Cleavage Structures and Party Systems in Latin America

Author(s): Robert H. Dix

Reviewed work(s):
Source: Comparative Politics, Vol. 22, No. 1 (Oct., 1989), pp. 23-37
Published by: Ph.D. Program in Political Science of the City University of New York
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Cleavage Structures and Party Systems

in Latin America
Robert H. Dix

In a seminal article in 1967 Seymour Martin Lipset and Stein Rokkan posed a series of
central questions for the comparative study of party systems. The first set of questions
concernedthe genesis of the system of cleavages within the nationalcommunity, including
the timing of their appearanceand their relative salience and durability.A second group of
questions focused on the translationof cleavages into stable party systems, including the
question of why conflicting interestsand ideologies in some cases favored the emergence of
broadaggregativecoalitions, and in others fragmentation.The final set of questionsbore on
the behavior of voters within the various party systems. What were the characteristicsof
those voters mobilized by the several parties, and how did economic and social change
translateinto changes in the strengthsand strategiesof the parties?The authorsstressedthat
all these and related questions were to be addressed diachronically, that is, in historical
perspective.'
While Lipset and Rokkan, as well as most of the many others who have asked similar
comparativequestions, have focused almost exclusively on the competitive partysystems of
Europe and the Anglo-Saxon diaspora (the United States, Australia, Canada, and New
Zealand), it seems high time thatquestionslike those raised for industrializedcountriesnow
also be posed for Latin America, particularlysince Latin Americaconstitutesthe area of the
world that most closely approximatesthe developed West in culture, levels of economic and
social development,2 and experience with competitive party systems. Only by examining
such questions outside the regions of the ancestral homes of political parties and party
systems can we expand our generalizationsabout the historical development of political
partiesbeyond the evidence of a particulartime and place. It is also at least highly plausible
that Latin America's experience with the construction of systems of competitive party
politics will prove more relevantto the futuretrajectoryof such politics in other partsof the
so-called Third World than will that of the developed West.
This article is an attemptto begin the systematicanalysis of that experience.3Among the
questions we pose will be the following. Has the development of western party systems
proven to be the prototypefor the evolution of competitive partysystems in Latin America?
What are the kinds of partiesand the patternsof competitionamong partiesin LatinAmerica,
and how have they emerged over time? Have the West's past experiences with the onset of
mass politics and the politics of industrialization been more or less replicated in
contemporaryLatin America?How might one account for any differences?What follows is
thereforemeant essentially as an exploratoryexercise in delineating some broad patternsof
similarity and difference between the party systems of Latin America and the developed
West.
At the same time, our enterprise will be a good deal more modest in scale and in

23

ComparativePolitics October 1989

supportivedetail thanthat undertakenby Lipset and Rokkan. In partthis is a function of the
relative paucity or unevenness of the kinds of reliable electoral data, opinion surveys, and
single country studies concerningLatin America in comparisonto what is available for the
so-called western or industrializedcountries. Too, the electoral process in Latin America
frequentlysuffers from constraintsthat hamperanalysis. Parties (sometimes majorones as,
at times, the AmericanPopularRevolutionaryAlliance, APRA, in Peru)may be barredfrom
presentingcandidates, or fraud and other controls may obscure fully accurateresults, as in
Mexico, not to mention Paraguay.The democraticexperience has also been briefer, more
recent, and more sporadic in the Latin American case and has often been interruptedby
periods of military and other authoritarianrule that have effectively suspendedcompetitive
politics altogether. Moreover, Latin America's parties may come and go with startling
rapidity and may form ever-changing alliances or combinations of sometimes confusing
complexity. Some have barely deserved the designation"party"to begin with. Finally, and
perhaps most fundamental,parties by no means encompass the full spectrum of groups
competing for governmentalpower. In many Latin American countriesthe armedforces or
guerrilla insurgencies, on occasion allied with one or another political party or even a
foreign country, employ armed force to compete for power, necessarily making elections
less definitive than has usually been true of western Europe, North America, and
Australasia.4
Nonetheless, it is our purpose to expand the comparativehorizons of the study of party
systems by incorporatingthe Latin American experience, particularlyin regard to the
development of those systems over time and the impact on them of the onset of mass
politics.
Patterns of Party Development
At first glance the historiccleavage lines of LatinAmericanpolitics would appearroughly to
parallel those of the Europeanpast, albeit with notable time lags: the center versus the
periphery, the secularizingstate versus the church, the landed elite versus commercial and
industrialinterests, and finally, in the wake of all the others, the class struggle of workers
against their employers.5Thus throughoutmost of the nineteenthcentury, and well into the
twentiethin many cases, the political divisions of Latin Americatended predominantlyto be
those of conservatives versus liberals, although they bore other names in some places and
almost everywhere showed a markedpropensityfor factionalism and fragmentation,often
centeredaroundparticularindividuals, families, or regions. The conservativepartiestended
to reflect the interests and attitudes of those who favored strong central government,
protectionof the Catholic church and its social and economic prerogatives,and defense of
the interestsof traditionallandowners.Liberals, on the other hand, could usually be found
advocating federalism, disestablishment of the church, and the defense of commercial
interests, often including the advocacy of free trade.6
One contrast to the European pattern was that the ethnic, cultural, and interreligious
dimensions of politics in much of the West were largely absent in the southernAmericas.
Thus, while center-peripherystruggles led in some places (Argentina and Colombia, for
example) to almost endemic civil war for much of the nineteenthcentury, they did not entail
24

RobertH. Dix
strugglesbetween nationaland provincialor subnationalcultureswith differentlanguagesor
religious attitudesas they did, say, in Norway, France, Spain, Belgium, and Canada. Nor
was the conflict over the churchever among differentreligions in the Latin Americancase.
As in southernEurope, the questions related ratherto church control over education, the
registrationof birthsand deaths, and, not least, the ownershipof land, with liberalstypically
wanting to open up entailed churchestates to the operationof marketforces.
However, there is a more importantconsiderationfor the understandingof contemporary
LatinAmericanpartysystems and their contrastswith westernpatterns.For if western party
systems evolved more or less incrementally,with partiesbased on newly salient cleavages'
being added to the existing system, in time shunting aside parties founded on previously
prominent cleavages, reducing them to minor party status, or interacting with them in
complex ways, this has been the case only exceptionally in Latin America.
Chile's party system, until its effective suspension by the military coup of September
1973, did substantiallyfollow the classic continentalEuropeanpattern.7In Argentina, too,
the currentgoverning party, the Radical Civic Union (UCR), traces its roots to the 1890s.
Ecuador and Panamahave also exhibited some evolutionarycontinuity, albeit much more
tentatively. However, in these countriesthe fragmentationand even virtualdisappearanceof
the traditionalparties and the volatility of newer ones have tended to blur the patterns,
characteristicof Chile and Argentina, whereby new parties were added to the system in
response to newly mobilized classes. Effectively, their currentparty alignments constitute
new party systems.
Yet the great majority of Latin America's party systems do not fall into the kind of
evolutionary pattern typical of the West. Thus, in a pattern that might be dubbed
"discontinuous,"the partiesand partysystems of perhapsa dozen LatinAmericancountries
have emerged more or less de novo, usually after a revolutionor a long period of dictatorial
rule, with few perceptiblelinks to the prerevolutionaryor predictatorialpast.8 Most of the
traditional conservative and liberal parties simply ceased to exist, leaving no visible
progeny.
True, in a few instances one can find some traces of linkage. Thus in the Braziliancase
the tiny RepublicanParty of the post-1946 republic could trace its lineage to the dominant
Republicansof the Old Republic (1889-1930), and some of the ruralpolitical bosses of an
earlier era became pillars of the later so-called Social Democratic Party (PSD).9 Yet the
parties, as well as the partysystem, of the pre-1930 period were essentially destroyedby the
adventof Getulio Vargasto power in 1930. When democracywas restoredin 1945, the new
party system bore little resemblanceto the old.
Rather, then, than the Europeanmodel of party development suggested by Lipset and
Rokkan, wherebythe principaldifferencesamong contemporarypartysystems can be traced
to distinctive configurations of early cleavages (center-periphery, church-state, and
landowners-commercial/industrial
interests), variations among many of Latin America's
party systems reflect divergentresponses to the expanded political mobilization of the last
several decades.
Just as striking, though fewer in number, are those "continuous"Latin American party
systems (Colombia, Honduras, Paraguay, and Uruguay) that simply have not evolved or
changed much at all over time, despite their countries' marked increases in social and
political mobilization and the emergence of new social classes. Liberals and conservatives
25

ComparativePolitics October 1989

-or factions and splinters thereof--still predominate,as they have since the last century,
and while thirdpartiesof some significance have from time to time emerged, they have so
far scarcely shaken the party alignments inherited from history. Not least, party
identificationtends to be intense and to have deep roots in the distantpast. Thus Paul Lewis
portrays a Paraguay where "party identification is practically universal," where
"membershipin one of them is almost always a lifetime commitment,"and where to switch
party allegiances connotes virtualtreasonto one's friends and family.10
The trajectoryof party system developmentin Latin America has thereforediffered from
that of the developed West in partbecause the formerhas largely lacked the cultural,ethnic,
and interreligiouscleavages that have characterizedthe latter, but most of all because the
vagaries of political history have in the Latin Americancase all but eradicatedthose parties
that took form prior to the onset of mass politics (or, in several other cases, paradoxically
forestalled the emergence of new parties altogetherby freezing in place the historic party
pattern).Only in a handfulof instances, notablyChile and, less clearly, Argentina,has party
developmenteven roughly followed the western model.
The Advent of Mass Politics
If both the natureand significanceof the patternsof cleavage thatprevailedpriorto the onset
of mass politics mark the developmentof Latin America's party systems as different from
those of the industrializedwestern countries, the coming of industrializationand universal
suffrage likewise had quite divergent impacts.
In the western case (albeit with the notable exceptions of the United States and Canada)
the admission of the middle and working classes to effective political participationin the
second half of the nineteenthand early decades of the twentieth century saw the attendant
formationof parties that have been variously termed "partiesof integration," "class-mass
parties," or "socialist working-classparties." Socialist and Communistpartieswere typical
of the new style of party.11Ideologically such class-mass partiestended to be Marxist, or at
least to adhereto programsthat spelled out quite explicitly the desirabilityof a futurewhere
the state owned the means of production. The focus was on the class struggle, and the
appeals of such parties were primarilyto the organized industrialworking class.
The coming of universal suffrage and high levels of political mobilization in Latin
America, on the otherhand, some decades laterthan in the Europeancase, did not eventuate
in the kind of class-mass partiesfamiliarfrom the industrializingperiod in the West, but in
something it seems fair to call a Latin American version (or ratherseveral versions) of the
"catch-all" party. Indeed, such catch-all parties, broadly conceived, have continued to be
the predominanttype of party in the Latin America of the 1980s. In most contemporary
Latin American party systems, single class parties (whether working class or bourgeois)
have tended to be relatively peripheral, or mere adjuncts to party systems that instead
revolve aroundan axis of one or more multiclass parties.
The catch-all party is one that eschews dogmatic ideology in the interestsof pragmatism
and rhetoricalappeals to "the people," "the nation," "progress," "development," or the
like, that electorally seeks (and receives) the supportof a broad spectrum of voters that
extends the party'sreach well beyond thatof one social class or religious denomination,and
26

RobertH. Dix
that develops ties to a variety of interest groups instead of exclusively relying on the
organizationaland mobilizationalassets of one (such as labor unions).
In short, whereas the catch-allpartycame into prominencein Europein the postindustrial
era of developmentand in the wake of a politics substantiallystructuredby partieswith their
principalroots in, and appealsto, one or anothersocial class (or religious denomination),the
Latin Americancatch-all partyhas surged to the front as the preeminentparty form during
the industrializingstage of development and in lieu of (prior to?) the emergence of class
partiesof the Europeanstripe.'2
Apart from broad characteristicsthat together mark them as catch-all,'3 there are, to be
sure, distinctions among Latin American catch-all parties as well. Some are essentially
personalistic instrumentsof caudillos, often but not necessarily military in background.
Examples include Argentina's Peronists, Peru's National Odrifsta Union (UNO), the
political vehicle of formermilitarydictatorGeneralManuel Odria, and Ecuador'sNational
Velasquista Federation(FNV), the party that served as the political instrumentof the late
Jose MariaVelasco Ibarra.Still others tend to be more structuredand enduring,with a more
consistent democratic vocation. The programs and ideologies of such parties, while
sometimes couched initially in dogmatic terms, very quickly become highly pragmaticin an
effort to attractbroad, multiclass supportand confront the real problems of governing.14
Examples are numerous, but include Peru's APRA, Venezuela's DemocraticAction (AD),
Costa Rica's Party of National Liberation(PLN), and the Dominican RevolutionaryParty
(PRD). Mexico's Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) and Bolivia's National
RevolutionaryMovement (MNR) (at any rate prior to its fragmentation)would also fit this
category of catch-all party. Yet a third type of Latin American catch-all party tends to be
squarelybased on the middle class and to be led by uppermiddle class professionals. In fact,
it may begin as a "bourgeois" party. But when such parties successfully reach out to
peasants, workers, or slum dwellers, as Chile's ChristianDemocratsdid in the 1960s, or to
a broaderelectorate, as Argentina'sRadicalshave in the 1980s underthe leadershipof Raul
Alfonsin or as Peru's PopularAction Party (AP) once did underformerpresidentFernando
Belatinde Terry, they go beyond a single-class constituency to become genuine catch-all
parties.
Notwithstandingthe differences among them, all merit the designation catch-all in that
they are pragmaticor eclectic in program and ideology, multiclass in their support, and
oriented to broad-basedelectoral appeals that go beyond the mobilization of a committed
constituency. In contradistinctionto the pattern of western party development, catch-all
parties, ratherthan the class-mass party, have generally been the immediate successors to
traditionalelite-centeredparties and politics in Latin America.
The Evidence
Electoralreturnsfrom a varietyof countries--some of it based on ecological evidence, some
on survey data-as well as evidence on the social composition of party leadershipconfirm
the general argument.
In Venezuela, two parties, the social democratic AD and the social ChristianCOPEI,
have togetherwon at least 85 percentof the vote since 1973. Yet demographicvariablesdo
27

ComparativePolitics October 1989

not account for the voting intentionsof the Venezuelan electorate. If one were to select at
randomone hundredHerrera(COPEI)supportersand place them in a room, and then repeat
this procedurewith Pinerua (AD) supporters,the two groups would look very similar."5
Polls in two states (one carried by AD, the other by COPEI) prior to the 1978 election
showed each party to be favored by a significant proportionof each economic stratum:no
less than 25 percentand no more than45 percentfor either partyin every one of four social
categories (upper, middle, working, and poor).'6 Clearly, both qualify as catch-all parties.
Similarly, a 1976 survey in Costa Rica found that voting for the NationalLiberationParty
(PLN), that country's dominant party, was only slightly related to such variables as
rural-urbanresidence, housing conditions (a surrogate for social class), and age. Party
identificationtied to events of the brief 1948 civil war appearedto be a far better predictor
of the PLN vote.7
Even such parties as Argentina's Peronists (today formally known as the Justicialist
Party), while perhapsappealingdisproportionatelyto the workingclass, are, when looked at
more closely, in reality quite heterogeneousand genuinely multiclass. Thus between 26 and
49 percentof the lower middle class (in the federal capital) voted for Peronistcandidatesin
the five elections between 1960 and 1973. In fact, the proportionof the upper middle class,
as well as of the upperclass, voting for Peronrangedas high as 31 and 30 percentrespectively
in September 1973. The Radicals, too, though getting somewhat more support from the
middle class (both lower and upper) than elsewhere, ranged ratherevenly across the social
spectrum,with 22 percentof the working class vote and 28 percentof the upper class vote
in the September 1973 election.'8
The leadershipof catch-all partiesconfirms their socially eclectic nature. Some, such as
Argentina's Peronists, Colombia's ANAPO, Peru's National Odrifsta Union, and the
short-livedmovement that adheredto the political bannerof formerChilean dictatorCarlos
Ibdifiezdel Campo in the 1950s, were not only led by formermilitaryofficers but, at least in
their formativestages, had a numberof active or retiredmilitaryofficers in other prominent
leadershippositions.19
Landownersand businessmen have also made up significant proportionsof the national
leadershipof many catch-allparties. For the Peronists, 12 percentof theirlegislatorsin 1946
and 20 percent in 1963 were landowners,20while industrialistswere among the prominent
confidants and advisers of Peron's first regime, despite its allegedly working-class base.21
While Venezuela's AD drew disproportionateelectoral strengthfrom ruralareas as well as
from organized labor, especially during the 1960s, its founders and top leadershipcadres
have largely been comprised of lawyers, educators, medical doctors, and professional
politicians.22Bolivia's MNR in its heyday showed a similar pattern.23
Some scholars, like Gliucio Ary Dillon Soares, have argued that the politics of
developmentare the politics of class and ideology and that Brazil duringthe years 1946-64,
priorto a militarycoup that restructuredthe party system, was a case in point. Thus in the
election of 1960 there was a clear and consistent tendency for voter preferences for the
National Democratic Union (UDN) to decline and for the Brazilian Labor Party (PTB) to
increaseas one "descended"the occupationalscale from persons with professionaland high
level administrativejobs to unskilled manualworkers. At the same time, it should be noted
that neitherthe PTB nor the UND found majorityfavor in any social groupingin what was
then a genuinely multiparty system and that the support of each was in reality quite

28

RobertH. Dix
heterogeneous.Thus among manualsupervisoryworkersthe UDN held 32.5 percentof the
party preferences, and the PTB only 28.5 percent. Indeed, the UDN had more than 18
percent supportamong "unskilled manual" workers and more than 20 percent among the
"skilled manual"category, while the PTB had over 10 percentof the electoral allegiance of
the top two social categories.24In fact, ratherthan a class party in any usual sense, and
despite its name, the PTB was essentially a vehicle by which such elitist politicians as
Getulio Vargas and Joao Goulart sought to control organized labor to the government's
advantage. The most heterogeneous among the major parties, the PTB, attractedwealthy
landowners,middle level governmentemployees, artisans,membersof the new urbanupper
class, and leftist intellectuals, as well as an importantrural following in the states of
Amazonas and Rio Grandedo Sul.25
Following the end of military rule in 1985, the Party of the Brazilian Democratic
Movement (PMDB) has at least temporarilybecome the overwhelminglypreponderant(and
clearly multiclass) party in Brazil, winning more than half the seats in the chamber of
representativesin the election of 1986. Meanwhile, the heirs to the traditionof the old PTB
have divided into two parties, while a third, more authenticallyWorkers' Party (PT), has
formed as well.26 None has so far prosperedelectorally.
Partiessuch as Argentina'sPeronistsand Brazil's PTB have surely had something of the
class party about them, notably in the disproportionatesupportreceived from the working
class. Yet the heterogeneity of such parties-both in their electoral support and in their
leadership--andthe failureof the majorityof the workingclass to supportthem clearly mark
them as something other than a typical Europeanworking-class party. Often they can be
bettercategorized as catch-all partiesin Kirchheimer'smeaning of the term.
Indeed, evidence concerning the social base and leadership of party after party-with
Peru's APRA, Chile's ChristianDemocrats, and Mexico's PRI only the most prominent
among them-could be invoked by way of furtherdemonstratingthat throughoutmost of
Latin America the catch-all party has tended to preempt the class-mass party as the
predominantparty form.
Latin America's Non-Catch-All Parties
There are of course a numberof non-catch-allparties in Latin America in the 1980s. They
include the Communistparties of the hemisphere, as well as a myriad of Marxist variants
and splintergroupsthatretaina highly ideological content and directtheirappealsespecially
to workers, although sometimes to peasants or nonproletarianslum dwellers as well. The
Communists are the single party in Cuba and, prior to the 1973 coup that brought the
militaryto power, were an importantpresencein Chile, regularlywinningbetween 11 and 16
percentof the vote in congressionalelections in the years between 1961 and 1973.27 Some
might also wish to classify Nicaragua'sSandinistasas a Marxistpartydominantin its system,
although its membershipand appeals are broaderthan those of most class-mass parties.
Elsewhere, although Communistparties exist--legally or not--in every country, they are
generally marginalto electoral politics.
There is also a scatteringof "bourgeois"partiesthat appeal largely to business or middle
class constituencies, some strictly regional or provincial parties (Argentina has had a
29

ComparativePolitics October 1989

number, for example), occasional parties representingvarious narrowly defined issues or
causes, and a host of partiescenteringon the ambitionsof an individualor clique that make
little real effort to develop a broad-basedappeal. Parties such as these generally have been
either quite small or ephemeralor both.
Partiesof rathergreatersignificancethatalso do not fall strictlyinto the catch-allcategory
are for the most part of one or two types. The first is the traditional"vertical" party that
continues to dominatesuch political systems as the Colombian, Uruguayan,Honduran,and
Paraguayan.Yet in key respects they resemble catch-all parties, or provide a functional
surrogatefor them. They are nonideological and pragmatic,and they successfully mobilize
the supportof a broadarrayof groups and social classes, from landownersand industrialists
to shopkeepers, peasants, and workers. They are perhapsless than catch-all, on the other
hand, in that at election time they rely more on the mobilizationof committedconstituencies
linked to the partyby clientelistic ties or by a kind of inheritedloyalty than on searchingout
new supportersamong the uncommittedand undecided.
A second varietyof partythatfalls outside the catch-all designationeven while exhibiting
certain of its attributesincludes certain parties or coalitions of the left. Some of these are
breakaways from the Communist party (for example, the Movement toward Socialism,
MAS, in Venezuela); others, like the Broad Front that has participatedin Uruguayan
elections both before and after the recent period of military rule (1973-84), contain the
Communists as one element but include as well such parties as the ChristianDemocrats.
Such parties or electoral fronts are a good deal more ideological than the typical catch-all
party and tend to appeal to a more restricted social base. Yet they often garner
proportionatelymore support from the middle and even upper classes than they do from
workers,28while populistic appeals often take precedenceover the mobilizationof union or
other class constituencies. In fact, Chile's Socialist Party, presumptively one of Latin
America's clearest examples of a class-mass party, has at various times in its history taken
on many of the attributesof populism.29These parties, too, then, although not strictly
catch-all parties, share certain of their qualities.
If not all significant Latin American parties fall under the catch-all rubric, neither are
catch-all parties equally dominant in all party systems. The traditional or so-called
continuousparty systems have had little place for them.30And the pre-1973 Chilean party
system (as well as its presumptivepostmilitary successor) saw a catch-all party like the
ChristianDemocratssharingthe political stage with significantpartiesof both working-class
and bourgeois orientation.
Yet it remains the case that the pragmatic, multiclass party is overwhelmingly the
predominantparty type in the Latin America of the 1980s. Indeed, in the great majorityof
Latin Americancountriesone or more such partiesgarnerthe largerproportionof the vote.
Aroundthem, more often than not, the whole system of partiesrevolves. Moreover, as we
have noted, even the traditionalvertical parties, as well as a varietyof putativeclass parties
or coalitions, manifest distinct catch-all aspects or tendencies. Thus it seems clear that the
preponderantparty form in contemporaryLatin America comes considerably closer to
reflecting the characteristicsof the catch-all party than to replicatingthe more ideological,
class-centeredmass parties of the West's initial decades of mass mobilization. If the mass
politics of an industrializingEurope tended to be exclusivist in class and group terms, in
Latin America they have instead been mainly inclusivist.

30

RobertH. Dix
Some Explanations
Why is it, though, that in Latin Americainclusivistpartieshave provento be the
and mass mobilizationinsteadof the
archetypicalpartiesof the era of industrialization
class-exclusivistpartiesmoretypicalof the westernexperience?Why, in short,has the
class-masspartyfailed, at least so far, to play muchof a role in the politicsof Latin
America?
It mightseemplausibleto suggestthattherehas beenan incentiveto formbroad-based
multiclasspartiesin LatinAmerica'spresidential
systemsin orderto maximizethe chances
of capturing
the all-important
office of chiefexecutive.Theremaybe somethingto this-a
comparisonof congressionaland presidentialelections does show some tendencyfor
to be fewerthanthenumberof competingcongressional
candidacies
presidential
partyslates
in thesameelection.Thedifferenceis notusuallygreat,however-the incentiveto coalesce
is seldom strongenoughto preventmultiplecandidaciesfor the office of president."3
Moreover,suchcoalescenceas does occuris usuallytemporary,
joiningdistinctpartiesfor
electoralpurposesonly, and does not as a rule lead to the long-termmergerof parties.
Politicalexplanations
mustin this case, it seems,give way to sociologicalones.
suchas relativeaffluenceandthe absenceof feudalismandrigid
However,explanations
statusbarrierspriorto the adventof industrialization--among
the explanationsused to
accountfor theabsenceof classpartiesin the UnitedStates32-cannotverywell be usedto
accountfor the relativeweaknessof suchpartiesin LatinAmerica.Neitheraffluencenor
relativesocialequalitycanbe saidto havebeenhallmarks
of theLatinAmericancondition.
Certainly,at least a numberof the LatinAmericancountriesare urban,industrial,and
literateenoughto havesizable,articulate
workingclassespotentiallycapableof formingthe
basisof class-centered
politicalparties.To takeonly the "uppermiddleincome"countries
amongthemby WorldBankcriteria(Chile,Brazil,Panama,Uruguay,Mexico,Argentina,
and Venezuela),they rangein the mid 1980s from 69 to 85 percenturban(exceptfor
Panama,whichis only 50 percenturban).The comparable
rangefor today's"industrial
marketeconomies"is 56 percent(Austria)to 92 percent(GreatBritain).33
Contemporary
LatinAmericais thereforevirtuallyas urbanas thenow-developed
West,andcertainlymore
so thanthe Westwas at a comparable
stageof industrialization.
Data on industrialemploymentfor 1980, meanwhile,show that between25 and 34
percentof the laborforce in the sameLatinAmericancountriesis employedin industry
(againwith Panamaas an exceptionat 18 percent).The comparablerangefor today's
"industrialmarketeconomies"is 29 to 44 percent,a meaningful,yet hardlydrastic,
difference.34
thanthoseof the
Thus,whileLatinAmerica'sworkforceis less "industrial"
"industrial
of industrial
workersin atleasta numberof theLatin
economies,"theproportion
Americancountriesis surely high enough to sustain class-masspartiesof the kind
characteristic
of earlierstagesof the West'sindustrialization.
Thenatureandtimingof socialmobilization
in LatinAmericahasnonethelessbeenquite
differentfromthatof Europe.Whereasin the industrialized
Westthose employedin the
and other
secondarysector, in industryand relatedoccupations,succeededagricultural
in LatinAmericathe tertiaryor
primarysectoremploymentas numericallypredominant,
servicesectorhas doneso. Secondarysectoremployment
has neverpredominated
in Latin
31

ComparativePolitics October 1989

America, and presumablynever will; as agriculturalemploymentdeclines, the service sector
has expanded more rapidly. The massive inmigrationto Latin America's cities in recent
decades has to some extent found employmentin industry,of course, but domestic services,
(often temporary)constructionwork, and petty entrepreneurshiphave absorbed the bulk.
The more advanced countries of today's Latin America, still far from fully industrial,yet
with the agriculturalsector a rapidly diminishing proportionof the work force, have seen
their service sectors reach proportionsapproachingthose of the postindustrialWest.35
Individuals so employed are much less susceptible to union organization and
class-oriented political appeals in the western sense than are industrialworkers. Indeed,
evidence from a number of Latin American (and other) countries shows that the urban
migrants, so often residents of the shantytownsthat ring the burgeoningcities, tend to see
their present and futurein terms of individual, ratherthan class or group, mobility, thereby
adheringto what AlejandroPortes has called a "migrantethic."36 Their demands tend to
center on acquiringa bit of land on which to constructa dwelling and on such amenities as
sewers and transportationfor their barrios,ratherthan on grievances against a factory boss,
much less againstthe capitalistsystem itself. Such is not the kind of social situationin which
class solidaritythrives.
The union movement, moreover, even where it has been quite large and robust, as in
Argentinaand Venezuela, has been socially very heterogeneous,containinghigh proportions
of white collar workers.The latterare not necessarilyless militant-the contraryis often the
case-but the diversity of perspectives and of class outlooks of, say, teachers, government
employees, and metallurgical workers has a tendency to dilute the kind of tightly knit
working-classsubculturesthat once flourishedin the industrialcountries. Thus in Argentina
as of 1970 only four of the largest seventeen unions were industrial(metallurgical,textile,
garment, and automotive workers), one was comprised of railroad workers, and two of
workersin construction.All of the others were either white collar unions (including two of
the three largest, teachers and commercial employees) or workers and employees of
governmentor services of various kinds.37
In some countries the campesinos have been politically mobilized as well, almost in
tandem with the industrialproletariat,in societies where agriculturalemployment, though
declining, is still important.Indeed, a number of the catch-all parties--Venezuela's AD,
Mexico's PRI, and Bolivia's MNR among them-have had peasants as a principal
organizationaland electoral supportbase, despite their close ties to industrialand mining
labor and the urbanmiddle class.
Takentogether, these facts make clear that the industrialworkingclass has comprisedbut
one element, and not necessarily the most important,available for mass mobilizationin the
newly industrializingcountriesof LatinAmerica. Generallyunderemployedurbanmigrants,
an expanding class of white collar workers, and campesinos have also constituted groups
availablefor mobilizationand electoral appeals. Any party that seeks to win a plurality, let
alone a majority, of the vote has had to encompass them, or a substantialpart of them, as
well, yet their demands and outlooks have seldom been those of a Marxian industrial
proletariat.
Latin America's would-be industrialists and the modernizers among middle class
professionals were meanwhile impelled by their own weakness in competition with
traditionallanded and commercial elites and by their common interests in developmentto
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RobertH. Dix
seek political allies among such groups, therebyaddinganotheringredientto at least some of
the political coalitions we have termed catch-all parties. As noted earlier, such individuals
are frequentlyfound among the leaders of such parties in Latin America.
Still otherfactors might be adducedto help accountfor the weakness of class-mass parties
in Latin America and the correspondingprevalence of the multiclass catch-all partyduring
Latin America's industrializingphase, among them the fact that the working class tended to
be grantedthe suffragerelativelyearly and "fromabove," by elites seeking political allies or
pursuinga strategyof cooption, thus precludinga prolongedconsciousness-raisingstruggle
for political participation.38
Yet the fundamentaldeterminantof the difference in the types of partiesthrownup by the
twin processes of industrializationand the introductionof mass suffrage in Latin America
and the West, respectively, would seem to lie in the heterogeneous composition of the
"masses" in Latin America, in contrastto the high salience of class conscious industrial
workersin the West, and the consequentincentive for political leaders to form broad-based
parties to encompass them.
Therefore the situation of Latin American countries as late developers (or "late-late
developers," as Albert Hirschmanhas called them)," particularlythe telescoping of their
urbanizing and industrializingprocesses and the alliance of diverse groups and classes
behind certain broad goals of development and nationalism, seems best to account for the
contrastsin the natureof westernand LatinAmericanmass partiesduringthe early to middle
levels of their respective eras of industrialization.
Conclusion
We have arguedthat, broadly speaking, the developmentof Latin Americanparty systems
has diverged from that of the now-developed West in two fundamentalrespects. First,
whereas in the westerncase early patternsof cleavage and partydevelopmentcast the basic
mold for contemporaryparty systems, with the (albeit important)partisanmanifestationsof
the worker-employeecleavage subsequentlyappendedto them, in the Latin Americancase
this has been true only in a small minorityof instances (notably in Chile and Argentina).In
most Latin American countries the party past has been rendered largely irrelevantto the
present by history. The majority of Latin American party systems (here called
discontinuous) at best bear only traces of a past that precedes the contemporaryera of
economic development, urbanization,and universal suffrage. (On the other hand, in a few
Latin American countries with so-called continuous party systems the original form of the
partysystem has paradoxicallybecome set in concrete, as it were, seemingly resistantto the
impact of rapid economic and social change and broadenedpolitical participation.)
Our second principal argumenthas been that, when mass politics did appear in Latin
America, they tended to take the form of the inclusive, multiclass party of rathereclectic,
pragmaticideology and appeals. Even those systems where the partiesof an earlierera still
hold sway may be said to be dominatedby parties of a multiclass appeal and ideological
pragmatism,even while their origins and structuresmay differ from the purer versions of
catch-all parties. The parties of integration(or class-mass parties) so familiar in European
politics during its era of economic development and mass politics have, by and large, not

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ComparativePolitics October /989

appearedin Latin America. Our argumentthereforesupportsLeon Epstein's contentionthat
"large-membershipworking-class parties are a product occurringonly at certain stages of
social development in certain nations."4
Whereas Epstein saw such conditions as receding in contemporaryEurope,41 it may be
that in Latin America (as in the United States, albeit for different reasons) they have never
really arrived, and may not do so in the future. In fact, it might be suggested that the
catch-allpartieswhich Kirchheimersaw as having succeeded the class-mass partyin postwar
Europe in tandem with the advent of "postindustrial"society simply appeared in Latin
America without the interveningstage, for reasons rooted in the natureand timing of Latin
America's process of late development.
By the same token, there are manifest differences between Europe's catch-all parties and
the Latin American versions of such parties, reflecting their distinct origins and styles and
above all the distinct functions they have performedin their respective societies and time
frames.
If most of the West's catch-all partieshave evolved from the socialist or religious parties
of the prewar period, most of Latin America's parties have been created de novo, the
consequenceof traumaticbreaksin theirpartysystems (althoughthe ChristianDemocratsof
Chile had their origin in the youth wing of the Conservative party, while Argentina's
Radicals, which emerged in the late nineteenthcenturyto challenge the dominantoligarchy
of the day, arguablyonly in the 1980s have evolved into a full-fledged catch-all party).
Typically, they have centeredaroundkey personalities, not only in their formativeyears,
but often for a long time thereafteras well. Victor Radl Haya de la Torre (APRA, Peru),
R6mulo Betancourt(AD, Venezuela), Jose (Pepe) Figueres (PLN, Costa Rica), and Juan
Peron (Justicialistsor Peronists, Argentina) are but a few of those founding fathers who
remained leaders of their parties for decades. Unusual in the western case, among Latin
America's catch-all parties-even the most institutionalized among them-dominant
personalitieshave frequentlyplayed majorroles and provideda significantcoheringelement
to otherwise quite opposing groups and classes.42Ratherthan confrontingthe problems and
conditions of postindustrialsocieties, the policies and programs of the Latin American
catch-all parties have tended to be the agents of economic development and to stress the
mobilization of "the people" above or across deep-seated cleavages in support of broad
national, even nationalist, goals. The Latin American versions of this type of party have
thereforetended to play a mobilizationalrole with respect to the entry of new groups into
political life, a role more akin to the class-mass partiesof western experience. Indeed, even
such non-catch-allpartiesor coalitions as Uruguay'sBroadFrontand Chile's Socialists have
at times shown marked tendencies toward class and group inclusion (that is, toward
populism), ratherthan toward the exclusivism of strictly class-based parties.
Most important, whereas Kirchheimer's catch-all parties were a largely postindustrial
phenomenon,reflecting the assuaging of class tensions and the consolidationof the welfare
state, along with a certain "bourgeosification" of the working class, Latin America's
catch-all partieshave emergedrelativelyearly in the industrializingprocess and in the initial
stages of mass politics.
We end by affirming the conclusion of Ergun Ozbudun, summing up a volume that
examinedcompetitiveelections in a varietyof developing countries:far from being confined
to postindustrialsocieties, "catch-allpartiesseem to be the norm, ratherthan the exception,

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

NOTES
I wish to thank my colleague John Ambler as well as two anonymousreadersfor their perceptive substantiveand
editorial suggestions on the draft of this article.
1. Seymour M. Lipset and Stein Rokkan, "Cleavage Structures, Party Systems, and Voter Alignments: An
Introduction,"in Seymour M. Lipset and Stein Rokkan, eds., Party Systems and VoterAlignments(New York: The
Free Press, 1967), pp. 1-64.'
2. Cf. WorldBank, WorldDevelopmentReport1987 (New York:OxfordUniversityPress, 1987), pp. 202-3. Latin
America in the context of this article encompasses the nineteen independentcountriesof the western hemispherewith
an Iberianheritageand colonial background.
3. Of course, this is not literally the beginning of all cross-national study of party systems in Latin America.
However, seldom have such studies sought explicitly and systematicallyto addressthe questionsraised here, and none
of which I am aware has endeavored, except perhaps in passing, to analyze the evolution of Latin American party
systems in juxtapositionto the experience of the West. Among the previous comparativestudies of Latin American
party systems is Ronald McDonald, Party Systems and Elections in Latin America (Chicago: Markham, 1971),
currently being revised and updated for a new edition. A comprehensive and very useful compilation of
country-by-country,party-by-partydescriptions is Robert J. Alexander, ed., Political Parties in the Americas:
Canada, Latin America and the WestIndies, 2 vols. (Westport:Greenwood Press, 1982).
4. The classic statementof the tentativenessof Latin Americanpolitical systems is Charles Anderson, Politics and
Economic Change in Latin America (Princeton:Van Nostrand, 1967), chap. 4.
5. See Lipset and Rokkan, "Cleavage Structures."
6. Of course liberals and conservatives were not always consistent in what they advocated. Liberals, for example,
once in power, often became staunchpromotersof central authority,in practiceat least, if not in doctrine. Moreover,
there were indeed conservative merchantsand liberal landowners. In fact, the very designations conservative and
liberal at times appearedto be mere labels, adopted by one or another caudillo in order to enhance his image or
legitimacy.
7. Conservativesand Liberals (with their various factions and permutations)were by 1857 supplementedby the
Radicals (much in the French traditionof that designation), then by the Democrats, a small "petit bourgeois" party
(1887), the Communists(1921), the Socialists (1933), and much later, in part as a breakawayof the Conservatives'
youth wing, the Christian Democrats, not to mention a myriad of other, mostly ephemeral, parties of varying
ideological hues. The Conservativesand Liberals merged to help form the National Party in 1966.
8. In a case like Brazil, such traumatic interruptionhas occurred several times, first when the Liberals and
Conservativesof the empire disappearedwith the adventof the republicin 1889, then when the dictatorshipof Getulio
Vargas put an end to the Old Republic in the 1930s, and again when the authorsof a militarycoup broughtan end to
the party system of the Second Republic in 1964 and effectively decreed a two-party system comprised of a
governmentparty and an opposition. In an effort to divide its opposition the militarysubsequently(1979) opened the
system to a variety of parties that have competed undercivilian rule since 1985.
9. See RiordanRoett, Brazil: Politics in a PatrimonialSociety, rev. ed. (New York:Praeger, 1978), pp. 65 and 69.
Despite the name, the PSD was not a social democraticparty in the Europeansense.
10. Paul H. Lewis, Paraguay underStroessner(ChapelHill: Universityof NorthCarolinaPress, 1980), pp. 145-50.
For a comparablediscussion concerning Colombia and its "hereditaryhatreds"that led to some 200,000 deaths in
interpartisanviolence as late as 1946-1966, see RobertH. Dix, The Politics of Colombia (New York: Praeger, 1987),
pp. 92-94. For Uruguay see Juan Rial, "The UruguayanElections of 1984: A Triumphof the Center," in Paul W.

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Drake and EduardoSilva, eds., Elections and Democratizationin Latin America, 1980-1985 (San Diego: Center for
Iberianand Latin American Studies, University of California, San Diego, 1986), pp. 262--64.
11. For these terms see, respectively, SigmundNeumann,ModernPolitical Parties (Chicago:Universityof Chicago
Press, 1956); Otto Kirchheimer, "The Transformationof the Western European Party Systems," in Joseph
LaPalombaraand Myron Weiner, eds., Political Parties and Political Development(Princeton:PrincetonUniversity
Press, 1966), pp. 177-200; and Leon Epstein, Political Parties in Western Democracies (New Brunswick:
Transaction, 1980). Analogous in some respects were parties like Germany's Catholic Zentrum, where religion
replaced social class as an integratingforce.
12. The classic depiction of the catch-all party is found in Kirchheimer.I do not mean to imply that there were no
importantpartieswith a multiclass following in prewarEurope(for example, Great Britain's Conservatives), nor that
all of Europe'sputativeclass partiesappealedalmost exclusively to the industrialworkingclass (France'sSocialists did
not, for example). Rather, tendencies and contrasts are at issue, the central question being why Latin America has
failed to develop sizable Communistparties or such ideological, working-class-orientedparties as the prewar Social
Democratsof Sweden or Germanyand the Laborparties of Great Britain and Norway.
13. The use of the term catch-all is not critical here, as long as the point is carriedthat Latin America's mass parties
tend to be cross-class and nonideologicalin nature.Some Latin Americanistsmight preferthe term populist to refer to
many (althoughperhapsnot all) such parties.
14. For an excellent example of this process with regardto Peru's APRA, see FrederickB. Pike, TheModernHistory
of Peru (New York: Praeger, 1967), and GrantHilliker, The Politics of Reformin Peru: The Aprista and Other Mass
Parties (Baltimore:The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971).
15. Robert E. O'Connor, "The Electorate," in Howard Penniman,ed., Venezuelaat the Polls (Washington, D.C.:
AmericanEnterpriseInstitute, 1980), pp. 86-87.
16. Ibid., pp. 80-81.
17. Mitchell A. Seligson, "Costa Rica and Jamaica," in Myron Weiner and Ergun Ozbudun, eds., Competitive
Elections in Developing Countries(Washington,D.C.: AmericanEnterpriseInstitute, 1987), p. 171.
18. Peter G. Snow, Political Forces in Argentina, rev. ed. (New York: Praeger, 1979), pp. 36-39.
19. See Robert H. Dix, "Populism:Authoritarianand Democratic," Latin American Research Review, 20 (1985),
33.
20. Snow, p. 32.
21. Jose Luis de Imaz, Los Que Mandan (Albany: State University Press of New York, 1970), p. 17.
22. John W. Martz, Accidn Democrdtica (Princeton:PrincetonUniversity Press, 1966), pp. 195ff.
23. ChristopherMitchell, The Legacy of Populism in Bolivia (New York: Praeger, 1977), pp. 17-19 and 26-28.
24. Glducio Ary Dillon Soares, "The Politics of Uneven Development," in Lipset and Rokkan, eds., p. 187.
25. Roett, Brazil, p. 67.
26. Most of the PT's leaders are blue collar workers, a rare occurrencein Latin America; see MargaretE. Keck,
"Great Expectations:The Worker's Party in Brazil (1979-1985)," paper preparedfor the ThirteenthInternational
Congress of the Latin AmericanStudies Association, Boston, October 1986.
27. Arturo Valenzuela, Origins and Characteristicsof the Chilean Party System: A Proposal for a Parliamentary
Form of Government, Working Paper (Washington, D.C.: The Wilson Center Latin American Program, 1985),
Table 1.
28. Thus O'Connorfound in a two-provincestudy of the 1978 Venezuelanelection that, while 8 percenteach of the
upper and middle strata supportedthe left, only 6 percent of the working class and 3 percent of the poor did so
(O'Connor, p. 81). CharlesG. Gillespie found a similar patternfor Uruguay;see his "Activists and Floating Voters:
The Unheeded Lessons of Uruguay's 1982 Primaries,"in Drake and Silva, eds., p. 234.
29. See Paul W. Drake, Socialism and Populism in Chile, 1932-52 (Urbana:University of Illinois Press, 1978). In
1952, for example, the majoritywing of the divided Socialists, togetherwith an eclectic arrayof parties and political
"movements," backed the presidentialcandidacy of former militarydictator(1927-31) Carlos Ibfilez del Campo.
30. A conspicuous, if short-lived, exception to this generalizationflourishedin Colombia in the late 1960s and early
1970s. The National PopularAlliance (ANAPO), essentially the political vehicle of former dictatorGeneralGustavo
Rojas Pinilla, won 39 percent of the vote, and nearly the presidency, in 1970 in a multicandidateelection with a
populistic appeal and strong supportfrom the urbanmasses, plus the supportof a numberof ruralareas, all of them
disaffected from the then-reigningpower-sharingagreementbetween the Conservativeand Liberal parties called the
National Front. Significantly, and attesting to the strengthof traditionalparty loyalties in Colombia, ANAPO at its
peak functioned not as a formally separateparty (though it became one in 1971), but as a combinationof dissident

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Robert H. Dix
factions of the two major parties. When in 1970 Rojas Pinilla himself ran for president, he did so under the
Conservativelabel; see Robert H. Dix, "Political Oppositionsunder the National Front," in R. Albert Berry, Ronald
G. Hellman, and Mauricio Solatin, eds., Politics of Compromise(New Brunswick:TransactionBooks, 1980), pp.
140-64. ANAPO has since virtually faded from sight.
31. The cross-national variance is considerable in this respect. Pre-1973 Chile was at one extreme: there were
typically three or four presidentialcandidatesbut many more congressionalslates, with many minor partiesexplicitly
or tacitly backingone of the majorpartycandidacies. In Peruin 1980, on the otherhand, therewere fifteen presidential
candidaciesand fifteen congressionalslates; cf. SandraL. Woy-Hazelton, "The Returnof PartisanPolitics in Peru,"
in Stephen M. Gorman, ed., Post-RevolutionaryPeru (Boulder: Westview Press, 1982), p. 55. More typical than
either of these cases are Costa Rica and Venezuela, where the two leading candidatesas a rule garner8-10 percent
more of the vote than do their respective congressionalslates and there are usually two or three more parties seeking
representationin congress than there are presidentialcandidates.
32. Cf. Epstein, Political Parties, chap. 6.
33. World Bank, WorldDevelopmentReport 1987, p. 267.
34. Ibid., p. 265.
35. Ibid.
36. AlejandroPortes, "Urbanizationand Politics in Latin America," Social Science Quarterly,52 (December 1971),
697-720; see also Joan M. Nelson, Migrants, Urban Poverty, and Instability in Developing Nations (Cambridge,
Mass.: HarvardCenter for InternationalAffairs, 1969).
37. JuanM. Villareal, "Changesin ArgentineSociety: The Heritageof Dictatorship,"in Monica PeraltaRamos and
Carlos H. Waisman, eds., From MilitaryRule to Liberal Democracy in Argentina(Boulder:Westview Press, 1987),
p. 95.
38. Cf. Epstein, concerningthe relevance of this factor in the case of the United States.
39. AlbertO. Hirschman,"Underdevelopment,Obstacles to the Perceptionof Change, and Leadership,"Daedalus,
97 (Summer 1968), 925-37.
40. Epstein, p. 132.
41. That the decline of class politics in Europemay have been exaggeratedis suggested in ibid., pp. 368-74; see also
Steven Wolinetz, "The Transformationof Western EuropeanParty Systems Revisited," West European Politics, 2
(January1979), 4-28.
42. France's Charlesde Gaulle was in a sense such a leader. However, he consideredhimself above, or apartfrom,
political parties, even those that adheredto his cause or invoked his name; he personally spent little time building or
leading his own party.
43. Ergun Ozbudun, "InstitutionalizingCompetitive Elections in Developing Societies," in Myron Weiner and
ErgunOzbudun, eds., p. 405.
44. Ibid.

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