Levitsky and Murillo 2005b

"Building Castles in the Sand? The Politics of Institutional Weakness in Argentina" Levitsky and Murillo, 21-44

in Levitsky, Steven, and Maria Victoria Murillo. 2005. Argentine democracy: the politics of institutional weakness. University Park, Pa: Pennsylvania State University Press.

•  Central argument OF THE BOOK: the major cause of Argentina's under-performance was persistent and widespread institutional instability (21)
• The Origins of Institutional Instability
• between 1955 and 1972 Argentina politics were deadlocked (24)
• one the one hand, allowing Peronist party to compete in elections woul certainly result in Personit victory, which was unacceptable to many elites
• yet, on the other hand, keeping the Peronists out of elections was a major destabilizing influence
• eventually military leadership had to allow Peron back into power (25), then another military regime
• The brutality and dramatic failure of the military regime discredited the military in the eyes of the public (26)
• gave rise to broad public support for liberal democracy (Catterberg 1990
• and gave rise to a powerful human rights movement
• change in office between Alfonsín and Menem was first time democratic change of hands, but even then Alfonsín resigned early because of economic crisis, and there was a lot of institutional fluidity
• Argentina under Menem
• Menem abandoned traditional Peronism, set off on neoliberalism (27)
• among the fully democratic countries, Argentina carried out the most rapid and far-reaching reforms
• among the countries with the deepest crisis and radical reform, Argentina was the most democratic
• BUT many of the policy arrangements made by Menem proved to be economically unsustainable
• AND Menem did little to strengthen political institutions, and in same cases he weakened them
• The Politics of Radical Economic Reform: Why Menem was successful
• Menem's ability to end hyperinflation increased public support for him/his policies (28)
• The strength of the PJ helped Menem keep a solid electoral base
• the PJ's hegemony in the popular sectors limited possibility of anti-reofrm appeals (29)
• PJ's close ties to organized labor gave union leaders a stake in limiting opposition from working class
• Menem gave side payments and policy concessions to losers (30)
• unions protected pro-labor law
• industrialists were giving help in competing for privatization contracts
• governors wooed by putting off provincial budgetary adjustments
• Encroachment on legistlative and judicial perogatives
• lots of executive decrees
• court-packing and impeachments
• PROBLEMATIC LEGACIES (31)
• convertability left governmetn without tools to rspond to economic shocks or erosion of competitiveness
• public debt grew a lot
• reforms generated large-scale social exclusion (and middle class shrunk
• Democratic Institutions under Menem
• Menem frequently circumvented legistlaive process using decrees (32-33)
• M allowed little judicial independence (33)
• executive accountability decreased, allowing corruption to increase
• widespread perception of corruption and abuse eroded the credibility of Argentina's representative institutions (35)
• Party system and Political representation in the 1990s
• Alianza able to win on anti-corruption ticket (37)
• mostly because middle and upper-middle classed had little faith in credibility of government
• The Post-Menem Era
• Alianza failed to clean up politics (37)
• actually got caught up in its own curruption scandal, which it didn't handle very well (37-38)
• Alianza did poorly in economic arena
• inherited a recession *38)
• convertibility left them without policy tools, and convertibility was too popular to be touched
• in 1999 legislative vote 22% cast spoiled/blank votes
• three Presidents in 2 weeks
• third was Duhalde, who ended convertibility (39)
• economic plunged into chaos
• poliitcal system and parties pushed into crisis as well
• FREPASO and UCR disintegrated (40)
• 2003 elections:
• military made no move to intervene
• despite anger, no anti-establishment outsider received more than 2% of the vote (41)
• PJ finished 1-2-3 in presidential vote, all other partis wiped out
• PJ proved remarkably resilient
• Kirchner 1
• concentrated power in the executive (43)
• but his initiatives were more transparent and oriented toward institutional integrity
• rst of the story yet to be seen (chapter form 2005)....