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After Regime Change: Authoritarian Legacies, Political Representation, and the Democratic Future of South America

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 June 2011

Frances Hagopian
Frances Hagopian
Affiliation:
Professor of Political Science at Tufts University
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Extract

This article focuses on the legacies of the authoritarian regimes of South America for the contemporary consolidation of democracy. In particular, it considers their lasting effects on the region's informal networks and formal institutions of political representation. It questions several assumptions made by the literature on regime transition and democratic consolidation in South America about political culture, institutional reform, and electoral realignment: taken together, these assumptions are misleading about how much and what kind of political change has occurred in Latin America as a result of authoritarian rule. To understand how the challenges of democratic consolidation have been shaped, the article proposes instead to examine how the economic policies and political strategies pursued by military regimes preserved, altered, or destroyed the clientelistic and corporatist networks of mediation between state and society prevailing at the onset of authoritarianism, as well as those constructed upon the representative base of programmatic political parties.

Type
Review Article
Information
World Politics , Volume 45 , Issue 3 , April 1993 , pp. 464 - 500
Copyright
Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 1993

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References

1 Huntington, , The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991).Google Scholar

2 The flagship of this literature is O'Donnell, Guillermo, Schmitter, Philippe C., and Whitehead, Laurence, Transitions from Authoritarian Rule: Prospects for Democracy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986).Google Scholar The work has nonetheless been criticized of late for its inability to provide a causal explanation of why regime change takes place and to predict when and where it will happen. See Remmer, Karen, “New Wine or Old Bottlenecks? The Study of Latin American Politics,” Comparative Politics 23 (July 1991)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Smith, Peter H., “Crisis and Democracy in Latin America,” World Politics 43 (July 1991).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3 The argument that how “transitions to democracy” take place determines the extent of the break with the past represented by the regime change has been best articulated by Karl, Terry Lynn, “Dilemmas of Democratization in Latin America,” Comparative Politics 23 (October 1990).CrossRefGoogle Scholar Marcelo Cavarozzi was the first to critique the extended utility of the “transitions” framework to which we have all contributed. See Cavarozzi, , “Beyond Transitions in Latin America” (Paper presented to the Congress of the Latin American Studies Association, Washington, D.C., April 4–7, 1991).Google Scholar

4 On the unconsolidated state of Latin America's new democracies, see White-head, Laurence, “The Alternatives to ‘Liberal Democracy’: A Latin American Perspective,” Political Studies 40 (Special Issue 1992).Google Scholar

5 There are exceptions, most notably, Samuel Valenzuela, J. and Valenzuela, Arturo, eds., Military Rule in Chile: Dictatorship and Oppositions (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986)Google Scholar; Lowenthal, Abraham F., ed., The Peruvian Experiment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975)Google Scholar; McClintock, Cynthia and Lowenthal, Abraham F., eds., The Peruvian Experiment Reconsidered (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983)Google Scholar; and Cava-rozzi, Marcelo and Garretón, Manuel Antonio, Muerte y resurrección: Los partidos políticos en el autoritarismo y las transiciones en el Cono Sur (Death and resurrection: Political parties in authoritarianism and the transitions in the Southern Cone) (Santiago, Chile: FLACSO, 1989).Google Scholar

6 These regimes became known as “bureaucratic-authoritarian,” a term coined by O'Donnell, Guillermo, ed., Modernization and Bureaucratic-Authoritarianism: Studies in South American Politics (Berkeley: Institute of International Studies, University of California, Berkeley, 1973)Google Scholar, to capture the pronounced participation of technocrats in the authoritarian regimes that swept to power in the latter phases of import-substituting industrialization. They set out to stabilize the economy, impose political order, and demobilize the popular sectors in order to reduce inflation and attract foreign investment.

7 During the Brazilian “economic miracle” of 1969–73, the economy grew by an average of 11 percent per year, led by an expansion of intermediate and heavy industry. At the close of the period of military rule in 1985, Brazil's economy was the eighth largest in the Western world.

8 What these military regimes hoped to accomplish was not always clear. The Uruguayan regime vacillated between favoring corporatism and “traditional” political parties, and the Brazilian, between villifying traditional politicians and exalting them.

9 As a result of military rule, the prerogatives and influence of the military over day-today political developments increased virtually everywhere in Latin America with the possible exception of Argentina (where gross human rights violations and military unpreparedness in the 1982 South Atlantic War devastated military prestige). This development was not reversed with redemocratization. In Brazil, notes Stepan, , “no substantial military prerogatives were challenged” (p. xvi)Google Scholar; and in Chile, by the terms of the constitution written by the military, President Patricio Alywin, elected in 1990, inherited the members of the junta governing the country in 1988 as chiefs of the four military services for his entire term in office.

10 See Remmer, Karen L., “The Political Impact of Economic Crisis in Latin America in the 1980s,” American Political Science Review 85 (September 1991).CrossRefGoogle Scholar She asserts that this is true to such an extent that economic crisis has not to date favored extremist options at the polls.

11 Lowenthal, Abraham F., “The Peruvian Experiment Reconsidered,” in McClintock and Lowenthal (fn. 5).Google Scholar Lowenthal makes the strongest case for change but does not commit this error.

12 The state of the literature on Brazil is reflected in Sarles, Margaret J., “Government and Politics: Brazil,” in Handbook of Latin American Studies 47 (1985)Google Scholar : “The literature on Brazilian politics suggests that the country will never return to the pre-1964 form of democracy” (p. 554).

13 Despite executive-legislative conflict, a lingering threat from the military, and a wave of strikes, Gillespie and Gonzalez remained optimistic that Uruguayan democracy would be able to strengthen and consolidate itself because “a major revalorization of democracy as a necessary component of civilized life has taken place on all sides” (in Diamond, Linz, and Lipset, 238–39). Waisman, though more tentative, also hoped that the commitment of Alfonsín and the Radical Party to liberal democracy and “the shift toward moderation and tolerance that the recent traumatic experiences produced in most interest groups and political parties” could offset the threats to democratic consolidation presented by mass praetorianism and corporatism (p. 99).

14 Such a view has also been put in the form of a theoretical proposition by Diamond and Linz (p. 35) with preliminary support from the Costa Rican and Venezuelan cases.

15 In the spirit of postscripts to their contributions, Della Cava and Mainwaring reluctantly concede the growing weakness of the progressive grass-roots movements within the Catholic church and the neighborhood associations of Nova Iguaçu.

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18 Poll conducted by the Peruvian Enterprise of Public Opinion (POP), as reported in Folha de Sāo Paulo (Brazil), April 8, 1992, sec. 2, p. 1.Google Scholar

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20 Remmer (fn. 10), 793–94, cites movement toward political pacts in several countries as reason to be optimistic about the future of democracy amid economic crisis.

21 Argentina has the dubious distinction of having had the highest per capita murder rate of the bureaucratic-authoritarian regimes: at least nine thousand middle-rank union officials, party cadres, teachers, and student activists died in what the Argentines call the “dirty war.”

22 Linz, Juan J. and Stepan, Alfred, eds., The Breakdown of Democratic Regimes (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978).Google Scholar

23 The double simultaneous vote permits parties to present more than one list in each: election, and the number of seats for each party is determined using a modified d'Honda form of proportional representation, first for the party as a whole and then by the samt method among rival factions of each party. Presidential elections, held at the same time, are also subject to the DSV; the victor is the candidate who polls the most votes of the winning party (Gillespie and González, in Diamond, Linz, and Lipset, 212–13).

24 See also the cogently argued apprehensions of Campello de Souza (in Stepan, 383).

25 Intraparty competition, if indeed strident, may have been exaggerated in the case of Brazil. In the current system deputies do not run against all colleagues on their party slate, but only against those competing for votes in the same, informally demarcated electoral districts. It is, moreover, not at all clear that they attack one another more ferociously than do their counterparts in primary battles in first-past-the-post systems; nor is it clear that their attacks are more destructive of party unity, coherence, and discipline.

26 The “freezing” metaphor is borrowed and adapted from Seymour Lipset, Martin and Rokkan, Stein, “Cleavage Structures, Party Systems, and Voter Alignments: An Introduction,” in Lipset, and Rokkan, , eds., Party Systems and Voter Alignments: Cross National Perspectives (New York: Free Press, 1967).Google Scholar

27 These reasons are cited by Garretón (pp. 169–70); and Valenzuela, Arturo and Samuel Valenzuela, J., “Party Opposition under the Chilean Authoritarian Regime,” in Valenzuela and Valenzuela (fn. 5).Google Scholar

28 The Renovación y Cambio movement within the Radical Party, spearheaded by Raid: Alfonsín, reformulated party ideology and especially used new methods of political mobilization in the 1970s to broaden the constituent base of the party. In the Argentine elections of; 1989, the UCEDE (Unión del Centro Democrático) garnered 12.1 percent of the vote, to emerges as the leading alternative to the Radicals and the Peronists. All together, the minor parties: captured more than one-fifth of the vote.

29 In Brazil political cleavages often correspond to political factions, and elites easily reasemble under new party labels whenever necessary. My own research has shown that the new political divide so well described by Lamounier (in Stepan, 43–44), which formed at the mass level around the issue of authoritarianism, did not eliminate the traditional rivalries that dominated party politics; rather, old political identities and disputes were accommodated within the ARENA Party through the use of the sublegenda, or subticket, during military rule. This is important because it implies that traditional politicians can carry votes with them as they move from party to party. See Hagopian, , Traditional Politics and Regime Change in Brazil (New York: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

30 See Schamis, Hector E., “Reconceptualizing Latin American Authoritarianism in the 1970s: From Bureaucratic-Authoritarianism to Neoconservatism,” Comparative Politics 23 (January 1991).CrossRefGoogle Scholar Different economic policies were probably adopted because, as Alejandro Foxley has argued, economic crises were graver, political threats more serious, and international economic conditions less favorable to developing countries in the 1970s than they had been in the 1960s. See Foxley, , Latin American Experiments in Neo-Conservative Economics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983).Google Scholar

31 Baer, Werner, Newfarmer, Richard, and Trebat, Thomas, “On State Capitalism in Brazil: Some New Issues and Questions,” Inter-American Economic Affairs 30 (Winter 1976)Google Scholar; Skidmore, Thomas, The Politics of Military Rule in Brazil, 1964–85 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988).Google Scholar

32 The best account is still Foxley (fn. 30).

33 See Rial, Juan, “Continuidad y cambio en las organizaciones partidarias en el Uruguay: 1973–1984,” in Cavarozzi and Garretón (fn. 5).Google Scholar

34 Arnes, Barry, Political Survival: Politicians and Public Policy in Latin America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987).Google Scholar

35 Current research confirms that the systematic practice of clientelism in Brazil is as pervasive as ever. Ames, Barry, “Electoral Strategy and Legislative Politics in Brazil, 1978–1990” (Progress report, April 3, 1991)Google Scholar; Mainwaring, Scott, “Clientelism, Patrimonialism, and Economic Crisis: Brazil since 1979” (Paper presented at the Congress of the Latin American Studies Association, Washington, D.C., April 4–7, 1991).Google Scholar

36 Rial (fn. 33), 257.

37 On the image of the paternalistic state, see Cohen, Youssef, “The Benevolent Leviathan: Political Consciousness among Urban Workers under State Corporatism,” American Political Science Review 76 (March 1982).Google Scholar When a labor research institute discovered in 1977 that the official inflation figures for 1973 had been doctored, labor launched a “wage recovery campaign.” For details of the campaign, see Keck (in Stepan).

38 I have borrowed the inducements/constraints dichotomy from Collier, Ruth Berins and Collier, David, “Inducements versus Constraints: Disaggregrating Corporatism,” American Political Science Review 73 (December 1979).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

39 Schmitter, Philippe C., “Still the Century of Corporatism,” Review of Politics 36 (January 1974), 1.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

40 Cavarozzi, at the Conference on Political Parties and Political Representation in the Post-Authoritarian Era, Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars, Washington, D.C., November 8–9, 1991.