rib: i\ 5 . 9:3. .Jfiturfiii . 3.3.; .5 . 5x. .3. h! . "a... I in”!!! a ‘1‘ v... y 5 r2: .3. 1;: ..Av....r..... v . {Starry x I A) .. t I... 9 .5.IIK :10; 3:7 : .: 1' (oilfiitf. .s ...w I .: tiIIE...‘ w 15...».- an?" 1.,‘r r. s 5.... Fa: .. . .o I 1:1. I .I ‘ .: Lwnrsujuiuih. W. 1&5“ . ‘ «#1 «Erin... s v) is n. 3 ‘0: 572.51; .. : . :2 :2{ . :23 .3: on: Y: ’5'] 3 n . I . basiu3flm L I n ~ .33 ‘l . c .4 I .. 5 y d. .05. 7 .. vi. 3 ‘n [V dd vagrww It! 9 , .iuléi .. :~ 1: 1" ~10! . 5’ .‘r:‘ z E .1 V ; I: 3,3990... §V.C\ THE Sis lllllll\llllllllllllllll lull llllllllllllll 3 1293 014 This is to certify that the dissertation entitled ‘ The Nationalization of Voting in Presidential Regimes: Party Organization and Institutions in Venezuela, Argentina and Uruguay presented by Jonathan Edward Monroe has been accepted towards fulfillment of the requirements for Phd degree in Political Science M NW Major professor Date 7/26/95 MSU is an Affirmative Action/Equal Opportunity Institution 0-12771 LIBRARY Mlchlgan State University PLACE N 361113" BOX to roman thi- chockout from your record. 1’0 AVOID FINES mum on or before date duo. DATE DUR DATE DUE DATE DUE MSU In An Affirmative Action/Equal Opportunity Indium W i THE NATIONALIZATION OF VOTING IN PRESIDENTIAL REGIMES: PARTY ORGANIZATION AND INSTITUTIONS IN VENEZUELA, ARGENTINA AND URUGUAY By Jonathan Edward Monroe A DISSERTATION Submitted to Michigan State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Department of Political Science 1995 ABSTRACT THE NATIONALIZATION OF VOTING IN PRESIDENTIAL REGIMES: PARTY ORGANIZATION AND INSTITUTIONS IN VENEZUELA, ARGENTINA AND URUGUAY By Jonathan E. Monroe This study is concerned with the problematic nature of mandates in presidential regimes, in particular the tendency for elections to the national legislature to be based on a local and/or sectarian vote. Two questions are asked. What relationship exists between styles of party organization and the nationalization of voting? Under what conditions do the presidential elections inhibit or encourage the nationalization process? Regression models are employed to assess the tendency of votes to "swung" according to local or national forces and to measure the electoral linkages between the presidential and legislative branches of the principal parties. It is found that styles of party organization exert a strong influence on the tendency to nationalize legislative voting. Centralized parties tend to prevent presidential elections from generating an unstable pattern of legislative voting. Concurrent elections, while strongly linking the legislative and presidential branches, nevertheless do not guarantee a stable, nationalized vote at the legislative level. In general, it is found that, contrary to widespread perceptions, under certain conditions presidential regimes are capable of producing a shared, "national" mandate. Copyright by Jonathan Edward Monroe 1995 To My Parents iv To My Parents iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank the members of my dissertation committee: Brian Silver, Jeffrey Riedinger, Mark Jones, and Scott Gates. Special thanks to Brian Silver for his help in focusing this study and charting its course. Thanks to Karen, Iris, Rhonda, and Elaine for their patience over the years. I owe debts of gratitude to John Ishiyama for many productive conversations and to Mei Mah for support throughout. TABLE OF CONTENTS LIST OF TABLES ...................................... p. LIST OF FIGURES ..................................... p. CHAPTER ONE: The Nationalization of Legislative Elections in Presidential Regimes ...... p. CHAPTER TWO: The Nationalization of Voting in Theoretical Perspective ................ p. Introduction ...................................... p. The Nationalization of Voting ..................... p. Theoretical Perspective ........................... p. Organizational Tendencies of Parties .............. p. Nationalization in Theoretical Perspective ........ p. Plan of Chapters Three through Eight .............. p. CHAPTER THREE: A Typology of Parties ................ p. Introduction ...................................... p. Professionalization and Centralization ............ p. Typology of Parties ............................... p. Professional-Centralized ........................ p. Professional-Decentralized ...................... p. Nonprofessional-Centralized ..................... p. Nonprofessional-Decentra1ized ................... p. The Parties of Venezuela .......................... p. The Parties of Uruguay ............................ p. The Parties of Argentina .......................... p. vi ix 18 18 19 23 30 31 44 46 46 49 61 61 63 65 66 69 79 85 CHAPTER FOUR: Nationalization in Legislative Elections: Hypotheses and Methods ..... Hypotheses ........................................ Data .............................................. Research Design .......................... I ......... Methods ........................................... CHAPTER FIVE: Nationalization in Legislative Elections: Data Analysis .............. Conclusions ....................................... CHAPTER SIX: Nationalization and the Presidency ..... The Mandate in Presidential Regimes ............... The President Within the Party .................... The Presidency and Nationalized Voting ............ Conclusions ....................................... CHAPTER SEVEN: Nationalization and the Presidency: Hypotheses and Methods ............... Hypotheses ........................................ Research Design ................................... Methods for Hypothesis 1 .......................... Presidential-Legislative Electoral Linkage (Hypothesis 2) .................................... CHAPTER EIGHT: An Analysis of Executive-Legislative Linkages and their Effects on the Nationalization of Voting ............ The Nationalization of Presidential Elections ..... Cross-election Stability of Voting for the Legislature.................................. ..... Cross-election Stability -- Results for Uruguay ........................................... Linkages Between Presidential and Legislative Elections ......................................... CHAPTER NINE: Conclusions and Implications for vii p. p. p. p. p. p. p. p. p. p. p. p. p. p. p. p. p. p. p. p. p. p. 99 99 103 106 108 112 123 125 125 130 138 147 149 149 150 151 156 158 158 171 183 190 Further Research ...................... Summary of Findings ............................... Suggestions for Further Research .................. A Note on Recent Reforms .......................... B IBLIOGRAPHY ........................................ viii p. p. p. p. p. 207 207 210 213 217 Table Table Table Table Table Table Table Table Table Table Table Table Table Table Table Table Table Table Table 10: 11: 12: 13: 14: 15: 16: 17: 18: 19: LIST OF TABLES Electoral Rules -- Legislative ............. District Magnitudes and Seat Bonus/Penalty for First Second and Third Place Parties .............................. Electoral Rules —- Presidential ............ Classifications of the Parties ............. Variance Components ........................ Variance Components -- Two Largest Districts Removed .......................... Cumulative Regional Inequality Index ....... : Vote for Frente Amplio in Montevideo and Interior ............................... Variance Components -- Presidential Elections .................................. CRI Index -- Presidential Elections ....... V-scores —- Uruguayan Sublemas ............ Model 1 -- Peronist Party ................. Model 2 -- Peronist Party ................. Model 1 -- Radical Civic Union ............ Model 2 -- Radical Civic Union ............ Model 1 -- Democratic Action .............. Model 1 -- COPEI .......................... Model 1 -- Republican Democratic Union.... Coalitions of Sublemas for Legislative Elections ................................. ix p. p. p. p. p. p. p. p. p. p. p. p. p. p. p. p. p. p. p. 42 42 43 105 115 118 121 122 161 168 169 174 175 176 178 181 181 182 187 Table Table Table Table Table Table 21: 22: 23: 24: 25: Model 1 -- Uruguay, Model 3 -- Additive Elections ................................. Model 4 -— Additive Model 5 -- Additive Effects of CON ............................ Model 6 -- Additive Effects of PTY ............................ Combined Models 5-6 ....................... 1966-1989, by Sublema. Effect of Concurrent Effect of Party Type.. and Interactive and Interactive p. p. p. p. p. p. 188 195 196 197 198 199 r: Fig C. F c. Figure Figure Figure Figure LIST OF FIGURES Similarity of Presidential and Legislative Votes -- Professional- Centralized Parties ..................... Similarity of Presidential and Legislative Votes -— Peronist Party ..... Similarity of Presidential and Legislative Votes -- Republican Democratic Union ........................ Similarity of Presidential and Legislative Votes -- Venezuelan Parties ................................. xi p. p. p. p. 203 204 205 206 Chapter One Introduction: the Nationalization of Legislative Elections in Presidential Regimes This study deals with two related issues: the nationalization of legislative elections and the impact of presidential elections on that process. To say that elections are "nationalized" is to say either that votes tend to "swing" among sub-national electoral districts in response to the same forces (Stokes, 1965), or that voting is homogeneous across electoral boundaries (Claggett, et a1, 1984). One of the findings of the earlier studies (Stokes, 1965; Jackman, 1972) was that structures of government could affect the tendency of a system to nationalize. The propensity of South American elections to respond to regional forces has often been noted, but has seldom been discussed in much depth. Literature on South American politics has frequently decried this tendency (MacDonald and Ruhl, 1989), with explanations ranging from inadequate parties (Scott, 1966), to electoral systems (Gonzalez, 1989, viz Uruguay), to the separation of powers (Shugart and Carey, 1992). By exploring the experiences of Argentina, Venezuela, and Uruguay I hope to shed light on the nationalization process, not only in the South American context, but in the broader context of presidential regimes. An exploration of the South American cases is interesting not only from an historical standpoint, as a description of processes under way in developing democracies, but also 1 -15" Chapter One Introduction: the Nationalization of Legislative Elections in Presidential Regimes This study deals with two related issues: the nationalization of legislative elections and the impact of presidential elections on that process. To say that elections are "nationalized" is to say either that votes tend to "swing" among sub-national electoral districts in response to the same forces (Stokes, 1965), or that voting is homogeneous across electoral boundaries (Claggett, et al, 1984). One of the findings of the earlier studies (Stokes, 1965; Jackman, 1972) was that structures of government could affect the tendency of a system to nationalize. The propensity of South American elections to respond to regional forces has often been noted, but has seldom been discussed in much depth. Literature on South American politics has frequently decried this tendency (MacDonald and Ruhl, 1989), with explanations ranging from inadequete parties (Scott, 1966), to electoral systems (Gonzalez, 1989, viz Uruguay), to the separation of powers (Shugart and Carey, 1992). By exploring the experiences of Argentina, Venezuela, and Uruguay I hope to shed light on the nationalization process, not only in the South American context, but in the broader context of presidential regimes. An exploration of the South American cases is interesting gift only from an historical standpoint, as a description of ’. cesses under way in developing democracies, but also insofar as it gives us an opportunity to explore the broader issue of nationalization. Earlier studies focused either on government structures in comparative context (Stokes, 1965; Jackman, 1972) or on single cases (Brady, 1985; Kawato, 1989). All of the studies focused on stable, developed democracies. The structural issue, while important, has been left at the level of federal versus unitary, or parliamentary versus presidential distinctions. This obscures differences in institutional arrangements within classes of regimes and may tend to exaggerate the importance of the more-general distinctions. Moreover, with the analysis kept at either the single-case level, or at a very broad level of generality, it is all but impossible to draw systematic comparisons among institutional differences below the regime level and among parties - the level at which nationalization is actually observed. The absence of attention to differences among parties is an important gap that needs to be filled in this literature, since it is the party, after all, which competes in the electoral marketplace. In this respect the South American cases, all of which are presidential regimes, provide an exceptional opportunity to explore the process of nationalization within a regime-type. These cases also provide us with a greater variety in the types of party organizations than was present in the earlier studies. What will distinguish this study from previous studies of the nationalization process, then, will be its attention to 2 3 two central issues: first, the role of jparties will be explicated in such a way as to draw clear parallels with the organizational practices of parties; second, we will here be looking at specific institutions rather than models based on government structure. What emerges, I think, will not only be a more complete picture of the organizational and institutional forces favoring a nationalization of electoral forces, but also a suggestive line of enquiry which can be improved and built upon. To complete the task outlined above we will need a theoretical perspective that accomplishes two things: provides an explanation for the tendency of parties to nationalize their vote, and provides an explanation for cross-national (rather than cross-party) differences in nationalization which can be logically attributed to different institutional arrangements within the presidential type. This is outlined in Chapter Two. The perspective adopted here is a "minimalist" perspective (Schumpeter, 1950). It is assumed that democracy is, at base, a procedure for alternating governments via elections. From this persepective it is natural to focus on the relations between parties and their electorates, and to give particular attention to institutions which alter the context of that relationship. The central theses of this study are therefore that differences among parties, particularly organizational differences, are an important determinant of nationalization, and that presidential regimes may usefully be 4 distinguished, for present purposes, by their electoral arrangements - particularly those which exhibit some potential for altering the relations between the president and legislature (specifics must follow the presentation of the theory in later chapters). In sum, this study contributes to the study of nationalization in two important ways: first, it expands the substantive focus to include developing' democracies with widely variant partisan and institutional characteristics from those studied earlier; second, it expands the theoretical content of this literature in that it provides a theory which explicates the relations between party organization, institutional differences within the presidential type, and the nationalization of voting. The cases - Argentina, Venezuela, and Uruguay - were selected first of all because each has well-developed party systems (in the sense that there have been a reasonably long series of elections in which the principal contenders have been retained). For the periods included - 1958-1978 for Venezuela, 1983-1989 for Argentina, and 1966-1989 in the case of Uruguay - each was at a roughly similar stage of development in terms of net wealth and modernization of the media (an important consideration in the earlier studies). Also important as a research design issue are the structural similarities in their governing and electoral systems. All have strong presidents. All used some variant of proportional representation (differences to be discussed later: structural 5 issues are discussed in more depth in Chapters Two and Six). And finally, all are relatively homogeneous in terms of cultural cleavages, which always has the potential to become a disturbing factor in a research design. These broad, systemic constants permit concentration on the institutional and party organizational variables mentioned earlier. Differences in electoral laws - principally, the type of proportional representation and.the nature of the electoral cycle - are emphasized in cross-national comparison. Party organization varies both within and among countries, which permits a stronger assessment of the independent influence of the institutional variables: Specifics regarding research design. are discussed. throughout in relation to specific hypotheses. The principal findings of this study can be summarized.in two parts. First, in Chapter Five evidence is presented which demonstrates that where legislative elections are considered independently, methods of party organization exert a strong influence on the nationalization process. Second, in Chapter Eight we find that where certain party organizational traits are combined with a concurrent electoral cycle, a condition here exemplified by' Venezuela, a particular pattern of linkages between the presidential and legislative elections emerges. Further, the evidence suggests that this pattern permits presidential elections to contribute to the nationalization of legislative elections. This linkage, I suggest, allows parties to cut across the barriers of the 6 separation of powers (in the sense that the branches share a common electoral fate). What makes these results particularly interesting, albeit within the limits of a small selection of cases, is that the absence of either the organizational or institutional foundations of the "pattern" referred to above appears to imply a pattern more typical of presidential regimes - i.e., an electoral divorce between the branches. In these systems, Argentina and Uruguay, the presidential elections do not become agents of nationalization, and parties are inhibited.in their ability to become "nationalizers." The implications of these results are manifold. First, they deny the rather easy condemnations of presidentialism which have become all too common recently. Second, they imply that an electoral pattern similar to that typical of parliamentary systems can be maintained in a presidential context (patterns of governing fall outside the scope of this study). Third, they underscore the significance:of parties and electoral systems in national political development (a goal of the earlier studies of Stokes and Jackman whidh was never realized owing to the high level of analysis they worked at). Finally, at a theoretical level, the results demonstrate the utility of a minimalist theory of party organization for comparative analysis. Before turning to the theoretical material presented in Chapter Two, we might well ask the question: "why study nationalization in the South American context?" What bearing 7 does this have on the conduct of politics in that region? My brief comments here will focus on typical problems of government, and especially those associated with the development of party organization. The nationalization of voting is a topic whose importance, particularly in South.America, extends far beyond mere description. of patterns of voting. In jpresidential regimes the separation of powers is maintained not only through formal divisions of responsibilities, but by a division of mandates. Studies of American politics have long emphasized the tendency of a separation of powers to divide the mandate along national and constituency lines (Schumpeter, 1950). The legislator becomes a "constituency delegate" (Stokes, 1965; Jackman, 1972). While it can reasonably be argued that the United States case also includes electoral system effects (Riker, 1986) , cross-national studies by Stokes (1965) and Jackman (1972), as well as more recent work on presidential regimes by Shugart and Carey (1992) , suggest that either or both of the government structure and the powers of the president are negatively related to the nationalization of elections. The study of nationalization thus bears a direct relation to the construction of mandates. Focusing exclusively on presidential regimes will here give us, indirectly; an.insight into the electoral origins of deadlock. In a region of the world where deadlock has been a continuing problem, even to the point of undermining democracy itself, the form of the 8 mandates, and an explanation thereof, takes on an added importance. The restriction of this study to presidential regimes serves this purpose well. This study is not about the governing of presidential regimes, though this is a related issue. Since the problems of "deadlock" and "immobilism" bear a relation to the construction of mandates, however, I will devote some attention here, and in Chapter Six, to these issues. As Lijphart (1977) has argued, presidential regimes pose unique problems in the realms of political conflict and in the process of governance. Presidential regimes concentrate political conflict on a single office, which only one of a small number of nationally significant parties can win. Linz (1990) and Horowitz (1990) concur that in pluralistic societies this contest can unleash destabilizing jealousies among competing groups that may undermine democracy itself. With regards to the process of governing it has been suggested that the separation of powers typical of presidential regimes poses additional problems: the principal concerns being "immobilism" (Weinstein, 1975), resulting from ineffective legislatures, or governments of obstruction, wherein the legislative and executive branches compete to the disadvantage of all (Sundquist, 1992; Cox, 1987). The concerns noted about the functioning of presidential systems ultimately hinge on the question of how the electoral process constructs the mandates of the executive and legislative branches. Lijphart's concern over political 9 conflict is related to the plurality rule (or majority rule, where run-offs are employed) employed in presidential elections. It is not inconceivable for a candidate to hold the most powerful office who has been rejected at the polls by as much as seventy-five percent of the voting population. Where concerns for minority rights are strongly held, this can lead to a delegitimation of the regime. The concern. over "obstructionism" is common to all presidential regimes and centers on the differing Constituencies of the president and the legislators. Legislators may be subject (justifiably) to the charge of political sectionalism; i.e., that they serve the needs of their constituents rather than the general welfare of the nation. Government can become an arena of competing mandates. These criticisms of presidential regimes alert us to two basic problems. First, obstructionism, while common to presidential regimes, is probably of greater concern to developing democracies which are more prone to crisis and possess fewer constraints against anti-democratic solutions. Second, in seeking to understand these problems we cannot be blind to the electoral realities of legislative-executive relations. The nationalization of Voting, in particular, shows promise as a means for assessing the problem of conflicting mandates. We must then begin by understanding the causes of a nationalized vote. The presidential regimes of South America provide an extraordinary, and.by and large ignored, opportunity to study 10 the nationalization of voting in legislative elections. Obstructionism and regionalism are both commonly acknowledged problems in South America. For the researcher, these countries offer a wealth of institutional and party-organizational differences within a context of similarity in historical and ethno-graphic backgrounds. Here we will focus on Argentina, Venezuela, and Uruguay. These cases, apart from other considerations detailed in later chapters, supply the minimal needs of this research: a reasonable series of elections which retain the principal parties. Frequently, discussion of the problem of deadlock in legislative-executive relations centers on the merits of expanding the president's powers. In the United States the debate in recent years has centered on the proposed line-item veto. In situations of crisis, the viability of legislatures as institutions ‘may' be (questioned: "reformist" sentiment reaches beyond the institutional or legal levels toward the regime itself. The Uruguayan coup of 1973 and the 1992 coup in Peru followed in the wake of harsh criticisms of the performance of legislatures in dealing with protracted internal crises. Rather than traversing this familiar ground, I suggest that the emphasis on inter-branch power relations is misplaced. While presidential power is indeed an issue, what has been neglected are the longer-term electoral processes underlying governments ofiobstruction; that is, the failure to develop a mandate linking the legislative and executive 11 branches. The perception that structures of government matter as future determinants of successful governance has been a focal point of debate in many transitional regimes. In the search for an optimal fit between societal pluralism and government structure Nigeria has been through a number of traumatic experiments with federalism and presidentialism (Horowitz, 1985). Urban-rural splits, manifested in Conservative-Liberal conflict, have motivated experiments with collegial executives and unusual systems of intra-party preference voting in both Uruguay and Colombia. Debates in post—Weimar Germany emphasized the relative merits of parliamentarism versus presidentialism and proportional versus maj oritarian electoral systems as means of containing urban-rural rivalries (Pulzer, 1983). In each of these cases the underlying concern was that the failure to build a regime capable of including the relevant representatives of a society’s sectional groupings would impair its ability to build a sense of legitimacy with these populations. Any sense of national unity would then be highly unlikely if the national government was perceived as the tool of a single interest. In a related area of research others, such as Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba (1963), David Apter (1956), Giovanni Sartori (1976) and Hans Daalder (1966), have explored the relevance of interest groups and parties as means of forging national unity. Parties, in particular, were seen as the principal means of channeling societal demands to the 12 government and hence they could be regarded as, at least, potential agents of national integration. Many noted, like Robert Scott (1966) and Samuel Huntington (1968), that parties were often the weak links in the chain; that they merely replicated the demands of particular groups and their interests and therefore did not function as conflict-mending political brokers. They communicated into the system private interests inimical to the public—spiritedness required to create a truly national polity. These studies suggest that the attributes of parties need to be taken seriously in the study of nationalization. Scholars have also long recognized that in the building of democratic systems it is wise to pay attention to how the system structures electoral competition. Madison's concern with the "spirit of faction" is echoed in the works of those studying national integration in Latin America. Latin American parties have, throughout their history, frequently been dominated by notables and by external, sectional interests. Seldom Ihave they' exhibited the delicate balance between ambition and responsibility, between public and private interest, which is generally regarded as the hallmark of developed democracies. Robert Scott, writing in 1966, noted that: "..throughout Latin America the absence in most party systems of nationalizing and integrating political parties that can. act as auxiliary' political structures to Iband together the operations of an expanding polity is one of the most important factors contributing to the problem of effective public policy formulation." (p.331) 13 This concern is still relevant. Uruguay and Colombia, while often considered models of democratic stability in South America, also provide vivid examples of how fractured.parties have imbued their polities with a highly personalized struggle for patronage. The spoils system has inhabited these governments at every level, and in both cases has directly contributed to the loss of political freedom (Weinstein, 1975; Osterling, 1989). Occasional attempts at pact-making notwithstanding, the spirit of faction remains a fundamental problem which elite pacts may solidify even as they succeed in buying time. The alienation of voters, particularly the young, under the Colombian. National Front illustrates Iboth. the 'underlying weakness of parties and the potential for political decay and instability which plagues a political arena based on the satisfaction of particularistic needs. In both the Uruguayan and Colombian cases the electoral laws have become defenders of this status quo (Gonzalez, 1991; Shugart, 1992) Carlos Waisman (1988) has observed similar problems at work in Argentina: "As long as the party system.is‘weak, and interest groups and bureaucratic organizations such as unions, the military, and others are strong, politicized, and independent from parties, there is a danger that an explosion of demands could trigger the destabilization mechanism that destroyed elected governments in the past." (p. 100) In order to become agents of national integration, in order to develop an electoral arena in which the national and l4 sub-national achieve a balance conducive to governing in a separation of powers system, parties must be able to control as well as to merely adapt to their electoral marketplace. Moreover, they must be given institutional incentives to pursue a nationalized vote; which is to say, institutions must make such a goal a precondition for winning on a national scale. The goal of this study is simply to demonstrate the validity of these assertions. The nationalization of electoral politics is a fundamental indicator of the extent of the "common ground" upon which the two branches stand. In particular, I will show that this process is linked to the development of certain kinds of organizational attributes in parties, that electoral institutions influence the ability of parties to develop nationalized electorates, and. that it is ‘the "type" of presidential regime rather than the powers exercised by the president that promote or retard nationalization.1 The research questions that motivate this study do not center around the conduct of government, though this would be an obvious corollary line of enquiry. Here I look specifically at how mandates are constructed along regional or national lines in the electoral marketplace. Three related questions are asked. First, what relation, if any, exists between the 1 Shugart and Carey's assertion cannot be directly tested.here because presidential power does not vary among the cases. What can be demonstrated is that other factors can alter the typical electoral relationships and that presidential power does not homogenize the results across cases when other factors are operative. 15 nationalization of voting patterns and the organizational attributes of parties? Second, what relation exists between the institutional attributes of a presidential system and the nationalization of elections? Third, how do electoral institutions and other aspects of a party’s "environment" influence a.party’s tendency to promote nationalization? With these concerns in mind, this study of nationalization may well provide the groundwork for a theory of the electoral origins of deadlock in presidential regimes. Our South American cases also permit an expansion in the content of our institutional analysis of nationalization. All the cases are presidential regimes, but there are widely varying electoral practices among the cases. The theoretical value of shifting attention to South America is thus that we are permitted to assess nationalization.processes in relation to specific attributes of parties and.also toiconsider sources of variation within the presidential regime-type. Every attempt has been made to avoid uncontrolled sources of variation at the structural level, but given the data requirements of this study' we are forced. to accomodate Argentine federalism. This is not a problem of great concern, however, as we are focusing on elections to national office. The direct effect of federalism, in any event, can best be described as indirect, through its influence on the structure of parties. The effects of such "background" variables are 16 worth noting, and I will do so where appropriate.2 The theory outlined in the next chapter will be applied to the.Argentine, Uruguayan, and Venezuelan.elections, for the periods mentioned earlier. The 1985 and 1987 elections in Argentina were midterm elections, while all the elections for the other cases were concurrent. These cases offer a wide degree of variation in party-organizational styles, among the major parties in.particular, which is seldom the case in more- developed democracies of the presidential type. The institutional variables - concurrence of elections and ballot type - were chosen for theoretical reasons (explained in Chapter Two), and because these aspects of the electoral systems are cflosely associated with "atenuated- presidentialism" - a variant of the presidential regime practiced in Venezuela (Brewer-Caries, 1982; rules were changed somewhat after the 1989 constitutional reforms) which has been creditted with making "party government" possible. Venezuela and Argentina employ the same balloting procedures (proportional representation with closed lists) , while Uruguay uses a variant of intra-party preference voting. Thus, the concurrence variable becomes operative in the Venezuela- Argentina comparison. The variance in electoral procedures 2 'Truman (1967) emphasized.effects on.party organization in his classic paper, "Federalism and the Party System" (cited from‘Wildavsky, Aaron, ed..American Federalism in Perspective Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1967, pp. 81-108.) He concluded that the nominations process, more so than the electoral activities of parties, reinforced localism and reflected the federal structure. 17 across all cases provides a strenuous test for the indepedence of the party organization variable. The elections includeduwere chosen.for practical reasons. The 1983-1989 elections in Argentina were chosen because these have been among a small number of elections in which the Peronists were not barred from participation (1951 and 1973 being the other - these were included in the analysis of presidential elections in Chapter Eight: problems associated with this are discussed there). The use of electoral coalitions is always a problem in tabulating votes. Votes were here counted as "party" votes only' if the ‘vote 'was cast 'with. that. party’s name. The Uruguayan elections were chosen on the basis of constitutional continuity, so only the elections following the 1966 reforms were included. The Venezuelan series ends, somewhat arbitrarily, at 1978. The 1983 and 1988 elections could have been included without sacrificing constitutional continuity, but here I chose to emphasize maintaining continuity with the other cases in terms of the number of elections and the time- span covered. Chapter Two The Nationalization of Voting in Theoretical Perspective Introduction The theory adopted here draws heavily on minimalist perspectives on democracy and party politics. Minimalism accords closely with the concerns of this work. Briefly stated, minimalism3 assumes that the underlying motive of competition in a democracy is the control of offices through electoral competition. Institutional effects (n1 party organization and.behavior are then assessed in light of their role in structuring electoral competition. Arguing from such a perspective we would then be led to consider whether the institutional system. provides incentives for parties to construct nationalized electorates. In develOping countries, where we cannot always expect a close fit to have developed between parties and their institutional environment, we are also led to consider whether parties exhibit an independent effect (one not premised purely on institutional incentives) on nationalization. The theory developed in this chapter aims to encompass both of the concerns noted above: the roles of institutions and party organization in the nationalization process. 3 This perspective has its roots in the works of Schumpeter (1950) and Downs (1957). It has been elaborated by Schlesinger (1975; 1984), Epstein (1967), Sartori (1976), and others. 18 reso‘ 19 The Nationalization of Voting The "nationalization" of voting can take on more than.one meaning. In an abstract sense it refers to the process through which national governmental bodies increasingly become the focus of political life as their resources and responsibilities grow. It can also take on a more perceptual meaning, in which nationalization refers to the salience of national politics to individuals or the affect (positive or negative) which they attach to it. Daalder (1966) saw these two aspects interwoven in the realm of partisan politics. As he put it (p. 66), "parties can be agencies of both integration. and. disintegration” They’ assist national integration if they serve as genuine brokers between disparate regional or social interests (without losing their national existence in the process). They are likely to strengthen centrifugal forces, on the other hand, if they become passive tools of sectional interests." Where a national polity exists alongside a sectionalized society, in other words, parties become the brokers among potentially competing groups provided that the party can maintain sufficient independence from all such sectional groups. It is not difficult to extrapolate the character of the "active" party from the above statement: a multi-interest organization which aims to become nationally significant in the electoral sense.‘ ‘ This implies that the cases should be parties that were, or had a reasonable chance of becoming, nationally significant. I defined "significant" as having occupied the third-place position in at least one election. the role Jackman tructur aSSumptj 20 The studies of the nationalization of electoral forces, both the earlier and.the more recent, have also suggested that parties play an important role in the process of nationalization, but discussion of the organizational attributes of the parties they studied has been strangely absent.5 The exact nature of the relationship between parties and nationalization has not been given much consideration, nor can the form of the relationship be inferred from the data presented in those studies. Rather than dealing directly with the role of parties in the process, the Stokes (1965) and Jackman (1972) studies relied on models of government structure in which the behavior of parties was left as an assumption. These "responsible party" (represented by Canada and the United Kingdom) and "constituency delegate" (represented by the United States) models, while suggestive and probably valid for the cases examined, cannot provide much guidance for further cross-national comparisons since they'do:not.allow'for variation among parties and because they do not sufficiently identify the features of regimes which might be used to properly classify them. Moreover, since the models correspond closely to the presidential-parliamentary distinction it is an open question as to whether these categories are interchangeable with the above. We might well ask what 5 The original study was Stokes’ 1965 paper, which was followed by Jackman's (1972) and Katz’s (1973). There is something of a gap thereafter until Clagget, et al. (1984), Brady (1985) and Kawato (1989). andlor re they we: they is: 1989, e. ‘7‘ Ace elector prov1ce 21 features a presidential system could possess which would qualify it as a member of the "responsible party" class. The later studies have shed little light on the question of party and/or regime influences on the nationalization process since they were little concerned with parties per se, and because they focused solely on.the United States (Brady, 1985; Kawato, 1989, e.g.). The literature focusing on the "nationalization of electoral forces, " as the preceding paragraph suggests, cannot provide much theoretical guidance for this work. The tools employed by those researchers and the concepts informing them, on the other hand, are of great interest. Jackman's (1972) interpretation of the problem of national integration provides a ready linkage with the electoral data which will be employed here. He stated that nationalization occurs when, "citizens' geographical or spatial location in the society does not help predict their political attitudes and behavior. Under such circumstances, sectionalism (i.e. behavior based on sub-national identifications) becomes politically irrelevant" (p. 572). Since the focus of these studies has been on partisan voting it might be more appropriate to say "electorally" rather than "politically" irrelevant. In any case, this implies, as Katz (1973) has pointed out, several ways of conceptualizing "nationalization": the degree of similarity in vote-swings across districts or, the degree to which vote-swings respond to the same electoral forces and/or issues. examinin: similari These c; discusse For definiti states (Express electio, riding nationa 22 Clearly these are not mutually exclusive interpretations, but the former interpretation will be used in this study (due mainly to the data requirements of the latter, which cannot be met for the South American cases). Some approximation with.the latter interpretation, or the spirit of it, can be reached by examining the similarity of votes across elections and/or the similarity of district-level and national-level elections. These options come into play in Chapter Six and will be discussed there. For the purposes of this study Jackman’s operational definition of nationalization is entirely appropriate. He states (p. 578) that, "if the national electoral 'swing’ (expressed as the mean change in the party vote from one election year to the next) accounts for the change in each riding [i.e. district] adequetely - that is, if there is little variance around the national swing - we will infer that national effects are of prime importance. " Naturally, then, if districts cluster around the regional or district cross— election means, then the attribution of variance would be changed accordingly. The above operational definition captures only one dimension of nationalization, however: what Claggett, et al. (1984), described.as its "movement." An election.may have been nationalized in the sense that voters tended to "swing" according to a national pattern, but this does not imply that the "configuration" of the vote (the dispersal of the total vote across regions and districts in a given election) was national tile 8 distric‘ theoret. further Theoret Q H oA two cha the othe priorit party v organi 23 nationalized. Swing voters may respond to national forces while a static electorate votes consistently along regional or district lines.6 The methodological options and the theoretical significance of this distinction will be discussed further on. Theoretical Perspective The literature on party organization calls attention to two characteristic goals of parties, the emphasis on one or the other normally reflecting substantially divergent research priorities. One line of research emphasizes the place of the party within the democratic regime. The party behaves and organizes in a manner highly responsive to its electoral incentives. Incentives are created by society's distribUtion of preferences (Downs, 1957), by the availability of offices (Schlesinger, 1984), and by election laws (Duverger, 1963). This view is often characterized as "minimalist" insofar as it asserts that the party’s place within the political system imposes on it the "minimal" goal of presenting viable candidates for elective office. The survival of the organization, or at least its significance, is measured in proportion to its success in gaining elective offices (Sartori, 1976; Epstein, 1967; Schlesinger, 1984). For the 5 In studies of U.S. elections this has often been referred to as a "normal vote." Usually this term implies a partisan vote which is stronger during midterms owing to the absence of national forces: an electorate mobilized by the presidential election or, in rarer instances, a national realignment. politiCa anhich of the me can be behavior stemming like 05 advocate autonom: parties but the market, Th perSpec market_ Change Panebia r631 re as.Orga finds impera. to the 24 political party, democracy is at base an electoral "market," in which votes are exchanged for representation. The structure of the market defines the means through.which the minimal goal can be satisfied, and thus exerts a direct impact on the behavior and organization of parties. Less attention, generally, is devoted to understanding how parties act to structure the market. An organizational, or "organic," view of parties, stemming from the pioneering work of political sociologists like Ostrogorski (1953) and Michels (1962), and recently advocated by Panebianco (1988), sees the party as a partially autonomous organization. The organizational features of parties are partly a result of interaction with the market, but the organization itself seeks to»control and structure the market. The differences in emphasis between the above two perspectives center on how the party interacts with its market. Where minimalists see the adaptation of the party to change in the market as normal, rational, and functional, Panebianco offers the obverse as a characterization of the real relationship between the party and the market. The party- as—organization, being adverse to uncertainty and change, finds it necessary to give preference to organizational imperatives aimed at protecting its internal cohesion, often to the detriment of electoral pursuits. Adaptive behavior is not the norm, but is a disruptive process associated with electoral trauma, such as the intrusion of competitors into the pa? TI basica. place party-i OVEISCE und rsi envirc: arguing return, unders: in pa: democra electc: relativ Should a party 25 the party’s traditional "hunting grounds." The points of division between these perspectives basically center on two issues: the goals of parties, and the place of the party within the wider political regime. The party-as-organization theorists hold that the minimalists overstate the "minimalism’ of the electoral goal and understate the potential of the party to transform its environment in the course of interacting with it. Those arguing from a ndnimalist perspective might well argue, in return, that Panebianco overstates organizational autonomy by understating the constitutive role of democratic institutions in party organization. Electoral activity, and hence democracy, is part of what a party is. The balance between electoral and organizational goals is indeed determined by the relative salience of these goals for members of a party, but should.a party entirely forego electoral goals it ceases to be a party. Despite these differences, the gulf is actually not as wide as it appears. As the foregoing comment suggests, the differences may ultimately hinge on the relative salience of goals within the party itself; party organization and behavior emerges from the balancing of these goals (defined more specifically further on). An illustration taken from Argentine politics demonstrates the importance of reconciling these perspectives. During a period lasting, approximately, from 1983 to 1987 the Peronist party was locked in a struggle whose main antagonists 26 could be characterized, broadly, as the office-holders (the "renovator" branch) and the unionist branches of the party.7 Through most of its history the Peronist party had relied on the support of the working class to secure it a predominant position in Argentine elections. During the military regime, which left power in 1983, the country had undergone a period of deindustrialization, however, which.weakened the electoral strength of labor. The dominant position of labor in the Peronist party had therefore become a liability (which was exacerbated. by the appearance of complicity' between. the unionists and the military during the military's withdrawal from power), limiting the party’s ability to adopt a more centrist, middle-class-oriented electoral strategy. Two goals were then at odds with each other. One was to preserve the established patterns of internal governance and programmatic cohesion within the party, the other was to change the governance of the party so that an electorally efficient strategy could be pursued. When the "renovators" ultimately succeeded in reducing the role of the unions in the party they not only succeeded in conforming the party to its electoral goal (and in preserving its place in the party system), they prevented the party from being colonized by an "interest group" which could have held the party locked in an ‘unresponsive electoral position. The jpreservation. of '7 The outline of this struggle bears a similarity to the forces which ruptured the Labour Party of the United Kingdom during the mid-19808. benefi remune: 27 traditional organizational goals and perquisites would have come at the expense of electoral rationality. As this example suggests, the question.of "balance" among basic party goals is not only relevant to party behavior (e.g. the type of program it presents) but to party organization: goals, organization and behavior are closely interlocked. Within both the minimalist and the organic perspectives (here referring most specifically to Panebianco) there is a suggestion that the basic party goals - what Schlesinger (1984) refers to as the "office-seeking" and "benefit—seeking" goals - are made manifest in the types of "goods" which the party-produces. Within all parties there is a balance between selective benefits which are privately held (such as office or other remunerations) and collective benefits which are held publicly (programs and policies). Schlesinger (1984) observes that the relative importance attached to the distribution of these goods within the party has organizational consequences which in turn are expressed in basic behavioral differences. He notes (p. 395) that: "The office-seeking force is generally perceived as the flexible, compromising aspect; collective goods, or policy goals, are usually seen as the less flexible, more ideological aspect." It is the office-seeker whose goals must be met in the electoral arena, while the benefit-seeker may regard compromise toward electoral goals as a betrayal of programmatic or ideological commitments. For the office-seeker, we would naturally expect a terms 0-. I: Q — 28 different pattern of accomodation with the electoral market than the benefit-seeker. Career success can be measured in terms of votes, and career stability can be measured in terms of his/her plurality. Maximizing the plurality requires programmatic flexibilityu Office-seekers .are therefore expected to struggle against interference from the party’s ideologues in their efforts to appeal to voters. Benefit-seekers, on the other hand, will tend to minimize the plurality by reining in candidates and preserving the purity of the party's programmatic commitments, which is itself a medium of exchange within the party. Consequently, office-seekers can more appropriately be referred to as the party's "brokers" - those who seek to bring the maximum diversity of opinion under the party umbrella (without thus sacrificing it electoral appeal) - while benefit-seekers may represent a brake on the party's potential to broaden its coalition of supporters. For an organization imbalanced in favor of benefit- seekers the strategy most conducive to organizational success, as they perceive it, would be control of the electorate; the building of stable bases of support founded on shared interests and identities. The numerical strength of such an organization reflects, at an abstract level, the mobilizational potential of its program/ideology. We might say that there is an upper limit set on the mobilization of supporters and the attraction of new voters by the organizational priority of limiting the internal discordance centering C the party. electoral 7 essence th: of the par benefit, fr What the: is a parties: t1". 3rd there Epstein (; candidates 3 mt seem cr; is an orga: From t Organized 29 centering on the program, or more generally, the "identity" of the party. Internal controls and control of sectors of the electoral market are therefore interdependent priorities. In essence this condition stems from the fact that many members of the party will receive little benefit, or even negative benefit, from mere electoral conquest. What can be derived from the above comments is that there is a crucial distinction among organizational goals in parties: there are parties which.are organized.around programs and there are parties which merely put forth programs. As Epstein (1967, p.262) has cautioned, "All parties and candidates present policies and the differences in emphasis do not seem.crucial in.and.of themselves." The crucial difference is an organizational one. From this perspective, it is an assumption that parties organized around the dispersal of collective goods are predisposed. txa subordinate "market" considerations to organizational cohesion around collective goals. This comes closer to the image of the party in Panebianco's work. The party becomes an instrument for "directing" ambitions and "controlling" votes rather than.merely "supporting" ambitions and "collecting" votes. It is not really possible to make determinations about which image of the party is generally accurate. The context - the structure of the electoral market - must determine which "image" survives the electoral test. This is really a central tenet of minimalist theory: a party cannot be assessed without 30 reference to the structure of the electoral market. As Schlesinger (1985) observed, an apparently weak organization (here referring specifically'to the largely supportive role of the party bureaus in the United States) may be quite strong if the market defines organizational success according to the ability of individual candidates to deliver offices to the party. The validity or wisdom of one or the other "image" of the party is really determined.by the institutional context of the "electoral market." Organizational Tendencies of Parties The tendencies discussed in the previous section can be summarized, for purposes of constructing a typology, as two organizational attributes: professionalization and centralization. These are discussed in more detail in the next chapter. Professionalization occurs as a party vests organizational power in the hands of those who seek to occupy elective office. Thus, the concept refers not only to the "balance of tendencies" referred to earlier, but to the organizational power backing the aims of each tendency. An entirely professionalized party corresponds to the organizational primacy of office-seekers. A centralized party seeks to concentrate the power of decision and the coordination of the party’s branches. Thus, while professionalization refers to qualities of the party leadership, centralization defines qualities of the .‘ .. o- ' 0313?“; 2a .. l corresponc 1 (or.-y rcug Nationalin AS till represents and the or: Organizati ‘5‘ 93313 w: b‘.‘ Li U‘ Sublime LHEJSr degv Party, we 8‘. a. e‘torar 31 organizational resources employed.by the leadership. A.highly centralized party uses a central bureau to direct every level of the organization. This usually implies a commonality of organizational practices at each level. The two concepts correspond roughly to the distinction between aims and means (only roughly, since aims are established only by assumption) . Nationalization in Theoretical Perspective As the previous discussion emphasized, party organization represents a balance of goals, or tendencies, within a party and the organizational resources underlying those goals. Now, it is not only the case that goals create organization, but organization also constrains the choice, or elevation, of goals within the party. That is, a party, because of its organizational choices, develops resistances to the elevation or sublimation of different goals: premised, naturally, on their degree of convergence with the dominant tendencies of the party. These resistances ‘ultimately' affect the ability’ and motivation.of a party to respond.(by adaptation or control) to sources of uncertainty. The principal sources of uncertainty are those relating to the vote. Since the party possesses imperfect knowledge about the premises of voters' decisions the party exists in a constant state of uncertainty. Without, for now, considering factors exogenous to the party, we may say that in the party’s relations with the electorate the basic issue is the relative importance of, and .' .- uncertain - Vcte. CI"? center on c O t (I) (D 2’ DJ 7 1 32 uncertainty surrounding, the "swing" vote or the "committed" vote. Organizational priorities regarding the electorate center on degrees of emphasis: capturing the swing, retaining (or constructing) the party faithful, or both. There must always be some tension between these priorities since capturing the swing risks offending the committed voter, who may resent expansions of the electoral coalition: programmatic concessions always have the potential of offending the existing coalition. Retaining the committed voters may risk stagnation, marginalization, or simply the loss of seats that might otherwise be gained, particularly when the social bases of the existing coalition corrode (for parties of the Left, e.g., the erosion of the manufacturing sector). As this discussion clearly intimates, the adaptive/expansive response to uncertainty is more likely to be elevated within a professionalized party. Centralized parties (those which are not also professionalized) should tend to emphasize capturing and holding committed voters.8 The ° This is actually something of a commonplace observation in general organization theory (Perrow, 1986, for example). The basic relationship between organization and uncertainty is well drawn by Simon (1981, p. 51), who states: "If what is uncertain is a multitude of facts about conditions in individual markets, then decentralized pricing will appear attractive; if the uncertainty is global, infusing major events that will affect many parts of the organization in the same direction, then it may' be advantageous to centralize the making of assumptions about the future and to instruct the decentralized units to use these assumptions in their decisions." Naturally' it would. be well to exercise caution in extrapolating .from a field with different concerns. The 25:10:18 vote, we national Great :ng CC ”Mints we are he Public a: :“°1”9I t: cOnStitue; 33 combination.of party attributes, in.other words, speaks to the elevation of goals in relation to basic sources of uncertainty. Without belaboring the point, all of this begs the question: "what does a nationalizing party look like?" If we were concerned merely with the occasional bout of national euphoria, or some other ephemeral influences on the vote, we might be content to describe the nationalizing party as one which generates national swings. But since we are concerned with a process rather than a discrete occurrence we must expect more than that. First, a nationalizing party must not only generate a national movement of votes, but it must also be capable of creating a stable tendency in the electorate. The difference referred to here is that between a party that "rallies" support and one which "captures" support by providing a consistent focus on national politics and political figures that transcends the events of a discrete election. Stability may be evident in the configuration (or change in it over time) of the legislative vote. But since the legislative elections are not based on national constituencies, additional considerations are of theoretical and substantive interest. Second, then, we must give some thought to how national comments above refer to an exchange of private goods whereas we are here concerned with organizations which dispense both public and private goods. Nevertheless there is a clear analogy to draw from "pricing" to the candidate’s appeal to a constituency (see Ware, 1979, for example), and between the uncertainty about "assumptions" referred to above and uncertainty concerning voters’ decision premises. forces purely only tIT begin. ‘oninant legisla: reasons of, fir: ‘iev‘h‘, h‘ucé‘y a‘ organiza: Within tt lmportan: 34 forces intrude into the legislative sphere. Since, from a purely juridical standpoint, presidential elections are the only truly national elections this is a logical place to begin. I would not imply that where the presidency is the dominant concern that parties will tend to nationalize their legislative vote, in fact the opposite seems more likely (for reasons developed in Chapter Six). Rather, the question is one of, first, electoral linkage between the legislative and presidential nuclei of the party, and second, the routinization (or stabilization) of this relationship. A centralized party seems more likely to link what can often be highly autonomous electoral organs since it will possess an organizational resistance to any attempt at "freelancing" within the party, especially as regards the program. Equally important, however, is that the party will insist that the national force be absorbed, or be made consistent with, the totality of electoral coalitions embodied in the party. A. third, and ‘very important, consideration is the incentive system, exogenous to the party, which, in essence, determines the electoral value of a stable, nationalized, and "linked" vote. This consideration stands large in this study because of our concern with the stability of the nationalization process. Structured incentive systems, here referring specifically to institutional arrangements, create durable incentives which may frustrate or assist a nationalizing party. Here, then, I must digress briefly into a theoretical discussion of the "electoral market, " which will save! institt G: manager elector committe instrume durable A d lnSCitut; and thos these are 35 serve to explain my reasons for focusing on specific types of institutions, and my expectations with regards to to them. Given.that.a.party’s organization.and.goals center on the management of forms of uncertainty, our description of the electoral market necessarily focuses on. how it elevates different forms of uncertainty in the calculations of parties. To clarify this discussion I begin by outlining what the electoral market does not do, and what aspects of it are not directly relevant to the research questions. The electoral market does not create votes, nor does it manufacture swings or determine their location. Rather, it determines the relative importance of the swing votes or the committed votes, where "importance" roughly equates with their instrumentality in acquiring offices. These influences are durable in that they transcend elections. A distinction must be maintained between aspects of the institutional environment which structure electoral outcomes and those which influence the structure of parties. Since these are interdependent phenomena, what this amounts to is a concern over the "directness" of the effects with respect to electoral outcomes. Federalism, as one example, creates an additional layer of opportunities for holding elective office (below the national level), and thus creates a layer of party nuclei around those offices (Schlesinger, 1984), but does not by itself exert an influence on the conversion of votes into offices - i.e. it does not have a direct bearing on electoral 36 uncertainty. Federalism may well tend to decentralize parties, and this in turn effects the parties' relations with the market, but we would then be speaking directly of a partisan effect, and indirectly of an institutional effect. Ballot type (closed lists versus intra—party preference voting, for example), for most of our concerns, also exerts an indirect effect: closed lists tending towards the centralization of parties, for example. The ballot type may have both a direct and indirect effect, however, in that it may exaggerate the effects of proportionality. For the office- seeker, the possibility’ of acquiring' an. office is both mechanically determined - by the conversion of votes into offices - and by his/her relationship to the party: i.e. the relative autonomy of the office-seeker in the nominations process. A.high threshold of representation and a closed list procedure, for example, produces countervailing tendencies: the former encouraging self-reliance in the electoral contest and the latter encouraging reliance on the party as a source of votes. Here, then, the office-seeker’s perception of the location of votes is at issue. With these considerations in mind, the electoral market is defined as: the combination of institutional and social (not dealt with here) forces affecting the magnitude and dispersion (or location) of electoral successes. Given the discussion of parties above, it should be plain that the electoral market, structures uncertainty. From the above definition, then, uncertainty varies with respect to magnitude and dispe (wacn v.- Secon , t makes Sea on mles Unce: each Cf w Q dimensions di'PGraioz 37 and dispersion. Since so many institutional forces, considered as influences on elections, are channelled through the party, the set of institutions to be considered here is necessarily narrowed. Some may object to a narrow focus on electoral rules, but I would offer two defenses for this choice of emphasis. First, as mentioned above, party organization is likely to embody the indirect effects of many institutions, particularly those which describe a government’s structure (which were the focus of the Stokes and Jackman studies). Second, this narrowing of variables around direct effects makes sense as a "first cut," since it focuses our attention on rules which most-directly influence a party's success in the elections. Uncertainty will here be divided into two components, each of which corresponds to one of the two organizational dimensions of parties. Uncertainty has magnitude and dispersion. Magnitude refers to the expected gains or losses (whether in votes or seats) a party will experience as a result of an election. The gain or loss of seats is directly related to the "swing" in an electorate from one election to the next. The magnitude of this swing and its expected effect on the distribution of seats is therefore the overriding partisan concern in relation to this dimension of uncertainty. The dispersion of uncertainty is the more-strictly qualitative dimension of uncertainty. Every market is composed of sectors, the extent of whose interdependence - or tendency to responl which co: member dis the swim LOW ; seats and 38 to respond to the same forces - is variable. For elections, in which constituencies are regionally defined, we are most concerned with the tendency of' a market’s sectors to correspond to juridical divisions, or regional agglomerations of those divisions. With regards to the magnitude of uncertainty it is the proportionality of the system which concerns us most. Single- member districts, at one extreme, elevate the importance of the swing votes because the margin of victory in terms of seats bears, potentially, little relation to the margin of victory in terms of votes.9 Where district size is generally small, therefore, we would expect the pressures on parties to adapt to the market to increase, thus decreasing the transformative potential of the parties vis-a-vis the market. Low district size, whose effect on parties basically centers around the disparity created between the percentage of seats and the percentage of votes won, tends to focus the party more strongly on office-seeking. This expectation is 9 The literature on the effects of electoral laws is quite extensive. Recent works include: Grofman, Bernard and Arend. Lijphart, eds. Elecgoral Laws and their Politigal ggpgeggepgeg. New York: Agathon Press, 1986; Taagepera, Rein and Matthew Shugart Seats and Vgtes: the Effects and Determinangg of Elegtoral Systems New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989. Usually the effect of single-member districts is viewed in terms of the tendency to reduce the number of significant parties. This presumes that the parties which survive possess the organizational capacity to adapt to the market; the system rewards flexibility and hence encourages professionalization. This effect diminishes as the number of seats elected per constituency increase. As organizational survival depends less on achieving pluralities in a multitude of districts the magnitude of uncertainty decreases and the control of swing voters declines in importance. (bristle-hp. ‘UH‘. 39 rooted.in the considerable literature on the political effects of electoral laws (and proportional representation in particular) . Systems with low district size, by decreasing the proportionality of elections, empower the office-seeking tendency by exaggerating the overall requirements for achieving a position of significance in the political system. Duverger (1963) discussed this in terms of the mechanical and psychological effects of electoral laws. The mechanical effect is simply the relationship established by electoral laws between votes and actual representation. A nationally significant party must be capable of generating pluralities across a wide variety of constituencies. By extension, this means that office-seekers must be given the flexibility to construct an individualized program.which at once retains a core of supporters while also capturing the swing voters, whose importance to party "survival" is necessarily elevated. The psychological effect of low district magnitude, which has been subjected to considerable criticism (Riker, 1986; Sartori, 1986), is embodied in the phenomenon of the "wasted vote," where it is hypothesized that voters will tend to vote strategically, supporting only the major contenders, so as to avoid throwing their votes away on lost causes. Either way the effect.ofjproportionality'is conceptualized, the effect of low district magnitude should be to elevate the magnitude of uncertainty. The institutional dimensions of dispersion considered c~ why ‘A h\ a». 40 here also center on electoral rules. To address the concept of dispersion we must identify rules which set constraints on the extent to which.branches of the party must respond to the same forces/uncertainties. One relevant set of rules would be those which establish what I refer to as the "ballot dependence" of members of a party on the party at large. This corresponds to the distinction between closed-list proportional systems and systems with intra-party preference voting (single-member districts with primaries would fall into the latter category) . Where members of the party are made "independent" on the ballot, constraints on responding to the dispersion of uncertainty are lifted. Where members are dependent on the party through the ballot, the party is encouraged to respond to uncertainty from the perspective of the party as a whole. The concurrence of presidential and legislative elections can have a similar effect. Concurrent elections encourage office-seekers at the sub-national level to identify with the national contest (Erikson, 1988; Campbell, 1985). The presidential election can exert a centripetal influence on party competition at all levels, thus constraining the dispersion of uncertainty; Nonconcurrent elections provide no such constraint.10 1° Shugart and Carey (1992) have shown that concurrent elections can produce a centripetal effect on party systems similar to that of low district size (i.e. a tendency towards two-party competition). The rationale for this effect is different from that associated with district size, however. District size exerts a constituency-specific effect - that is, parties are "eliminated" on the basis of their ability to generate pluralities within discrete districts. The party's 41 To summarize, the earlier discussion of professionalization and centralization implied certain dispositions toward the electoral market. Professionalization tends toward a flexible, adaptive disposition in which ambitions for office are given a relatively high organizational priority. Since cmfice—seeking involves attention to the swing voter, the professionalized party directs much of its attention not to the core of its supporters but to the marginal votes which.decide the outcomes of elections (i.e. it controls uncertainty by increasing its plurality). Professionalization should thus interact most strongly with the magnitude of uncertainty. Electoral rules affecting the required size of victories at the polls provide an additional element of interaction with the market. Centralization, with its attendant emphasis on control, stability, and the management of group identity, focuses the organization more on its interaction with the dispersion of uncertainty. Electoral rules affecting the homogeneity of constituencies (concurrence) or the ability' of the organization to relegate control of sources of uncertainty to discrete members or branches of the party (ballot dependence) are of the greatest concern.here. A.summary of electoral rules is provided in Tables 1 through 3. problem, then, is to assess and respond to the forces determining the vote in each district. Concurrence, on the other hand, is expected to harmonize the electoral forces themselves. The party’s environment - the dispersion of uncertainty - is directly effected by this electoral arrangement. Ada 42 Table 1 Electoral Rules -- Legislative Formula Ballot Expo Intra-party Preference Argentina d’Hondt closed ' no Venezuela d'Hondt closed no Uruguay d’Hondt closed yes1 Ticket Splitting; Coalitions Electoral chle Argentina yes yes C/NC Venezuela yes2 yes C Uruguay no yes C Intraparty preferences are exercised by voting for sublemas within the party, or by voting for listas within each sublema. The voter casts two ballots: one for the presidential ticket and one for the remaining offices. There is no ticket splitting among the sub-national offices. Table 2 District Magnitudes and Seat Bonus/Penalty for First Second and Third Place Parties Avera e DM Bonus Penalt : lst 2nd 3rd Argentina 5.3 (3.6)1 +7.4% +4.1 -1.6 Venezuela 7.6 (5.6) +3.8 +5.9 -0.5 Uruguay 5.2 (2.9) +0.52 0.0 0.0 1 Figures in parentheses are average district magnitudes computed without the two largest districts. Figures are for the last election included in the study. Uruguay employs a two-stage application of PR-list. Seats not awarded in the first stage are awarded by the Corte Electoral according to a national quotient: thus these are referred to as "national“ seats. The extreme proportionality evident above is the result of this procedure. 43 Table 3 Electoral Rules -- Presidential Elections Direct Election Re-election Argentina yes1 no Venezuela yes no2 Uruguay yes no 1' Voters elect a Board of Electors, but since there is no winner-take-all rule this is equivalent to direct election. Prior to the 1993 reforms. (J nu (D In '(3 ll) 44 Plan of Chapters Three through Eight Now that the theory has been outlined it is necessary to consider how it will be applied towards answering the two central research questions: under what conditions do parties become agents of nationalization in legislative elections?, and, what role do the presidential elections play in this process? To begin to answer the first question we must first establish the existence of variability within countries in parties' nationalization profiles. Second, it must be shown that these differences in profiles cut across national boundaries. These concerns are addressed in Chapters Three through Five. Because party type represents such a crucial variable in this study, Chapter Three deals extensively with the criteria for classification and the case materials upon which the classifications are based. Hypotheses and methods are presented in Chapter Four. Legislative nationalization profiles are then presented in Chapter Five. These data are presented. prior to the analyses of presidential election effects for a number of reasons. One is clarity of exposition. The second research question involves a more complex series of data analyses and a more-focused discussion of theoretical considerations and research design issues. Another reason is that since proportionality and ballot-type effects refer specifically to the conversion of legislative votes into seats, it makes sense to establish ..n< «vac UQVV - AQV‘I 45 their effects prior to consideration of effects stemming from the jpresidential elections. ‘With. this done, we can. then proceed with some measure of confidence in interpreting the independent effects of the presidential elections (as it turns out the electoral rules do not appear to exert a great impact on the magnitudes of the nationalization scores). Chapters Six through Eight develop the ideas, hypotheses, and methods of analysis necessary to address presidential- legislative electoral linkages. Party organization and the electoral cycle there emerge as the decisive influences. "K . 1“ ‘0‘. () fl (‘1' Chapter Three A Typology of Parties Introduction What kinds of parties are likely to promote the nationalization of elections? The literature on democratization and national integration offers some clues about the attributes we might expect from a "nationalizing" party. These literatures are replete with references to how parties go about solving a variety of problems: representation, interest aggregation, channelment, mediation, brokerage, and so forthfi11 Taken in sum, what they provide is an image of what might be called a "professionalizedfl partyw one 'which. is :not rigidly programmatic and which possesses a good measure of autonomy vis-a-vis potentially colonizing secondary associations, such as labor unions and business associations.12 While this image of the party is frequently called forth it is seldom examined in much detail. The minimalist theory of party organization naturally 11 Recent works include: Rueschemeyer, Stephens and Stephens (1992); Przeworski (1991); Huntington (1991); Burton, Gunther and Higley (1992). Earlier works culling similar observations include: Almond and Verba (1963); LaPalombara and Weiner (1966); Daalder (1966). 12' I chose this term not to suggest that other parties lack "professionalism" but instead to suggest that these are parties within which the professional politician - one for whom elected office is more than a secondary job, a position considered necessary for the furtherance of other ends - is an influential actor within the party bureaucracy. 46 () o) (I) n: C); ( T) .‘l ‘3‘ . .F‘ V0.4 .‘ .- .«‘.. 47 calls towmind.the image of the professionalized.party’as well. Sartori (1976, p. 63), for example, offers the following definition of political party: "A.party is any political group identified.by an official label that presents at elections, and is capable of placing through elections (free or nonfree), candidates for public office." The suggestion here, as also in Duverger's, Schlesinger's, and others' work, is that parties organize around their electoral goal. With considerations of principle (a preoccupation of early thinkers like Burke) and internal structure left out, it would be easy to extrapolate from this that the natural state of the party is that of a multi- interest representational body. This, of course, is a statement made "ceteris paribus" and ignores the concern in minimalist theory' over' the constitutive effects of institutional arrangements. Michels (1962), and others, might argue that organizational priorities also exert an impact on the extent to which a party approaches the multi-interest "ideal," but would not disagree that this is the pattern most conducive to building national unity. Parties, however, can be multi-interest bodies in a number of ways. Parties in the'United.States, Uruguay, and the United Kingdom all represent diverse coalitions of social forces, but no one would argue that they are organizationally interchangeable. Nor would anyone argue that they have the same effects on the character of elections or the conduct of .5. V- (J ‘\ ~.Y ‘\ 48 government. In each case organizational strategy is colored.by the manner'in.which.mandates are conferred.in.elections and.by the government structures in which'mandates are brought into action. Uruguayan parties are substantially reliant on factions in the electoral process, largely due to the use of a form of intra-party preference voting in both legislative and presidential elections (Gonzalez, 1991). The United Kingdom's parties behave differently than those in the United States, in both elections and government, owing to the parliamentary system: the similarity in their election rules notwithstanding. Both electoral rules and basic governing institutions exert a strong impact on party behavior and organization. Our immediate concern is not with the forces shaping parties but merely with describing them. Within the three cases mentioned above there is, among the major parties, a consensus that winning elections is a central party goal: office-seekers occupy central places in the party hierarchies. But the parties of the United States and Uruguay are clearly qualitatively different than those in the U.K. Parties in the U.K. are much more hierarchically organized and party members, owing to the imperative of governing as a party, are much more committed to supporting the programmatic directives of the national executive committees. Using the term mentioned earlier, we could say that all three countries possess "professionalized" parties, but the -v Prc 6‘ Va. A we urea me.» A. e 49 parties of the U.K. tend to be more centralized - a direct reflection of the greater emphasis on supplying collective goods both within and without the party. We could also say that U.S. parties are qualitatively different from Uruguayan parties since their decentralization centers more on individual candidates and their supporters rather than organized factions. Either way, however, there are branches within the party which exercise considerable autonomy. Professionalization and Centralization Professionalization is a concept directed at the question of "who" is recruited and advanced within party organizations. In.a professionalized.party office-holders and office-seekers exert great influence within the party. It is therefore a quality associated with membership in a party and the terms of that membership. Since it will be difficult in practice to distinguish between office-seekers and benefit-seekers, we can probably settle for indirect measures, such as the origins of party leaders. Where party leaders are consistently recruited from specific sectors of society; or' specific secondary associations, we would infer that the party has less flexibility in constructing itself around the office-seeking goal. Behavioral indicators can also be used, such as the degree of conflict between. office-seekers and the party bureaucracy and the outcomes of those conflicts. Below, I discuss some of the measures which could be up“ ‘ defile ‘ pay-bra yyiabb can.“ Y bu-ihlu . Vaa$‘ 1,... . 1‘1. 3"? ‘ :»‘.bd In“ I NVA‘, \ U. L egr a“ H 50 applied to judge a party’s level of professionalization and centralization. The "ideal" measure is then followed by some summary judgements about the character of the parties included in this study. It will be noted that these are seldom.based.on "ideal" measures but rather on data which is suggestive of similar priorities. This method of presentation is used to highlight both the strengthes and weaknesses of these judgements. Fuller descriptions of the parties are offered at the end of this chapter. The {parties which. will be characterized. below are: Democratic Action (AD), the Christian Democrats (COPEI), and the Republican Democratic Union (URD) of Venezuela;13 the Peronists and Radical Civic Union (UCR or, "Radical") of Argentina;“ the Colorados, Nacionals, and the Frente Amplio ("Broad Front ") of Uruguay. These parties were chosen because, for at least a period of two to three elections, each constituted part of a two or two-and-a-half party system. In the ideal case we would be able to look at the origins of party members at a variety of levels: grassroots, party leadership, and candidates. In practice the grassroots level is relatively bereft of data and only the upper levels of party bureaus are generally given much attention in both secondary and primary source materials. In any event some 13 The acronyms correspond to their Spanish names: Accién Democratica, Comité de Organizacion Politica Electoral Independiente (more commonly referred to as the Partido Socialcristiano), and Union Republicana Democratica. “ Union Civica Radical as at e Au .3 .r“ .n K at l “ Y a \ ¢ i b V a d a . Q .a. HLL Va 9.... Lu .C ~PA a mi. a» a.» Ta n .. Sl presentation of the ideal is necessary before an assessment can be made of what is actually to be done. The criteria for classifying cases has been borrowed directly from Duverger (1963) . At the grassroots level the principal criterion will be the extent to which the party relies on voluntary association as a means of subscribing members. Duverger referred to this as the "direct" or "indirect" membership base of the party. Where direct membership is prevalent the party comes closer to the image of a voluntary association. Memberhip is an individual act of volition. This does not presume any particular motive, but simply accentuates the personal relationship between the member and his/her party. Membership in Colombian parties, for example, is often motivated by the desire to acquire government employment. Here, though, the defining element of the member to the party is not the patronage itself but the direct, personal relationship between the party and the member. Indirect membership, on the other hand, means that membership is a consequence of membership in some other associational group. While such membership may well serve a member’s individual needs, the defining feature of his/her relationship with the party is one in which group priorities have the initiative. For the party, this kind of membership base may imply that the potential leadership pool will be constrained by the group bases of the party and that control over the party program may be, in effect, in the hands of an external group. 52 The membership bases of the Venezuelan parties can best be described as "direct." Relationships with secondary groups are institutionalized in the form of youth groups, workers’ affiliates, teachers' and professional associations, and so on, but co-membership is not mandatory in any sense. Rather, parties compete within these sectors (Myers, 1973; Herman, 1988). In Uruguay, the nature of the party organizations negates any possibility of "lema" (a term referring to labels recognized as "permanent parties") membership being captured by, or the lemas themselvesicapturing, secondary'associations. The strongest unit of organization in the party is, in fact, the sublema, roughly equivalent to the old ward machines of the United States. Party loyalties, in addition, tend to be a highly personal matter, centering on identifications passed on through the family (Gonzalez, 1991). The Frente Amplio deviates from this pattern. Much.of the work of its Comites de Base centers on mobilizing workers' support.- which is to say, it has a more ideological, sectoral orientation towards membership, recruitment, and activism. Indirect membership within the Peronist party of Argentina centered principally on its union affiliates, and particularly the 62 Organizations, which. was explicitly politicized. While union.mobilization was, from the beginning a cornerstone of Peronist electoral strategy, this contrasts with a leadership base of diverse origins and which was largely similar in terms of class and occupation to that of To 53 the Radicals (Ranis, 1971, eg.). The Radicals, typical of many predominantly middle-class parties, did not have strong union affiliations and, by and large, relied on direct membership. The party leadership pool is naturally also an important indicator. Two issues will be given particular attention: the sources of leadership with regards to external groups and the sources of leadership internal to the party. One indicator of professionalization is the diversity of external sources of leadership. Where the pool of leaders is drawn predominantly from a single sector, or from.a small selection of groups, the party would be considered less professionalized. This indicator naturally' produces a bias in favor of larger parties, which is why it is advisable to look at internal recruitment of leaders as well. One such indicator is the extent to which party leadership is drawn from the ranks of office-holders and potential office-holders, as opposed to party bureaucrats and ideologues. Another indicator is the extent to which the party exhibits flexibility in the top leadership posts. Where, for example, the leadership remains unchanged, even in spite of electoral rebuffs, we would presume that factors other than electoral considerations determine placement within the party (this provides, incidentally, a direct analogue with the "organic" school of thought, whose central finding is that party bureaucracies ultimately become rigid and unresponsive) . The criteria for assessing the candidate pool are essentially the same as those for the leadership pool: i.e. . - - ‘k g I v he s n h h . a: \ .3 by A.» 2» Vs .3 at u \ .~ 4 I . a. a». For Au .9. «C utter. H a» H. 54 the patterns of internal and external recruitment. Parties that consistently seek outsiders to fill legislative slates or presidential nominations would be considered to lean towards professionalization.15 Where such information is lacking, high turnover rates and low age at entry into the legislature have also been suggested.as indicators that offices are sought as ends in themselves rather than as means to forward policy goals (Schlesinger, 1965). Venezuela's major parties, while internally competitive, have been subject to generational rigidity. This has provoked calls for greater internal democracy and a strengthening of the party congresses as decision-making organs. The 1967-68 conflict within AD (Democratic Action) is particularly revealing, insofar as control of the national executive permitted the less-popular candidate, Gonzalo Barrios, to gain the presidential nomination over Luis Prieto Figueroa, the winner of the party primary. The predominance of Jovito 'Villalba. within the URD (Republican Democratic Union) has also been problematic in this regard: a stagnation of leadership owing to Villalba's personalist style and control of the party's inner circle. 15 This criterion would be difficult to apply to minor parties since reliance on outsiders for presidential nominations, as mentioned earlier, is dictated by their position. Nor does such reliance compromise the benefit— seeking tendency of the party in this case. As an.example, the presidential elections in France, Schlesinger (1991) notes, have served to sustain highly programmatic parties that "specialize" in positioning themselves to deliver voters outside of the Center to the parties/candidates capable of winning the presidency. F3." LmV' AV!“ vh‘ ‘I G O.» b 322. Q. an Syn“. .... V V “.V «.a ma 5 1i I 55 Closed electoral lists, to some extent, account for these leadership dilemmas. Uruguayan sublemas tend to have a highly personalized leadership base, but in this case the DSV system of inter- factional competition helps to make the lemas internally democratic at that level. Nominations frequently have brought relative newcomers into political office (Guidobono, 1986) . In addition, potential candidates dissatisfied with their prospects under one sublema boss.have frequently exercised the option of lending their services to another. During the years of Perén’s dominance placement within the Peronist party often depended on Perén's or the unions’ approval (Rock, 1986). This could be considered the norm for some sectors of the party until the legislative group and the provincial factions asserted themselves after 1983. Peronism follows the typical pattern of "verticalism" insofar as tight personalist control at the center often implies looser arrangements at the periphery. For this reason, and because of the ideological and factional inchoateness of the party, Peronism is often characterized as a "movement" rather than a party (Snow, 1971, eg.). Factional conflict within the Radical party appears to have been more open and competitive than in the Peronist party. While this has often been disruptive, many of the conclusions drawn about factionalism in the Radical party have been based upon the experience of the party during the years (approx. 1955-1970) when Peronism.was excluded from electoral 56 competition: a circumstance which virtually dictated a split within.the Radical.party'given.the effective two-party format. In the post-1983 era democratic inter-factional conflict has produced decisive resolutions of party leadership questions. In sum, then, the professionalized party is candidate- centered insofar as its membership and leadership profile, as well as the organizational power given to office-seekers, places the fewest constraints on the office-seeker in his/her quest to gain office. Internal democracy is probably the most accessible indicator with regards to these criteria. It is also "differentiated" (Apter, 1956) insofar as the claims of external groups on the party are either balanced by competing claims or controlled.in some other way. These general criteria should be kept in mind when looking at more-specific indicators. The latter should not override one’s judgement if the general should clash with the specific in the balance of evidence. Centralization refers to the extent to which key party activities are controlled by central party bureaus or leadership groups. Two general indicators will be discussed: structural coherence and intensiveness of organization. Structural coherence means that there is stability and predictability in the processes of advancement within the party. Centralization is highest where the organized leadership, usually a national executive committee, closely monitors, and has substantial influence over, the recruitment of candidates and party leaders. Where advancement depends 57 upon jperformance in. direct internal elections,16 or ‘upon one's place in a faction, we would consider the party to be somewhat less centralized. Where advancement is based upon informal, irregular procedures, such as the will of particular party notables, we would consider the party to be decentralized. By these criteria, AD and COPEI (Christian Democratic Party) would be considered centralized, owing to the predominance of the national executives in recruitment and nominations. The same could be said, though to a lesser degree, of the Radicals. Within the URD the personal influence of its long-time leader, Jévito Villalba, disrupted structural coherence.l7 Peron's influence within the Peronist party would lead to a similar judgement. More recently, "verticalism" has been less a factor than unionism, although the attempts to bring back Isabel Perén in 1984 seemed regressive. Later, verticalism broke down. entirely‘ as the unions lacked the electoral resources to secure control of the party. The "traditional" parties of Uruguay (the Colorados and Nacionals) are clearly decentralized owing to the role of the 1" This is to be distinguished from procedures for electing party leaders, who then control the nominations process, as has been the case in the Radical party and in the major venezuelan parties. " For details see the more detailed commentary on the URD provided in the case histories of the parties. 58 sublemas.18 The Frente Amplio is a more difficult case because, although it is nominally an alliance of separate organizations, it has strived to conduct itself as a distinct party.19 Its organizational methods seem to be a mixture of a confederal alliance with democratic centralism: founded on "base" committees and coordinated by a central policy bureau. "Intensively" organized parties possess central, national policy-making bureaus which are formally and informally superior to external groups (Duverger, 1963) . In addition, the party replicates its national structure at each level of organization (Panebianco, 1988). Janda and King (1985) code this according to the existence of institutionalized party organs below the national caucus, then the regional caucus, etc. By this coding Uruguay’s traditional parties would be considered decentralized since, below the national level, factional (sublema) organs supplant lema organs. The Frente Amplio's national executive, on the other hand, directs partisan activity down to the grass-roots level. Venezuela's major parties have national executives which exert vertical control, and the structure of the national organs is replicated at each sub-national level (Martz, 1966; 1" Uruguayans use the term "traditional party" to designate the parties which formed during the Nineteenth century, and later fought in the civil wars. The unique standing of the traditional parties in the civic-consciousness probably also accounts for the recognition of these parties as "permanent" parties in party law. 19 More detail on this question is provided in my comments in Chapter Two, pages 69-70. -A I ‘ ‘ nu. vb 59 Myers, 1980; Arroyo, 1986). The campaign (and pre-campaign) activities of Democratic Action and COPEI, as the studies in Penniman (1980) vividly demonstrate, show a degree of technical and organizational coordination.which distinguishes them from other parties in the region. Maintaining a consistent set of organizational principles makes this coordination and control possible (see below). This survey of indicators, while useful for illustrative purposes, leaves open many areas of ambiguity, not the least because the directly relevant data is seldom available. Some attention must also be given to the issue of combining these indicators to create a summary judgement of a party’s "type." I conclude this section, therefore, with a brief discussion of the problems inherent in generating these judgements. The criteria presented above are meant to provide a guide or "map" for assessing party organization. Archival research does not provide us with ideal indicators. Rather, we must look for suggestive pieces of information in the available materials and infer what we can from that. For this reason the discussion of the parties in Chapter Two does not adhere dogmatically to the indicators discussed above. Another problem in categorization is the reliance of the organizational categories on the idea of a "balance" among tendencies within a party: this issue centers chiefly on the concept of "professionalization." Unfortunately it is not possible to arrive at a hard-and-fast rule for this judgement. It should be kept in mind that indications of party va: are “A a... l f‘, & kn‘ .V‘ 60 centralization do not imply an absence of professionalization, and vice-versa. Nor should it be considered that the concepts must point in one direction or another uniformly. A party may be centralized in one respect and decentralized in another. While this would be a severe problem in a large—n study, we can here rely on secondary evidence and judgement to resolve such classificatory dilemmas. Since a party's organizational structure can serve a variety of ends, it is necessary to consider carefully the relationship between professionalization and centralization. One purpose of organization.is control: control over votes and control over the identity and aims of the party (which is to say, control over the membership). For the benefit-seeker, the organizational imperative is to define and resolve the party’s "identity" and to stabilize and routinize party activity around that identity. Nevertheless, an "intensively" organized and coherent structure may also serve to further the discrete ambitions of a party’s office-seekers. Centralization cannot be regarded as the antithesis of professionalization. Their coexistence is, in fact, the source of strength for the "mass-membership" party (Duverger, 1963), which supports a large membership base by distributing collective goods, but retains electoral viability by elevating the status of office-seekers within the party. This is particularly relevant when parties organize intensively to compete at the ideological "center." We can now outline four types of parties based on their :— ?. FL 61 combination of professionalization and centralization. These categories will be employed throughout this work. Typology of Parties Professional-Centralized The leadership of the professional-centralized party is drawn from the ranks of those who hold office, or are judged to have good prospects to do so. Nevertheless, party leaders also participate in party organs whose role is not only to support candidates, but to direct their actions. In. parliamentary' systems the relatively’ tightly disciplined "backbencher" is one manifestation of the dual role of the party. It is the national leadership which directs the party, and prepares it to fulfill its role in government. The task of the backbencher is to demonstrate his/her value to the party first by helping it to fulfill its role in government, and second by winning elections (a secondary task because for the backbencher it is the party as much as his own effort which decides the election). Through this arrangement the party elite gain a high degree of flexibility while controlling a stable support group in the legislature (and at a lower level, the grassroots). Because this party concentrates the real power held within the party, much of its success as an organization depends on its ability to distribute collective, rather than selective, benefits to its members. Thus, "electability" is generally somewhat less an important characteristic of the vi unww. -\ .- conf 9 f e £1 1" u s. .i I a .Q m ‘7 5 2 xi m d 0 a E. .1 Ab a v1 JPN. CV d R D: T th 62 backbencher than is the case for, as an example, the junior congressperson in the United States. Those who render services within the party are often targeted for advancement. Occasionally, this will be true even for the most visible representatives of the national party.20 In sum, this is a party in which the selective benefits of office accrue disproportionately to the party elite, while collective benefits sustain the party at lower levels. This division is then reflected in patterns of recruitment and advancement, as well as in a hierarchically organized party apparatus which emphasizes a top-down pattern in devising strategy and defining the party's identity. Democratic Action and COPEI both fit rather neatly into this category so I will not belabor the point. The only other party'which fits is the Radical Civic Union.of Argentina. This judgement is based upon the "office" orientation which is fostered by factional competition and the middle class base of the party, and by the notable manner in which factional conflict has translated into effective national leadership of the party. The party falls short of the ideal insofar as, up till the period of the Renovation and Change faction’s dominance of the party, it would be difficult to say that the Radicals had the organizational capacity to translate national 2° It was commonly averred that this consideration was prominent in the choice of John Major to succeed Margaret Thatcher as leader of the Conservative Party. The choice of Gonzalo Barrios as the presidential nominee of Accion Democratica in 1968 is a more directly relevant example. nfl" vUnd Arr- V-“ .. “A.” tab. 63 control of the party into provincial and local control.21 Professignal-Decentralized The professional—decentralized party exhibits a central organizational apparatus of limited activity. The "party of notables," in which the organization steps forward prior to elections and exists mostly to support the efforts of a specific candidate(s), exemplifies this type. This type is the organizational progenitor of the rather disjointed verticalism exhibited within the URD. Mass mobilization and personal leadership have had a productive, but very uneasy relationship within the Peronist movement. This is one reason why Peronism vacillates between this and the nonprofessional-decentralized type. This type of party, where there has been an attempt to reconcile with a mass base, tends to produce crises of leadership as the representatives of the movement’s political wings naturally seek to control the top ranks of the party. A less extreme example is the system of parties found in the United States, wherein parties have emerged as permanent structures but limit themselves to recruitment and campaign support services. Discipline is not well-enforced and program is largely a broad guideline within which candidates exercise a great deal of autonomy in tailoring appeals to specific constituencies. An absence of central control over nominations 21 See Snow (1971) and Snow and Manzetti (1993), for examples, on this problem. '?f M U) ( D II '(3 fl)! '53: \ 64 would be a corollary of this condition. In essence, this type of party embodies a bargain in which candidates deliver offices to the party. In return the party supports them and agrees not to interfere with their efforts. In Uruguay, factions and factional leaders deliver offices to the party. For any type of centralized party the situation will normally be reversed. This type of party survives principally by distributing selective benefits. The efforts of benefit-seekers within the party cannot be dismissed, but it is the drive for office, fueled by office-seeking ambition, which ensures the party's survival as an electorally significant organization. The emphasis on selective benefits has significant organizational consequences. "Outsiders" with good electoral prospects will often be preferred to party insiders. Thus, career pathes will tend to be rather unstable; a fact which has been noted not only in the context of U.S. parties, but also in countries with similar party organizations, like Uruguay, Colombia, and Peru (prior to the Fujimori "coup"). The decentralization of real power within the party is also notable. Key decisions regarding program and strategy are made by candidates and their "nuclei." In systems like those of Uruguay and Colombia those decisions are made by factions, while the national executive committees have the appearance of confederal arrangments. In cases like the Republican Democratic Union in Venezuela, a single notable holds the reins, resulting in 65 centralized power without centralized organization (in the sense used here). One could argue that in such a party the institutionalization of the party would de-personalize power, thus threatening the perennial leadership’s ambitions for office. In each of these cases, "office" is the dominant concern.of the leadership but, for varying reasons, the party- as—organization is eschewed as the means to that end. Nonprgfessional-Centralized The nonprofessional-centralized party, in contrast to the above, purchases whatever success it achieves by distributing collective benefits. Party activity is framed within a bureaucracy whose members are paid with "belonging," "solidarity," "ideology," and other intangibles. Tangible benefits will normally be framed within the party program itself (a leftist party advocating redistributive measures, for example). The party’s "identity" is thus the natural focus of intra-party controversy. The determination of the breadth and boundaries of this identity is held tightly by a centralized bureau. Changes of identity will normally result from traumatic internal struggles, or occasionally from the trauma of assuming the reins of government. The relationship of this type of party to the electoral market is somewhat complex: owing to its more-ambivalent posture towards the :necessityr of electoral accomodation. Whereas for the professionalized party the success of decisions regarding the party's programmatic identity are ’(3 'r1 u; r) cu -v 4n A’ V. ii. .01 9. 1“ d ‘. \V' 66 directly and visibly measured in the market, the market produces no such.resolution.for the nonprofessional party. The primary reason for this is that questions of program are tied also to the distribution of power among factions and to the internally defined means for allocating power. Additionally, the threat of disaffecting the membership, whose concerns are centered on collective benefits, must continually be reckoned with. Disruptions in the flOW'Of such benefits may be regarded as more costly than electoral failure. The Frente Amplio exhibited this tendency in "forcing" its most electorally-significant partners from the alliance in order to preserve the organizational and ideological "vision" of its leadership. The problematic aspect of the Frente is its degree of centralization. It is both an alliance and a party. This requires more elaboration than I can give here, so I must refer the reader to the case histories presented further on. In sum, I have chosen to emphasize the fact the Frente Amplio operates as a party distinct from its constituent parts and that it does exercise discipline over its members in a manner untypical of the traditional Uruguayan parties. Nonprofggsional-D§centralized In the nonprofessional-decentralized party the means or procedures through which the party identity is managed are at their least coherent state. Neither office-seekers nor benefit-seekers can be said to control this process. One likely form such.a party may take is as a front group for some 67 secondary association: the party as such is not the relevant locus of organizational power. The highly personalized attachment between Perén and the unions in Argentina would be one example of this type. Since the relatively influence-poor candidates and bureaucrats/activists cannot serve two Caesars, as it were, it is unlikely that there will be more than one such group (if there were, the resulting factionalism might empower the party as a broker, thus releasing it from its organizational mire). Under these conditions the party resembles an interest group, insofar as it acts on behalf of another association rather than taking on some measure of autonomy in its internal affairs. A.party can also reach this state when it is experiencing what Panebianco (1988) referred to as a "crisis of identity;" where office-seekers and benefit-seekers clash, with no apparent victor, over the definition of party goals. In this case the party offers a bewildering spectacle of instability. The rump party congress held by Peronist office-seekers in 1986 is one example: both congresses offered alternative programs, claimed the same leader (Isabel Peron), and offered alternative slates.22 22 It should be noted that the two examples mentioned above are highly dissimilar. The first would tend to have a highly centralized structure, even though the party itself is not the locus of decisionmaking power. The second.would.suffer from the opposite malady - a, probably temporary, loss of both internal and external means of control. This "type" is thus problematic. For the countries studied here a resolution is not entirely necessary as only the second example is found 68 The means for classifying this last type of party obviously lie somewhat outside of the measures discussed earlier. For the first example this isn't a problem since the indicators do take into account the party’s relations with external groups. For the second example we would have to rely on information about internal partisan conflict, and of the extent to which. this manifests itself in. organizational challenges to the established party order, such as: competing party congresses, the existence of rump executive committees with real influence, competition over the party label itself, etc. The Peronist fit this category "neatly" only in the 1983- 1987 period. Prior to that period of crisis, I have chosen to emphasize the decentralization of the party outside of the unionist sector. As I have noted earlier, the party has been characterized.by a division between unionist and "provincial" (for want of a better term) elements, which also corresponded fairly well to what have been referred to as the "benefit- seeking" and "office—seeking" tendencies within.parties: this can therefore be considered a fundamental division. It would be hard to refer to the party as having been strictly "professionalized" either, since the office-seeking tendency of the party never really had control of the party until 1987. It would probably be most accurate to say that the party has vacillated between the professional-decentralized and the among the parties of those countries for the periods in question. _A"‘ I...“ The . ~n§~ .u‘b V31' ‘9' rub “a b ‘ I yv-u , “4.) suci 69 nonprofessional-decentralized types.23 The Parties of Venezuela Democratic Action is both a cause and consequence of nationalization in Venezuela’s political history. Its entry into politics followed a succession of nineteenth-century revolts which drained the power and authority of the latifundia, thus eliminating a traditional barrier to the nationalization of politics. Venezuela is one of the few Latin American states in which the regionalism of the rural aristocracy was overcome in such decisive fashion. The extraordinary centralization of power under the dictatorship of Juan Vicente G6mez followed. Lasting from 1908 to 1935, the Gomez dictatorship oversaw the discovery of oil, the internationalization of agriculture, the integration of the internal market, and the development of a national bureaucracy. Democratic Action emerged in the 19203 and 19305 as the principal popular opposition to Gomez. Its aims were revolutionary, its politics socialist, and its organization tailored to grass-roots mobilization - much in the tradition of marxist-leninist "cellular" organization. In time it became 23 It should be noted that the earlier-mentioned conflict between Gonzalistas and Prietistas within AD did engender conflict over the party label, and thus represented a considerable crisis. But since Barrios controlled the national executive the electoral courts made short work of deciding the issue in favor of the Gonzalistas. The conflict, while disruptive, cannot be put into the same class of "fundamental" conflict as the Peronist situation in 1983-87. 70 a "movement," embracing the loyalties, ultimately, of a broad cross-section of Venezuelans and covering a wide swath of ideological positions, though the leadership remained staunchly socialist. During the first democratic experiment (1945-1948) — the "trienio" — AD polled upwards of seventy percent of the vote. With an exaggerated sense of its mandate (both from its status as a movement and the fact that it was the only serious contender) AD embarked on a hurried path of socialist social engineering which ultimately provoked a conservative backlash. AD entered the 1958 elections with a conciliatory (and pragmatic) move towards the center. By this time COPEI had also emerged as a well-organized opposition party (which would outlive the URD and other personalist vehicles which showed early strength) and also occupied space close to the center. AD’ s move naturally aggravated the more-extreme leftists still lodged under its umbrella and hence the next ten years saw a number of splits from the party. The Revolutionary Left departed in 1960, as did a number of young "adecos" who were frustrated by the continued predominance of "Generation of 28" adecos in the party leadership and on electoral lists. The importance of these splits lie in what they tell us about organizational priorities. While the splits certainly damaged AD’s voting strength in the short run it would be ridiculous to imagine that the extreme elements of the party could have remained in an organization which was increasingly committed to governing all Venezuelans. The continued presence 71 of these elements, in any' but a marginal sense, would ultimately have damaged.the party’s public credibility and its internal unity. The 1968 split was particularly emblematic since it involved a popular member of the party vying for the presidential nomination. Luis Prieto of the AD Left, was passed over, despite being, arguably, the most electable candidate AD could then field. The party'man, Gonzalo Barrios, was instead favored with the nomination. The message in this case was clear: Prieto was outside of the party’s ideological mainstream and therefore unfit to hold the party banner. Prieto left the party before the elections, which AD narrowly lost, and formed his own. party (the People’s Electoral Movement). After the election AD turned its attention towards shoring up the rift created by the nominations struggle. AD exhibited a number of tendencies during this period which are important for its classification. First, it showed a keen sense of its role as a governing party and the necessity of operating near the ideological center - even if this resulted in short-term losses. Second, its electoral commitments were clearly balanced by its commitment to maintaining a coherent ideological stance.' Third, its organizations had the capacity to restrain elements of the party considered "dissident." AD has, from its beginning, exhibited a great deal of agreement between its formal and.informal structures of power. The legislative group is strong within the party apparatus, '4 (_) Lat] trac fin“.- fivr: 72 with virtually all of the party leadership coming from the ranks of the deputies and senators. The National Executive Committee meets in continuous session and the chief policy— making organ of the party, the National Political Committee, is actually a sub-committee of this group. The structures that exist at the national level are replicated at each level of the organization, with the levels corresponding to electoral boundaries.24 Internal party rules have tended to ensure that service to the party precedes office-holding. Six years of party service were required before a member could seek national office. This would also have the effect of insulating the party from outsiders and of drawing potential leaders into the organizational culture.25 The National Executive Committee exercised a great deal of control over the electoral lists put forward in each department. The same has also been true of COPEI. In 1973 the CEN reserved the power of decision over half the electoral office nominations. The executive of COPEI reserved such power over one—third of the electoral posts. This has ensured that the national leadership could maintain control of the 2‘ Much of the information pertaining to the early organization of the party is taken from Martz (1966). 3 Unions frequently exercise considerable power within Latin American parties. AD and COPEI provide exceptions. The trade union movements were mobilized and organized by AD and COPEI (the Confederation of Workers being an arm of AD, while the Worker's Front is a dependency of COPEI). See, for example Martz (1966) and Herman (1980). S" fiau U 73 legislative groups, and also ensured that the leadership retained their offices (Arroyo, 1986). While these practices contributed to generational "rigidity," it also assured that the party career structure would replicate the party’s concern for being perceived as a governing party. This element of centralization existed alongside the practice of operating parallel party organs during elections. These could be regarded as somewhat comparable to the election committees surrounding legislative candidates in the United States, but these committees normally replicated the membership of the permanent organs of the party. This practice was the subject of internal reform in 1993; recommendations for democratizing nominations were also considered.26 The organizational structure of COPEI provides some slight contrast with that of AD. Since 1968, COPEI has focused on a regionally-based campaign strategy and has built up a systemnof regional directorates towards that end. Like.AD, the party is highly centralized in recruitment and nominations practices. The emphasis on, and need for, centralized control was evident in the 1973 elections when.the party sought to attract prominent independent candidates and up-and-coming regional leaders to shore up the lists. These deviations from normal patterns of career advancement were said to have caused 2‘ FBIS-LAT-93-045, Mar. 10 1993, p. 39, "Meeting’s Final proposals." 4- ban #1» Us. fig“ 74 considerable "internal distress" (Martz and Baloyra, 1976, p.87). Thereafter, traditional party virtues of discipline, apprenticeship, and technical superiority in election management were stressed as means for advancing the party’s interests. COPEI’s regional bases are important for understanding the statistics that will be presented later. When it entered the electoral arena in 1958 its principal base of support was the Andean region, which gave the party a highly unbalanced "look." COPEI’s expansion was based also on developing regional electorates and the "movement" of its vote reflects this regionally-based strategy.27 The "third" party in the 1958 elections (which since decayed to virtual extinction) was the Republican Democratic Union. This party is widely considered to have been a personal vehicle of its founder, Jovito Villalba. Organizationally, it bore little resemblance to either AD or COPEI. It lacked a permanent organizational structure at virtually all levels. Nominations and recruitment were less the province of formal executive committees than they were of‘Villalba and.his close associates, although factions within the party'did.exist and competed for leadership posts and nominations. The URD's perennial organizational problem was its lack of penetration into Venezuelan society, outside of a fairly strong commitment by eastern peasants (Myers, 1973). 2" Myers (1980) provides an excellent discussion of COPEI's expansion. 75 While Villalba was a popular figure and convincing orator (traits shared by others who ran for President with this party’s support), rallies were seldom followed up with grass- roots mobilization of great consequence. Villalba operated something of a travelling convention which, outside of Caracas, could not consistently hold the loyalties of voters. The dominance of Villalba is not sufficient, therefore, to class this party as "centralized." In fact, as was suggested earlier, it is inimical to such a classification. The party bureaucracy never developed as a means for constructing, defending, and propagating a party "identity" to which members and voters could attach themselves. It remained, in the truest sense, a personalist party with an identity closely attached to its leader. Competition among factions and personalities was the principal means of career advancement, but this was not mediated by coherent, impersonal intra-party rules and practices. This displacement of organization by personality is one important reason for being skeptical of the appearance of centralization in these types of parties generally. The vulnerability of these and more "verticalist" parties once they have been "beheaded" demonstrates the vital difference between structural coherence and strong personal leadership. The organizational fluidity of the party ultimately undercut its electoral goals. Villalba’s leadership was not maintained by superior organizational and mobilizational skills, nor, necessarily, by the mediation of electoral 5 r‘. l. he .'.,. Sn“. F yf. 5‘ an... A; De... ‘ Y B..e arnw. “Vux. ~ 76 results, but instead by the elimination of rivals who might have strengthened the party. Leonardo Montiel Ortega, a popular leader of the younger generation of "urredistas" (Villalba himself was a member of the Generation of 28), was a strong critic of the party’s strategy and organizational ineptitude. In 1978, however, he failed to gain.a congressional seat and.was shortly forced out of the party by Villalba (Martz, 1980). Prior to the 1968 campaign, a similar conflict produced similar results. Villalba opted.to ally with.a number of small parties - the Popular Democratic Force and the National Democratic Front - to support the candidacy of Miguel Angel Burelli Rivas. The apparent reason for this decision was Villalba's presidential ambitions; he did not want to place his party and his future in a position of subordination to Democratic Action, which would dictate the nomination of the presidential candidate. Others in the party, Juan Dominguez Chacin being chief among them, argued that alliance with AD was the more rational choice given ideological and social affinities, and also because the URD had until very recently been a member of AD’s coalition government. Personal ambition centered on the presidency thus conflicted with, we may reasonably suppose, ambitions centered. on sub-national offices and the strengthening of the party apparatus. Chacin, like Ortega after him, was removed.and.his supporters marginalized.(Myers, 1973). ‘20 (D a. .o . r‘ A p9 U5“ 77 Categorizing this party has been very difficult owing partly to the relative paucity of attention given to its organizational attributes in the literature, and also to ambiguity with respect to professionalization. It is quite clearly not to be regarded as centralized. The decision to classify it as professionalized owes to its orientation, almost exclusively, towards the goal of putting its leaders in office. Its ideological flexibility, as well as its understandable desire to remain flexible with regards to the demands of extra-party organizations as well as its potential coalition partners, also figure heavily.28 Nevertheless, the dominance of Villalba's personality in the party is a complication.29 As was noted earlier, personal control does not imply centralization in the sense used here. The URD provides, I think, an example of this principle. As Myers (1973) noted with respect to the 1968 campaign, the three "personalist" parties that supported Burelli Rivas did not have the organizational capacity to transfer votes and loyalties to their joint candidate. Rival ambitions and ideological incompatibilities instead carried the day.30 “ I refer here to the URD's, and particularly Villalba’s, troubled relations with AD, particularly in the period leading up to the 1968 elections. 29 This, however, did not stop the party from courting the popular Admiral Wolfgang Larrazabal for the presidential nomination in 1958 w The Popular Democratic Force was led by Arturo Uslar Pietri, a well known intellectual from Caracas, while the National Democratic Front was led by Admiral Wolfgang Larrazabal, a hero of the restoration of democracy in 1957 and ‘wn aha r3: 78 Following the 1978 elections the Venezuelan parties were largely unchanged from the picture presented here. The principal organizational problems for AD were generational rigidity and the perception that the party had become over- bureaucratized and was beginning to lose touch with the electorate. These factors provoked a decision to restructure the leadership of the party by appointing "young charismatic men to leadership positions."31 Seventeen secretaries-general positions became vacant as a result. The URD's situation was more difficult to assess. Despite its concentration of support in Caracas, where Villalba's charisma was an Operative factor, the URD continued to expend its meager organizational resources in a futile search for national significance. The URD’s decline, correspondingly, has been national in scope, perhaps reflecting this dispersal of effort.32 Its fate has been similar to that of many "parties of notables" in South America which have been unwilling or unable to expand their organizational capacity at the grass- roots level.33 a very prominent presidential candidate in 1958. PDF was a party of the Right, while the END was a party of the Left. 31 FBIS-LAM-79-017, Jan. 24 1979, p. L3, "Democratic Action Reorganizes Party Leadership." . 32 See the results for the variance-components model presented further on. 33 This is, of course, a phenomenon of more general interest as well. Organizational transformation has been, given the institutional incentives, the necessary counterpart of modernization and the advent of universal suffrage (see Ostrogorski, 1952 and Duverger, 1963, for examples). The The: i 1 7"" at“ 1 o ‘ ' :7“ ‘. dua‘u with «55“. L» ratba: mcr CEYE. Mcnte 79 The Parties of Uruguay The two "traditional" parties of Uruguay, the Colorados and Nacionals, were direct outgrowths of caudillo politics. Unlike the venezuelan parties, they organized, originally, within the context of civil wars (19th and early 20th century) rather than after their resolution.I§he Colorados were the more liberal (in the economic and social senses) party and developed a loyal following in the urban areas, especially Montevideo. The Nacionals were akparty of the conservative interior and were also "clerical." i ( \ ~ «4 Despite the fact that the party ("lema") labels are significant as symbols of party identity,[énd party loyalties tend to be passed on with great consistency from generation to generation, these are actually among the more fragmented parties included in this study. The centralmlocifiof_power_in thesis—missmarswpotms0--mugh..-th.e..__r,1ational._-9.r9§ns. but the factions ("sublemas") out of which the parties themselves grew. The parties are, in effect, confederations of the factions. The national organs are not very authoritative as there is little ideological cohesion in either party. The question of nominations is settled first by the factions and later during the general elections which.have a kind of built- in primary system. The binding force for these parties is the peculiar histories of the Conservative and Liberal parties in the United Kingdom, and of the Social Christians in Germany, are very interesting in this regard. 80 electoral system - the Double-Simultaneous Vote — which is itself an institutional expression of the traditional strength of the factions.“ The distinctive feature of this system is that, regardless of ideological/programmatic distance among the factions, there is very little to be gained by splitting from the party "lema." Not surprisingly, the parties have a multi-class character. Programmatic and ideological flexibility are rewarded by the electoral system and permitted within the party organizations themselves. The parties also tend to exhibit a great deal of discontinuity in political careers. Gonzalez (1991) has calculated that 56 percent of the deputies and 40 percent of the senators elected in 1984 had held no prior elective office prior to the coup. This can partly be explained by the electoral punishment levelled at factions which were regarded as having been too friendly with the military government. It is also a consequence of the reliance of politicians on patronage positions for their livelihoods. Guidobono (1986) has presented evidence that the elevation of new-comers has been a common feature of Uruguayan politics since the 1950s. In Colombia, which has similar parties, electoral system, and a broad patronage system, similar tendencies have been observed: there, the explanations tend to focus on the importance of patronage jobs and on the status value of elective office. The distribution of selective “ The workings of this system are discussed in Chapter Four, Hypothesis 5. crga n V“ Laelh ele: n'n-w ”O‘a. EIEC 81 benefits can therefore be considered the principal corganizational "glue." The career structures of these parties are not strongly <:entralized, in terms of there being a party-mandated road to elective office. Some authors (Solari, 1964; Biles, 1972) characterized these as purely pragmatic parties, in that electoral ambitions appear to be dominant. The recruitment process in both parties was/is decentralized, with the leaders of the principal factions exerting control over the lists quite apart from the influence «of the national committees. Effective coordination of the sub- lemas by any national-level organ is not a notable feature of these parties (Janda, 1980). The Frente Amplio, while formally an alliance of leftist parties, is actually organized as a separate party with its autonomous organs reaching down to the "base" level. Unlike the traditional parties, where the "bases" (political clubs) are not coordinated effectively, coordination of the militants is very much a part of the Frente Amplio’s strategy. The Constitutive Declaration of the Frente Amplio (1971) decribes the front as an. organization. based. on. nuclear organizational principles, with common authorities, common mandate, and some disciplinary mechanisms. Rules adopted by the "Special Commission" were to be considered obligatory for all those signing the declaration then, and all those who would join the front thereafter. Among the common authorities adopted at that time were a Tribunal of Political Conduct, new Ivy“ .Lc \rbav COR} w; u; prac the GER: its thn \- 82 Sectoral and Regional Base Committees, and intermediary groups to coordinate the actions of the committees.35 The national organs of the party are the Plenary, composed of delegates of each member of the Frente. Voting in the Plenary is weighted, but it is not sensitive to differences in electoral strength. The most popular member (at the time) - the Government of the People - received just as many votes as the Communists, who were substantially weaker in electoral terms. This is a detail of substantive importance insofar as it indicates an organizational rejection of elections as the mediator in intra-front disputes. The general recommendations of the Plenary are communicated to an executive committee - Mesa Ejecutiva - which takes all actions "necessary and convenient " to put into practice the decisions of the Plenary (Aguirre Bayley, 1985, pp. 102-103) . The Comités de Base are the grass-roots agents of the party: organizing workers' cells, for example. The Frente Amplio's principal organizational problem of the post-transition period (1984-1989) was the issue of centralization - particularly, conflicting conceptions about its role as a party and the role of the party's executive in the control of nominations. The Left, and particularly the Communists (who occupy a central position in the organization) , viewed the organization as a party. The program 35 For information and documents pertaining to the founding of the Frente Amplio, Miguel Aguirre Bayley provides a fairly comprehensive selection in El Frente Amplig: historia y dogumentgg Montevideo: Ediciones de Banda Oriental, 1985. 83 agreed upon at the National Convention was expected to be the final word and candidates were expected to support it. The Center-Left, represented by the Party for the Government of the People (PGP) and the Christian Democrats (PDC), regarded the organization as a "front," much in the spirit of the traditional lemas. The PGP also happened to be the majority fraction of the Frente Amplio, as it polled 40 percent of the total party vote in 1984.36 Both center-left parties split from the Frente in 1989 to form the Nuevo Espacio. The immediate context of the split was the insistence of the further—left leadership on fielding a unity candidate for president.37 The broader context was the difference in attitudes mentioned above. The Frente’s vice-presidential candidate, Jose d'Elia, in.a.statement revealing of the Left's view, claimed that the PGP was part of the "ideological unity" of the Frente Amplio.38 Another official of the party stated, similarly, that "the Broad Front is not a mere electoral option, a circumstantial pact, nor a politician's agreement. . . The Broad Front is for us the broad road towards socialism in ” The PGP had 11 of 21 deputies and 3 of 6 senators. 3" They preferred either an alternative candidacy to Gen. Liber Seregni (retired) or a dual candidacy with Hugo Batalla, the leader of the PGP. This latter arrangement would.have been logical given the electoral law, but would have risked alienating the far-left. 38 FBIS-LAM-84-223, Nov. 16 1984, p. 115, "Socialists Deny Discord Within Broad Front." 84 our country."39 These statements reject the idea that the Frente Amplio was a pragmatic adjustment by the Left to the Double- Simultaneous Vote system and point to ideology and unity as the party’s calling cards. Both the PGP and the PDC found attempts at reform in the direction of greater electoral competitiveness to be half-hearted and regarded the influence of the far-Left to be disproportional to its electoral strength.‘o They, in turn, were regarded as "more interested in the electoral campaign than in reorganizing the coalition."“ Shortly after the PGP and the PDC left the front, it was joined by several radical groups, including the MLN-Tupamaros (the political wing of a former guerilla movement). Overall, the Frente Amplio’s organization and activities reveal a lack of willingness to forego its intra-organization goals - principally ideology and an insistence on unity - even as its electoral significance increased from 1971 to 1984. Rather, it has remained quite solidly within the confines of its urban 3’ FBIS-LAM-85-054, March 20 1985, p. K1, "Communist Official on Plans to Rebuild Party." The rejection of the front as an "electoral convenience" is also stated explicitly in the Constitutive Declaration. “’ The PDC would later cite the recovery of its "autonomy and its representatives" as one of its reasons for splitting with the FA. FBIS-LAT-88-251, Dec. 30 1988, p. 23, "PDC Suspends Participation in Broad Front." ‘1 FBIS-LAT-88—22, Nov. 17 1988, p. 45, "Broad Front Facing 'Internal Crisis'." 85 base in Montevideo. The Parties of Argentina Both of the major parties, the Radical Civic Union (UCR) and the Justicialist (Peronist), are currently broad-based, multi-class organizations. The Radicals entered the post- transition period in this state; the Peronists achieved this only after approximately five years of internal struggle. These two parties have essentially'monopolized.the "center" of Argentine politics, and with that state of affairs comes the necessity of presenting at least the appearance of possessing the capacity to govern on behalf of the majority of Argentines. Their histories of electoral success, particularly in the case of the Peronists, impose limits on the extent to which they will, as organizations, tolerate the possibility of being relegated to the status of "third" parties. The concentration of the vote reinforces the tendency to regard this as a two- party system, even though the use of proportional representation would tend to militate against this.“2 Of the six deputies that the minor parties won in 1983, five came ‘2 Sartori (1986) has discussed the conditions under which proportional systems can maintain a two-party format. These center mainly on the distribution of the electorate’s preferences (uni-modal; relatively few salient issue- dimensions). Shugart and Garey (1992) have suggested that presidential systems, particularly with concurrent elections, tend to promote a two-party format; the extension to legislative elections does appear to be very sensitive to the use of concurrent elections, though. 86 from a single district. Both Peronism and Radicalism have, historically, resembled movements as much as parties, encompassing factions of diverse ideological views. Both have also been, at one time or another, characterized by personalism, and have relied on the charisma of their leaders. For the Radicals, Hipolito Yrigoyen was emblematic of this tendency. Nevertheless, the party labels have had great and durable meaning for their supporters over and above considerations of personality, as evidenced. by their resurgence after ‘military' rule in a virtually unchanged two-party format. For the Peronists, however, personalism has been a more enduring problem than has been the case for the Radicals. Acute factionalism after the death of Juan Peron, and the attempts to nominate Isabel Perén for the presidency in 1984 (a last—ditch attempt to unify the party), demonstrate the overriding importance of personality. The Radicals, while exhibiting some similar traits, are organizationally distinct from the Peronists. Radical congresses have been the decisive instruments for nominating the top leadership positions and candidacies. Rafil Alfonsin's undisputed leadership of the party after military withdrawal served to unify the party, and the ease with which opposing factions gave way and supported the new leadership presents a starkly different picture from what was happening within Peronism at that time. During Alfonsin’s tenure an additional step to unify the 87 party was taken in the form of an alteration of party rules; specifically, abolishing the rule requiring the President of the country to step down from.the presidency of the party. The Radical party's attention to local organization has also been a notable feature.“3 Although the local committees, whose purpose is essentially to homogenize regional voting, have often been ineffectively coordinated, this appears to have improved under the Renovation and Change (RyC - "Renovacion y Cambio") leadership, who have been applauded by other members of the party for their grass-roots efforts. Party discipline is also managed more effectively than has been true for the Peronists. During the 1984-87 period, when as many as four principal Peronist factions were voting against each other in parliament, the UCR managed to maintain a high degree of discipline. At least one source has also mentioned that career partisans are typically given preference for advancement within the party (Day, 1988). The Argentine parties emerged from military rule in relatively'unchanged form.‘The Radicals and.the Peronists had, particularly during the final three years of military rule, kept up functioning party organizations. Though there was a law on the books banning party activity, this ban was not ‘” The party's successes have more recently been attributable to the influence of the Renovation and Change faction. But Waisman (1991) notes that development of the mass base has been a constant priority for the Radicals, perhaps owing to the legal proscriptions employed against them prior to 1910 and during the military and Peronist governments of 1930-1955. 88 enforced during the last two years (though the military was more stringent in enforcing rules aimed at keeping the union activists loyal to Peronism inactive - especially the "62 Organizations," the political wing of the General Confederation of Labor). The Radicals were traditionally a party of the middle class with relatively few or no ties to the unions. The Peronists, on the other hand, had dominated the political scene since the 19405, winning every national election they contested. Their strong connection to a disciplined working class vote engineered by highly politicized unions was a major source of strength. With the "center" of politics shifted in favor of the Peronist stronghold, Peronism developed great expectations of itself. During the military’s tenure, however, divisions were sown in union ranks, the "verticalism" of the organization became a liability when it was "beheaded" by the death of Juan Perén in 1974, and the numerical strength of labor was decreased by "deindustrialization." The beheading of the Peronist party brought into prominence an old division in Peronist ranks which.had.earlier surfaced during Peron’s exile (after 1955): that between the syndical sector (largely the CGT) and what were then known as neo-Peronists -za confederation of provincial parties. The latter were perceived as the more compromising aspect of Peronism, willing to consider alliances with the Radicals and cooperation with the Frondizi and Illia governments. 89 This union/provincial split was echoed in a debilitating internal struggle lasting from 1983 to 1987, in which it more plainly displayed its close relationship to the office-seeking and benefit-seeking tendencies of the party (this split is detailed further on). This struggle also pointed out the continued relevance of the description of the Peronists as a "movement." Whereas the Radicals have polled as much as seventy percent of their vote from the middle class in areas like Buenos Aires, Peronist support has been much more diverse and potentially fractious, with support divided among, for example, the unionist urban working class and the "caudillistic" working class of the interior provinces.“ The return to democracy thus brought into focus some fundamental organizational dilemmas for the Peronists. In the early going it was not clear that they had the capacity to respond to them, at least in a manner that would allow them to regain their electoral hegemony. The vital question, "who controls the party?" was unanswered in 1983. The union branches and the politicos (career politicians) vied for supremacy; each based their claims on highly disparate goals. The union branch, dubbed "officialists," argued for continuity with the past in terms of both ideology (and hence benefits to labor) and the distribution of ‘4 Snow (1971) points out that Perén's early support drew heavily from peasants from the interior who were accustomed to patronal politics. Many of the smaller parties attached to Peronism in the interior maintained this characteristic. Often these parties have had a Center-Right orientation. 9O organizational power (under Perén, verticalism had often implied.an1 arbitrary, even highly-personalized, discipline over office-holders). The politico branch - dubbed "renewalists," or "renovators" - argued for an ideological shift towards a new center, now perceived to be further to the right and infused with the interests of the middle class. Since this seemed unlikely under the stifling rule of the unions, such an approach could only involve dislodging the unions.‘'5 The Radicals, by contrast, had never adopted a verticalist style of organization and had a long history in which electoral concerns (and internal elections) determined the distribution of organizational power. As the elections of 1983 approached, factional disputes centered on slates of candidates rather than on more-fundamental questions. The faction which emerged triumphant in the general election, the Renovation and Change Movement of Raul Alfonsin (its presidential candidate), had earlier secured control of the leadership of the party (the National Committee) in the internal elections.“6 The victory of the RyC was secured by widespread ‘“ For a detailed discussion of the Radical and Peronist organizations in the period just prior to the 1983 elections see: Cavarozzi, Marcelo "Peronism and.Radicalism:.Argentina's Transition in Perspective," in Paul Drake and Eduardo Silva, eds. Elegtig g and Demogratization in Latin Ameriga, 1280-85 San Diego: University of California Press, 1986, pp. 143-174. ‘5 FBIS-LAT-83, August 1, 1983, p. B2, "Alfonsin Named Head of the UCR National Committee." 91 confidence in Alfonsin's electability (he had been a vocal opponent of the military and organizer of opposition) and by the perception. that the RyC was the more youthful and energetic of the contending factions. The role of the RyC in organizing grass-roots opposition to the military was very important in this regard. The victory of the RyC, moreover, was acknowledged. and. supported. by 'virtually' every’ major element of Radicalism. A.spokesman for the National Line faction, speaking prior to the internal elections, summed up a typical Radical attitude towards internal, factional divisions when he said, "the Radicals are 80 percent united and 20 percent split. The 80 percent keeps us together and the 20 percent keeps us democratic."“ The leader' of the 'Yrigoyenist Affirmation Movement, Luis Leon, made a similar statement: "We don't want to argue about names. We want to be nationally significant."“ These attitudes contrast sharply with the prevailing winds in Peronism at that time. The Peronists could not come to agreement on the procedures that would be used to nominate candidates and leaders of the party. This conflict was so intense that a meeting to discuss the issues could not be organized” Party' discipline broke down as some Peronist " The rhetorical value of such a statement for a post- transition election should not be ignored. ‘“ FBIS-LAT-82, July 19, 1982, pp. 81-82, "Radical Party Plenary Session to Choose Leaders." 92 factions initiated separate talks with the military (the unionist elements were given the bulk of public attention in this regard and it proved to be electorally damaging). The Peronist Youth.openly called for the resignation.of the entire party leadership.“ Not surprisingly, the 1983 loss brought increased demands for reform in the party. But with the climate of conflict in the party this actually led to further polarization and organizational paralysis. The Peronist Youth continued to berate their elders; they regarded the loss as a betrayal of the Peronist's natural position in Argentine politics. The divorce between the officialist and renewalist tendencies became more pronounced. The officialists exhibited interest in bringing Isabel Perén back into active leadership of the party (despite the disastrous experience of 1973-76), who they regarded as a potential symbol of unity. This move was quickly matched by the renewalists, who, for a time, also claimed Isabel as their leader. By 1984, a reorganization of the party was ostensibly in the works under Perén's leadership. Her moves would have placed the unionists, once again, in control of the party.50 Perén later backed away from this reform. w FBIS-LAT-BZ, March 5, 1982, p. BB FBIS-LAT-82, July 19, 1982, p. B2 FBIS-LAT-83, April 29, 1983, p. Bll "Peronists Face Paralysing Ray," in Latin Ameriga Pglitical gepgrt 83-32, August 19, 1983, p. 8 5° FBIS-LAT-84, June 7, 1984, p. B4, "Peronists to Announce Reorganization." 93 In a very real sense, the 1983 elections served to clarify the electoral position of the Peronists. It was apparent that the party’s strong union identification had hindered their appeal to the middle class. The idea of a "military-syndical" pact, a supposed power-sharing agreement, was given great credence and brought the democratic credentials of the entire party into question. The entrenchment of the unions in positions of power, however, dictated that the road to reform 'would. be strewn with debilitating conflict. The failure to resolve this conflict - to rid itself of the perception that it responded to a limited sector of interests - contributed.to electoral failure in both 1983 and 1985. Conflict reached its peak in 1984 when the renewalists walked out of the party congress in Buenos Aires. Those that remained were the loyalists of Herminio Iglesias, a union- affiliated leader, and the representatives of the 62 Organizations. Those who walked out included all of the party's senators, more than 70 (out of 111) national deputies, and 9 out of 12 of the department governors - in effect, the entirety of what we have referred to as the "office-seeking" tendency of the party.51 Both groups then proceeded to build competing organizational structures, including separate 9' FBIS-LAT-84, Dec. 17, 1984, p. B4, "Peronist Congress Splits; Delegates Walk Out." FBIS-LAT-84, Dec. 17, 1984, p. B5, "Dissidents Hold 'Rump' Convention." FBIS-LAT-84, Dec. 18, 1984, p. B2, "Justicialist Faction Elects New National Council." 94 congresses and national executives. After the loss in the 1985 midterm elections the rift within the party had still not been sealed.$2 In 1987 Peronist leaders agreed to a single, "unity" slate, which essentially recognized that the renewalists were the only viable electoral option the party could put forward. Having won the 1987 elections, the predominance of the renewalists was reinforced such that, by 1989, Carlos Menem (by now the party’s leader and presidential candidate) could form a cabinet that virtually shut the unions out. The victory in the 1989 General Election saw the party adopt a very flexible approach to electoral strategy. The Peronist coalition included not only a great portion of the Left, but also incorporated conservatives and business interests - moves which engaged the ire of the unions.53 52 The two groups ran separate lists in which the Frejudepa -the renewalist alliance - took 26% of the vote in Buenos Aires (Peronism’s traditional preserve and the largest single district in the country) and 11 seats in the Chamber of Deputies. Frejuli - the alliance of officialists - gained only 9% of the vote and only 3 seats in the Chamber. The officialists were thus the big losers in the election and this helped to facillitate their demise in the party prior to the 1987 elections. See: "Radicals Sweep the Elections," in Lapin Amegiga Poligigal Repgrt 85-44, Nov. 8, 1985, p. 3. The elections also pushed the renewalists' allies in the General Confederation of Labor - the reform-minded Committee of 25, forward as a possible rival to the 62 Organizations. The officialists' losses were interpreted as a "message" to the unions to adopt more-democratic procedures. See: "CGT Hierarchy in a Crossfire," in Latin America Pplitical Report 85-46, Nov. 22, p. 9. 53 "Postscript: Argentina," in Latin America Poligigal Repor; 87-41, October 2, 1987, p. 12. "Peronist Unions Are None Too Happy With Menem's Choice of Friends," in Latin Ameriga Polipigal Report 89—26, 95 .As was mentioned earlier, the signal departure of the experience of the Radicals from that of the Peronists was that they began the transition and post—transition periods with the capability to authoritatively resolve internal conflict. The victory of the RyC was grounded in organizational success and electoral appeal. The cohesion.of thejparty, moreover, was not overly disturbed by its losses in 1987 and 1989. .After' the 1989 defeat Rafil .Alfonsin. was once-again elected president of the party and the RyC retained.a dominant position on the party's executive board.54 Rather than signalling stagnation, this was interpreted as an effort to avoid fractious disputes and.as a recognition of the skills of the RyC leadership. While the Radical party cannot be considered centralized to the same degree as the major Venezuelan parties it is not possible, either, to place it in a class with either the Peronists or the traditional parties of Uruguay. It might be best to consider it intermediate (along this dimension), but the classification will stand, bluntly, as "centralized." Peronism has been dramatically altered under the leadership of the Menem faction. The party'has moved.closer to a.center-right.position, has achieved.some centralized.control over electoral lists, and has pursued advantageous alliances July 1, 1989, p. 1. FBIS-LAT-89-053, March 21, 1989, p. 35, "Electoral Courts Approve New Alliances." 5‘ FBIS-LAT-89-223, Nov. 21, 1989, p. 4, "Former President Alfonsin Elected UCR Leader." 96 with popular independents and provincial parties.55 It would be difficult to argue, however, that the party is going to become highly centralized in the immediate future. Menem has made party discipline an issue, but this is largely a response to the imperatives of governing in difficult circumstances: holding the party together in the wake of privatization schemes and highly-partisan union conflict. At the same time, the Peronist leadership has advocated reforms in the electoral laws which would, in fact, undercut the centralization of the party. One such reform would have allowed intra-party preference voting, a scheme which. is widely' regarded. as antithetical to centralized control. One difficulty that arises in categorizing these parties is that, apart from.the extreme fragmentation of the Peronists during the 1983-1987 period, their histories tend to color perceptions. The earlier history of Peronism, for example, is often characterized as "verticalist," implying a highly centralized structure. But, as Snow and Manzetti (1993) wrote: "...the Peronist party was held together almost exclusively'by the personality of Juan Perén; however, even at its height, Peronism was not a unified national party with a coherent program. In the Federal Capital and its working class suburbs it was primarily a labor party, but in other areas it 55 Many of these small parties share:Menem’s center-right orientation. Menem’s leadership in the party opened up the opportunity to sharply increase the number of such alliances as compared with 1987. Nevertheless, the use of such alliances has been common throughout the history of the party. For information on the scope of these alliances see Venturini (1989). 97 was essentially a Social Christian movement , an ultranationalist Catholic organization, or simply a 19ersonalist vehicle for provincial caudillos." (p. 79) With respect to the Radical party, Snow and Manzetti (1993) note: "During much of its history radicalism was essentially an alliance of provincial caudillos. This personalism, plus factions that became virtual parties within the party (each Ihad.its own offices, program, and membership list), has long loeen a Radical hallmark. Party factionalism declined during ‘the first half of the Alfonsin.administration, but it returned .as soon as the Radicals began to lose electoral support." (p. 79) This reading of party history would tend to suggest that ‘the structural coherence of these parties is not a predictable organizational feature so much as a consequence of the relative predominance of particular factions at particular ‘times: the RyC of Alfonsin in the post-transition period, for example, and the menemistas of the Peronist party after 1989. Factionalism tends to imply a bypassing of the party. 'Under Peron, the state became the principal means for — 8 * fi ** *‘ ¥ ’ fi * § * ’ o p; x xx; ‘x > * * m: <1 . “ ._ 3° _ x * x a x x I ¥ E x ‘4* x * O 20 — 3 * a x 10 — o 1 1‘1; 1 J l 20 30 40 so so 70 80 Presidential Vote % Figure 2: Similarity of Presidential and Legislative Vbtes -- Peronist Party 3% 1‘. 4f“. 205 Legislative Vote % Similarity of Presidential and Legislative Votes ProfessuonaI-Decentralized (URD of Venezuela) 60 ..l ,E a! x x x p is K is * * * § at x x * 20 — * g i * x ! ijfxg’”§* o *A?“ * 1 .— 3“! * x * ¥ * *3! ‘ in: a" :1: i“ x * X 0 l l l l l l C J. o 10 20 30 40 so 60 70 so Presidential Vote % Figure 3: Similarity of Presidential and Legislative Votes -- Republican Democratic Union ”m? _ _ 206 80 70 60 50 40 30 Legislative Vote % 20 Similarity of Freeidential and Legislative Votes Venezuelan Parties i - % *¥* * *fl‘u is was ‘3‘; X)! ag" g ** * O 10 20 30 4O 50 60 70 Presidential Vote % 80 JFigure 4: Similarity of Presidential and Legislative Vbtes -- Venezuela Chapter Nine Conclusions and Implications for Further Research Summary of Findings We began with the rather simple observation that party organization matters as a determinant of legislative patterns of nationalization. This by itself represents a substantial improvement in our understanding of the process, not simply because party organization’s differ in this respect, but because we now have some idea why they differ and in what specific ways the differences matter. The picture complicates itself when we turn to the role of presidential elections: not simply because this portion of the analysis begs a further study of governing processes and inter-branch relations, but because the presidential elections are not merely discrete factors exogenous to the legislative elections. They are, in fact, a significant component of the "national force" we have sought to capture. It is almost surprising - and granted, the number of cases is small - that such a clear pattern would emerge, and that "nationalizing parties" should emerge defined essentially by two factors: organizational and institutional. While this result elevates an additional question - what institutional factors support the organizational tendencies observed? - we can derive lessons of some importance from what has been presented. One lesson is that decentralized.parties, even.movements 207 208 with rich histories like that of the Peronists, do not put down the kind of roots which encourage a national focus in legislative politics. It might be argued that the recent travails of the party have something to do with this, but it must also be recognized that those problems arose because of the organizational framework, and the distorted power relations, of the Peronist party up till 1987. The Republican Democratic Union is an especially interesting case because it began as an electorally strong party in a system conducive to nationalization, yet it too could not take on a role of focusing legislative electoral politics. The experience of the Radical party might well be taken as a lesson, where concerns over inter-branch relations are strongly felt, in the importance of institutional reform. The party managed to create a stable, nationalized vote, but this vote has remained un-linked to the national constituency of the presidential candidate. This suggests that party reform is not enough. The style of governance in Argentina, as opposed to Venezuela (during the period studied), corroborates this speculation. The above point is worth noting, even with the limited nature of the data, and especially given the on-going and largely’ unresolved. debates among ‘U.S. scholars over ‘the relative importance of organizational and institutional factors in overcoming deadlock (Truman, 1967; Sundquist, 1992; Jacobson, 1990, etc.). But since this represents only a small piece in that puzzle, I will not speculate further. Rather, it 209 could more usefully be asked: how can this research can be improved and expanded to provide a clearer picture of nationalization processes and inter-branch linkages? Suggestions for Further Research Though there are undoubtedly a great number of issues that deserve attention, I will here restrict myself to three themes that arose in the course of this study which have been left in the realm of speculation and/or assumption: the problem of the "dual incentive structure" created by midterm elections; the effects of certain "background" variables on party organization; the underlying assumption, thus far unelaborated, that within parliamentary systems the problems discussed here necessarily exhibit a different character. I will not attempt to elaborate wholesale research designs, but rather outline a problem-directed program: i.e., one with a high potential for rooting out inaccuracies in the findings of this study. It was suggested earlier that parties with a centralized structure will tend to respond to midterms by emphasizing the nationalizing potential of the on-year elections. The Radical party emerged as the emblematic case, and the result was a stable, nationalized, though unlinked legislative vote. Two other South American cases (though I do not mean to suggest that the analysis should be restricted to this area) employed nonconcurrent elections while offering a reasonable number of elections for study. Brazil, from 1954 to 1964, and Chile, ' 210 from 1945 to 1973. The Brazilian.parties were relatively loose in structure, perhaps due to an overwhelming proportion of votes being cast along the lines of intra-party preferences, in comparison to the principal Chilean parties. Other cases could.of course be suggested, but the general priority ought to be to establish the independent effect of party organization in constructing a stable, nationalized vote. In a larger-n study, perhaps including cases with well- institutionalized parties, this research could also begin to uncover the institutional framework underlying parties which fit this profile. The importance of concurrence in relation to linkage could be further reinforced.by replicating these analyses for Costa Rica, which shares with Venezuela the use of concurrent elections and.whose National Liberation Party shares the same organizational type as the major Venezuelan parties. Once these and other, similar cases have been addressed, the natural point of departure would be to compare their experiences with those of parliamentary systems. Such research could also serve to increase our understanding of long-term electoral dynamics in parliamentary systems (discussed further below). Any attempt to address the indirect impact of variables effecting party organization would involve us in a study of large proportions, and would necessarily involve cross-area research. A relatively narrow focus on the two variables identified here — federalism and ballot type - would certainly 211 be inadequete once the field was expanded to include parliamentary systems. Argentina, Brazil (1954-1964), Venezuela (after 1989), have had federal systems, while Costa Rica, Venezuela. (before 1989) and.‘Uruguay' were unitary. Closed-list systems were employed in Argentina, Venezuela and Costa Rica, while intra-party preference systems were used in Brazil and Uruguay. Establishing the independence of either factor in a study of small size would be difficult owing to the fact that their expected effects would frequently be reinforcing. Nevertheless, theoretically grounded studies of the determinants of fundamental attributes of party organization are lacking, and such.an attempt would illuminate not only the issue of nationalization, but also the general theory of party organization. As a final research note, it might well be asked whether presidential systems are as peculiar as it is often suggested. Certainly, one of the claims of this study partially obscures that contention. Atenuated-presidentialism does seem to exhibit parliamentary tendencies, both in the construction of the mandate and in the conduct of parties in the government. It would therefore be advisable to address ourselves to the institutional arrangements within.parliamentary'systems'which inhibit party government and the nationalization of voting. This expansion of the research design would certainly open up a host of possibilities, but I can suggest a few areas where focused comparisons could be instructive. Party 212 organization and its determinants would be the most likely starting point. Federative parliamentary systems which employ proportional representation formulas, for example, may be particularly susceptible to the formation of regionally-based parties and parties of the non-professional-centralized type (Germany, for example, though its formula is "mixed"). A Note on Recent Reforms Finally, it has been noted that both Argentina and Venezuela have undergone revisions of their constitutions. Before closing, then, it would be worthwhile to consider the potential impact of these reforms given the results of this study. The reforms in Argentina were substantial, including re- election for the President, a majority/run-off system for presidential elections, and the creation of a prime ministerial position known as the Chief of Cabinet. The context of the legislative elections, however, has not changed much. Midterm elections will still be held, though less frequently because the President now serves a four year term. Thus, while the legislature can potentially exert pressure on the executive by voting down the "government," the President remains electorally isolated from the legislature. The necessity of installing' the officer known. as "Chief of Cabinet" probably' will not have the same effect as the installation of a prime minister since the coalition will be under pressure to dissolve at the midterm, thus replicating F .1 .i'“.a-' ‘~_.~“l-" IA 213 the electoral cycle effects which existed previously. Reforms in Venezuela were aimed at the excesses of the previous system, particularly what came to be an excess of hierarchical control within the parties. The parties were perceived.as unresponsive to constituency interests (Shugart, 1992). Venezuela now has a "mixed" electoral system, with somewhat more than half of the deputies to be elected in single-member districts. This reform could elevate the importance of personalist voting and thus loosen candidates from the influence of the party hierarchy. The change in the electoral system corresponds with the direct election of governors. The intention of this reform was also to localize politics to a greater extent. In the first gubernatorial elections three parties of the Left, which heretofore had not had great success in national elections, managed to capture gubernatorial office. These plurality-rule races encourage the building of coalitions to compete with the larger parties (as do the single-member districts for legislative office). The long term effects of these changes are difficult to assess, but nevertheless, I think two possibilities deserve attention. The retention of proportional representation for half the legislative seats could very well mitigate the effects of the jplurality' elections, particularly' if the national electoral quotient operates to preserve the positions of the smaller'parties. One scenario (relying on the plurality effects) would see the 1989 elections as a deviation, with the 214 large parties ultimately using the advantages the electoral system gives them to further consolidate the two-party system. This would obviously have some benefits in terms of governing. Another scenario, however (which we might model after the German example), would have some of the smaller, leftist parties capturing gubernatorial office and using this position as a springboard and.as a means of securing its representation (especially in the plurality races) within those districts. Such a regional party might well stand a chance of making further inroads, but even if it didn’t, it could have some nuisance value in the legislature and could force the formation.of governing coalitions (like the Free Democrats and the Bavarian wing of the Christian Democrats in Germany). On the one hand, then, the system could enhance the possibility of creating governing majorities, but on the other, it could do the opposite. The outcome may well depend on the willingness of the Left to create durable and/or institutionalized coalitions. The latter problem may lead to pressure towards a premier-presidential system in the future. The effects of these changes on the nationalization of politics are likely to be negative in the long run, since the partisan foundations of these voting patterns are likely to change. If the system does indeed move towards a constituency- delegate model, or if regionally based parties begin to make a mark, then some change in voting patterns is likely. Whether this poses a threat to the governability of the system is difficult to say. Since the changes in the institutional I 1.1313“! __ . 215 format of the legislative elections have been significant, but not traumatic, and have taken place within an institutionalized party system, I doubt that the changes will be dramatic. BIBLIOGRAPHY MID. 216 BIBLIOGRAPHY Aguirre Bayley, Miguel (1985) El Frente Amplio Montevideo: Banda Oriental. Almond, Gabriel and Sidney Verba (1963) The Civic Culture New York: Little, Brown and Co. Apter, David (1956) The Politics of Modernization Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Arroyo, Eduardo Talavera (1986) Elections and Negotiation: The Limits of Democracy in Venezuela New York: Garland. Ayala Corao, Carlos M. (1992) El Régimen Presidencial en América Latina y los Planteamientos para su Reforma Caracas: Editorial Juridica Venezolana, 1992. 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