Levitsky 2003b

Levitsky, Steven. 2003. Transforming Labor-Based Parties In Latin America: Argentine Peronism In Comparative Perspective. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.

• Chapter 1: 
• The PJ's flexibility contributed to its adaptation and survival in teh neoliberal era (3)
• the weakly institutionalized labor-party link permitted the traditional mechanisms f labor participation in the party to be quickly dismantled
• the absence of stable career paths and secure tenure patterns meant it was easy to get rid of old-guard leaders
• the absence of stable norms of accountability in the party allowed Menem the freedom to design and implement a radical economic program (3-4)
• the decline of postwar ISI brought on a programmatic and a coalitional challenge to labor based parties (5)
• programmatic: slowdown of economic growth, globalized trade, and debt-crisis helpers (IMF, World Bank) made it very difficult for parties to enact policy that wasn't orthodox neoliberal (5-6)
• coalitional: economic changes hanged class, labor had fewer votes to trade (6)
• Look at party change (organizational change) in terms of a two-level, nested game, in which party leaders are located at the intersection of environmental and intraorganizational dynamics (12)
• leaders who seek to increase their power must respond to changes in the external environment, but their strategies to do so are mediated by the power game within the party and the party's strucutre
• "Yet the flexibility-stability tradeoff may not be as steep as the literature suggests.  ... Although the Pj is unquestionably a mass party, its mass organization is informal rather than bureaucratic, and the rules and procedures that govern the internal life of the party are fluid, contested, widely manipulated, and often ignored." (14)
• "A central claim of this book is that routinization limits the capacity of organizations to respond quickly to environmental challenges, and that weakly routinized organizations may be better equipped to adapt to rapid environmental change than highly routinized organizations." (18)
• routinization affects strategic flexibility in three ways: (19)
• leadership renovation (ease of changing old-guard)
• leadership autonomy
• structural pliability, or ease of changing a party's structure
• Chapter 2
• This chapter sets up the book's central argument,, which is that the PJ's fluid internal structure can be traced to its formative phase (36)
• but also, it's proscription after the first coup meant that it was highly decentralized, had a "movement" structure, which continues to this day (36-37)
• decentralization during proscription period meant peronist movement essentailly in anarchy, allowed for many autonomous units to self-direct, also allowed for groups to seek very divergent goals, from leftist to conservative, all under name of peronism (41-43)
• "partyization" occurred during teh 1980s, where the movement focused mainly on winning elections (minus a few revolutionary groups and the Ubaldinist labor unions), but it did not result in routinization (49-57)
• chapter 3;
• the PJ is an "informal mass party" (59-60)
• mass because: it maintains an extensive membership (60)
• it has a dense organizational strucutre, partucularly in working class neighborhoods (61)
• it has lots of informal structures that help it embed deeply into working-and lower-class neighborhoods (62)
• the party is informal (doesn't rely on bureaucracy), segemented (few insitutionalized horizontal ties between groups) and decentralized (65-76)
• chapter4: populism in crisis: environmental change and party failure, 1983-1985
• chapter5: union-party links: see levitsky 2003a
• in peripheral provinces where hte uniosn were weak, union leaders had only gotten their tercio thanks to the good will of hte party bsoses, so in the provinces it was much easier to dismantle this (114)
• the 25 organizations, which was allied with the Renovators, didn't demand any institutional linkages to the party, just assumed the renovadores would reward them. in the end, they didn't and the 1987 Congress did not establish any body/org to represent labor inside the party. party leaders ended up choosing who the few remaining labor representatives would be  (116-118)
• int eh face of union politics, some uniosn set up their own territorial based agrupaciones, but these end up being fixed investments which helps entrench teh system of union political fragmentation (131)
• chapter 6: Menemism and Neoliberalism: Programmatic adaptation in teh 1990s
•  chapter 7: the view from below, party activists and the transformation of base-level peronism
• argument: two factors that allowed teh PJ to maintain its activists base even as it programmatically changed (and experience litlte intra-party dissent for this change) (186)
• increase access to state resources
• decentralized party structures
• the combo of sate resources and local autonomy allowed some local groups to engage in traditional peronist practices even as the national aprty abandonded them
• but by relying on state resources the personal, ideological, and union-based ties that had sustained local peronist organizations began to erode
• this left he party more reliant on state resources than it ever had been before
• chapter 8: the paradox of menemism: party adaptation and regime stability in the 1990s
• chapter 9: crisis, party adaptation, and democracy: argentina in comparative perspective