Ergun Ozbudun, eds., Competitive

Elections in Developing Countries (Washington, D.C.: American Enterprise Institute, 1987), p. 171. 18. Peter G. Snow, Political Forces in Argentina, rev. ed. (New York: Praeger, 1979), pp. 36-39. 19. See Robert H. Dix, "Populism: Authoritarian and Democratic," Latin American Research Review, 20 (1985),

33. 20. Snow, p. 32. 21. Jose Luis de Imaz, Los Que Mandan (Albany: State University Press of New York, 1970), p. 17. 22. John W. Martz, Accidn Democrdtica (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966), pp. 195ff. 23. Christopher Mitchell, The Legacy of Populism in Bolivia (New York: Praeger, 1977), pp. 17-19 and 26-28. 24. Glducio Ary Dillon Soares, "The Politics of Uneven Development," in Lipset and Rokkan, eds., p. 187. 25. Roett, Brazil, p. 67. 26. Most of the PT's leaders are blue collar workers, a rare occurrence in Latin America; see Margaret E. Keck,

"Great Expectations: The Worker's Party in Brazil (1979-1985)," paper prepared for the Thirteenth International Congress of the Latin American Studies Association, Boston, October 1986.

27. Arturo Valenzuela, Origins and Characteristics of the Chilean Party System: A Proposal for a Parliamentary Form of Government, Working Paper (Washington, D.C.: The Wilson Center Latin American Program, 1985), Table 1.

28. Thus O'Connor found in a two-province study of the 1978 Venezuelan election that, while 8 percent each of the upper and middle strata supported the left, only 6 percent of the working class and 3 percent of the poor did so (O'Connor, p. 81). Charles G. Gillespie found a similar pattern for Uruguay; see his "Activists and Floating Voters: The Unheeded Lessons of Uruguay's 1982 Primaries," in Drake and Silva, eds., p. 234.

29. See Paul W. Drake, Socialism and Populism in Chile, 1932-52 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978). In 1952, for example, the majority wing of the divided Socialists, together with an eclectic array of parties and political "movements," backed the presidential candidacy of former military dictator (1927-31) Carlos Ibfilez del Campo. 30. A conspicuous, if short-lived, exception to this generalization flourished in Colombia in the late 1960s and early

1970s. The National Popular Alliance (ANAPO), essentially the political vehicle of former dictator General Gustavo Rojas Pinilla, won 39 percent of the vote, and nearly the presidency, in 1970 in a multicandidate election with a populistic appeal and strong support from the urban masses, plus the support of a number of rural areas, all of them disaffected from the then-reigning power-sharing agreement between the Conservative and Liberal parties called the National Front. Significantly, and attesting to the strength of traditional party loyalties in Colombia, ANAPO at its peak functioned not as a formally separate party (though it became one in 1971), but as a combination of dissident

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factions of the two major parties. When in 1970 Rojas Pinilla himself ran for president, he did so under the Conservative label; see Robert H. Dix, "Political Oppositions under the National Front," in R. Albert Berry, Ronald G. Hellman, and Mauricio Solatin, eds., Politics of Compromise (New Brunswick: Transaction Books, 1980), pp. 140-64. ANAPO has since virtually faded from sight. 31. The cross-national variance is considerable in this respect. Pre-1973 Chile was at one extreme: there were

typically three or four presidential candidates but many more congressional slates, with many minor parties explicitly or tacitly backing one of the major party candidacies. In Peru in 1980, on the other hand, there were fifteen presidential candidacies and fifteen congressional slates; cf. Sandra L. Woy-Hazelton, "The Return of Partisan Politics in Peru," in Stephen M. Gorman, ed., Post-Revolutionary Peru (Boulder: Westview Press, 1982), p. 55. More typical than either of these cases are Costa Rica and Venezuela, where the two leading candidates as a rule garner 8-10 percent more of the vote than do their respective congressional slates and there are usually two or three more parties seeking representation in congress than there are presidential candidates.

32. Cf. Epstein, Political Parties, chap. 6. 33. World Bank, World Development Report 1987, p. 267. 34. Ibid., p. 265. 35. Ibid. 36. Alejandro Portes, "Urbanization and Politics in Latin America," Social Science Quarterly, 52 (December 1971),

697-720; see also Joan M. Nelson, Migrants, Urban Poverty, and Instability in Developing Nations (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Center for International Affairs, 1969).

37. Juan M. Villareal, "Changes in Argentine Society: The Heritage of Dictatorship," in Monica Peralta Ramos and Carlos H. Waisman, eds., From Military Rule to Liberal Democracy in Argentina (Boulder: Westview Press, 1987), p. 95. 38. Cf. Epstein, concerning the relevance of this factor in the case of the United States. 39. Albert O. Hirschman, "Underdevelopment, Obstacles to the Perception of Change, and Leadership," Daedalus,

97 (Summer 1968), 925-37. 40. Epstein, p. 132. 41. That the decline of class politics in Europe may have been exaggerated is suggested in ibid., pp. 368-74; see also

Steven Wolinetz, "The Transformation of Western European Party Systems Revisited," West European Politics, 2 (January 1979), 4-28. 42. France's Charles de Gaulle was in a sense such a leader. However, he considered himself above, or apart from,

political parties, even those that adhered to his cause or invoked his name; he personally spent little time building or leading his own party. 43. Ergun Ozbudun, "Institutionalizing Competitive Elections in Developing Societies," in Myron Weiner and

Ergun Ozbudun, eds., p. 405. 44. Ibid.

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Article Contentsp. 23p. 24p. 25p. 26p. 27p. 28p. 29p. 30p. 31p. 32p. 33p. 34p. 35p. 36p. 37

Issue Table of ContentsComparative Politics, Vol. 22, No. 1 (Oct., 1989), pp. i-ii+1-122Front Matter [pp. i-38]Rural Development Areas in Swaziland: The Politics of Integrated Rural Development [pp. 1-22]Cleavage Structures and Party Systems in Latin America [pp. 23-37]Patterns of Church Influence in Brazil's Political Transition [pp. 39-61]The Adequacy of the Electoral Motive in Explaining Legislative Attention to Monetary Policy: A Comparative Study [pp. 63-82]Variations in Union Political Activity in the United States, Britain, and Germany from the Nineteenth Century [pp. 83-104]Review ArticleReview: Deregulation and the State in Comparative Perspective: The Case of Telecommunications [pp. 105-120]

Errata: Popular Democracy in the New Nicaragua: The Case of a Rural Mass Organization [pp. 121-122]Back Matter

Dix Cleavage

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