Grassroots Expectations of Democracy and Economy: Argentina in Comparative Perspective. By Nancy R. Powers. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2001. 294p. $45.00 cloth, $19.95 paper.

Extract

As the recent political meltdowns in Venezuela and Argentina made clear, a vast gap persists between elite behavior and mass attitudes in much of Latin America. Scholarly understanding of this gap—and its political implications—would benefit from more fine-grained, yet theoretically informed, studies of nonelites. Nancy Powers's Grassroots Expectations of Democracy and Economy is one such study. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 41 residents of two lower-income neighborhoods in Argentina's federal capital, Powers examines how poor people understand their own interests. She argues that people experience poverty in vastly different ways, and this variation has important implications for political behavior. Thus, to understand how poor people view the relationship between their own material conditions and government policy, one must examine “the conditions themselves and how people live with them” (p. 33). This kind of inductive analysis has important and well-known limitations, particularly for studies—such as this one—based on a small sample size. Yet given how little we continue to know about the relationship between mass attitudes and macrolevel politics in Latin America, such a “bottom up” approach should be welcomed. To the extent that fine-grained inductive research generates insights that 1) are unlikely to emerge out of larger-n studies and 2) challenge or refine dominant theoretical assumptions, it can be extremely fruitful. This is the case with important sections of the book.