Varela 2013

Varela, P. (2013). Los sindicatos en la Argentina kirchnerista. Entre la herencia de los’ 90 y la emergencia de un nuevo sindicalismo de base. Revista Archivos de Historia del movimiento obrero y la izquierda, (2), 77-100.

• Introduction
• lots of scholars are suggesting growth of unions in the 2000s is the result of state-driven change in industrial relations (77)
• one problem with this is it overemphasizes the large, national, institutional scale, and ignores the very important role of conflicts and unions at the firm leve: internal commissions and bodies of delegados (77)
• secodn proble, it overemphasizes the polarization between the "new" unionism and the "old" unionism, when in fact these groups lots of similarities and have some ruptures
• the article has three hypotheses for debate:
• the strong recomposition of working class as a social and union thing after 2003 are thanks to the continuing of the exploitation begun in the 1990s (78)
• it is on this contradiction, strong unionism without change in exploitation, that has been teh foundation for strong unionism from the base
• the presents of younger workers and strong Trotskyite influences are altering unionism of the base in important ways
• Contradictions of a return
• the relegitimation of colecltive bargaining and negotiation at the high level has made workers realize how bad their conditions still are, and helped explain why Cristina had an anti-union turn after 2011 (78-9)
• between 2002 and 2004 there were a number of increases in minimum wages, negotiated directly between labor leaders and capital, though started by and arbitrated by the Néstor, these were mainly attempts to soothe people and get them money they lost during devaluations (79)
• 2004 was the real start of re-legit of unions, esp CGT and Hugo Moyano
• this happened due to economic growth, combined with growing union conflict due to the emergence of unionism of the base (80)
• this was new because there were lots of surprise conflicts started and led by delegados and leaders within the base openly against the higher up leadership of the union
• this article suggests that Moyano was helped, becamea  strategic ally of the Ks because unions of the base were already getting strong, and government wanted a way to channel that momentum, not the other way around (81-2)
• until 2011 the formula was crate peer groups and set wage ceilings (82-3)
• this sort of got disrupted in 2007 when the government started messing with statistics to cover up inflation (83)
• AND when unions outside of Moyano's circle started being repressed
• 2009 brought Cristina needing help of Moyano against Ag strike, financial crisis which made inflation go down, and strong conflict of the base at Kraft foods (84)
• this resulted in government not setting a limit on salary negotiations
• Kraft workers continued to fight, and a union thug from the Union Ferrovaria killed a militant from teh Partido Orbrero, whcih revealed the violence used by traditional unions (85)
• After 2011 Cristina began pushing back on unions, undoing some of the thigns that had made unions adn important political representation post-2003
• number of collective contracts went down in 2011
• suggests this happens because of inflation issues, and...
• break between CK and Moyano
• whie there was GDP growth in 2011, it shrank in 2012 (86)
• 2011 elections didn't have a lot of union candidates, but did have a lot of territorial candidates, which was teh start of the rupture between CK and Moyano
• in 2012 this caused a rupture among the major union confederations, ended up with 3 opositoras and 2 oficialistas
• in 2013, docentes demanded a 30% wage increase, and the Ministry of Trabajo arbitrarily closed discussions and just said they woudl get 22%
• since 2003 the growth of union strngth has run into the fact that labor precarity and fragmentation, both begun in 1990s, continues to happen (87)
• Ks made unions stronger at the top, but didn't roll back the gains won by capital during the 1990s
• all fo this came to a head when the economy started having trouble...before then wages could just be increased and keep people relatively happy without rolling back management power
• this is felt most often at the workplace, so conflicts happen at the workplaces more often (88)
• informality and work precarity continues during the 200s (88-89) with DATA
• because collective contracts DON'T talk about flexibilization liek they did in teh 1990s, it is fair to assuem that flexibilization continues (ie CCT shudl have rolled it back!) (90)
• lower unionization rate has more to do with the fact that unions are really engaging with their base (90-1)
• Younger workers aren't necessarily leftist, don't really have a lot of political connections
• but they grew up during the time of the resurgence of lefty groups into social and class struggles (92-3)
• but CTA has statsistics that note thigns like, in 2007, 14% of labor conflicts were undertaken without the presence of unions (93)
• leftist people, members of PTS and others, began winning elections to be delegados (94)
• conclusions
• the basic contradiction of the Ks is the increased power of uniosn whiels working conditions and exploitation remained exactly the same/unchanged (95)
• possible to see some sindicalismo de base as a possibility of unionism outside of Peronism (96)
• the question for the new generation is how to expand unions to include other groups, precariosu workers, desocupados, and how to inegrate lefties into the movement/create a new movement? (96)

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

Garay 2011

in Collier and handlin 2011

Focuses on GROUPS and ASSOCIATIONS, not people/participants

·         Union-linked associations are more likely to coordinate with other associations (262, )

o   Meaning associations linked to unions in Arg and Chile tend to be central in mobilizing associations and creating linkages across them

·         Party association linkages

o   Parties see these associations as possible electoral support (262,)

o   Associations tend to seek issue-based interactions with parties, meaning associations try to get things from parties

§  Arg and chile associatiosn support parties, peru supports candidates, and venzuela is multifaceted

·         Associations tend to not have links with corp unions, more with social movement orgs like CTA, and often (in Peru, Chile, and Arg) with public sectors unions (267)

·         Union connection makes little to no difference on the use of state resources, though union-linked associations are more likely to gain access to state resources (271-272)

·         Popular assocaitions and political parties:

o   Parties seek help during elections (276)

o   Associations have three types of connections, issue-based (one issue), candidate based (connected to candidate) or multifaceted (work with a party in multiple was in multiple arenas) (276-280) countries see a mix of these (278)

o   Overall suggests assocaitions weakness to clientelism MAY be overstated (I don’t buy it)

·         Arg and Chile show some continuity between old and new interest regimes (288)

Roberts 2012

• Introduction
• one the one hand, democratic regimes from the 1980s have proven remarkably durable adn resilient to crises (2)
• On the other hand, party systems have been far less stable
• Paradoxically, democratic consolidation has coincided with a crisis of representation and general disillusionment with the political establishment
• but this crisis affects different countries differently
• Critical junctures:
• neoliberal turn (3)
• reactive sequences against neoliberalism!
• Modes of political representation based in ISI were undermined by its collapse, specficially among the popular classes
• and party systems varied widely in their ability to channel these issues
• Broadly, these critical junctures dealigned parties, made their programmatic promises seem less sincere (especially thanks to bait and switch)
• Argument:
• when a populist/mass-based party undertook economic reform
• it often made the transition more politically viable
• but also dealigned the party from its constituents (4)
• when a right party undertook economic reform
• left party was able to channel dissent through the insittuions
• party alignment was "reinforced"
• in both cases, parties that undertook reforms were vulnerable to leftist challenges
• The Puzzle of Party System Stability in Latin America
• Presidentialized party systems may result in parties with unaccountable elites, ambiguous programmatic stands, but it doesn't help explain the wide variation in strength and durability of party systems (5)
• electoral competition has not stabilized party systems or crystallized partisan identities
• During neoliberal transition programmatic differentiation was tough, since there were such acute constraints on policy options available (7)
• by contrast, the left turn helped realign some of these party systems
• "neoliberal critical junctures and teh reactive sequences they spawned dislodged and reconfigured historic party systems, altering their programmatic alignments in was that heavily conditioned the stability ot partisan competition in the aftermath period" (8)
• Market Liberalization and Part system alignments during neoliberal critical junctures
• Critical junctures are designed to explain why similar types of political or economic challenges produce different, path dependent patterns of institutional change across a range of cases
• suggest neoliberal critical juncture from 1973-1998 (Chavez ended it) (9)
• it altered:
• the character and purpose of state power
• the patterns of association in civil society
• the ways in which societal interests and claims were articulated and represented in the political arena (Collier and Handlin 2009, Yashar 2005)
• Party systems before market adjustment: (10)
• labor mobilizing
• elitist (with clientelistic relations to popular sectors)
• these preconditions weighed heavily on results of critic juncture, but did not define them entirely
• three basic requirements of programmatic structuring of party systems
• parties must adopt relatively coherent stands on salient issues that divide teh body politic (11)
• policies adopted in office must bear resemblance to election platform
• bait and switch severs relationship between electoral verdicts and the content of public policy (12)
• there must be meaningful differences/policy alternatives between the competing parties
• often not true during ISI crisis
• The regionwide transition undermined all three of these basic conditions (13)
• lots of policy switching, left/populist parties went along with reforms, or did bait and switch (13)
• created internal party dissension among leftish parties
• often meant that popular sector connections to parties were severd, replaced with clientelistic relations (14)
• BUT if a conservative party initiated transition, and left remained in opposition, no dealignment
• Three possible outcomes: table on page 16
• parties aligned (contested liberalism), outcome was a durable party system (15)
• Brazil, Chile, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Uruguay
• Mexico, thanks to creation of PRD which replaced PRI as left
• ambiguously Nicaragua (17)
• dealigned (bait and witch), or neutral (no real left to contest) results on part system (neoliberal convergence), outcome was not a durable part system
• dealigned: Argentina, Bolivia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Peru, Venezuela
• Neutral: Colombia, Guatemala, Honduras, Panama, Paraguay
• contested liberalism allowed for dissent to be challenged through stable forms of electoral competition (17)
• neoliberal convergence resulted in systems susceptible to destabilizing reactive sequences
• 17-25 goes through cases and uses electoral data, etc to prove this story
• 
  

Roberts 2002

Roberts, Kenneth M. 2002. "Social Inequalities Without Class Cleavages in Latin America's Neoliberal Era". Studies in Comparative International Development (SCID). 36 (4): 3-33.

• Introduction
• Social inequality along class "fault lines" is unusually pronounced and appears to be growing (3)
• despite inequality growth and economic insecurity, parties are not cleaving the political arena along class lines, but are building cross-class platforms (4)
• this is especially true in Latin America, which is contiuning historical subordination of the popular classes
• though in the past class cleavages were important, after neoliberal turn party systems now are more elite dominated than before, and the elites dominate the popular classes through diffuse, multi-class forms of representation (5)
• Distinction between "segmented" and "stratified" cleavages
• segmented cleavages are constructed across class lines (ELITE parties)
• stratified cleavages are grounded in class consituencies or organizations (LABOR MOBILIZING parties)
• neoliberal critical juncture was hard on stratified parties, made them seek/create more segmented party structures (5-6)
• Argumetn is that neoliberal juncture realigned party systems across Latin America toward segmented structures (6)
• Economic Crisis, Strucutral Adjustment, and Deepening Social Inequalities
• Given teh growth of inequliaty, one could expect rejuvenation of class-based politics (7)
• but it's not happening
• early protests against neoliberalism were not sustaine
• the economic transition drove new wedges between different sectors of the lower classes, diffusing class cleavages
• Party Systems and Cleavage Structures in Latin America: Historical Patterns
• uses term from European scholars, class cleavages, where a cleavage must: differentiate a group, organize them for political representation, and generate a sense of collective identity (8) (citing Lipset and Rokkan 1967 and Bartolini and Mair 1990)
• this rarely happens so neatly in Latin America
• most economic identities are rather shallow
• labor-backed parties have always had to attract other support as well
• better definiton of segmented versus stratified cleavages (9)
• segmented cleavages may be grounded in social/cultural distinction, or the may be entirely political
• at 1900 modernization began creating a more diversified social structure (10)
• the mobilization of workers created intense class conflict
• nevertheless, class cleavages were never quite as durable in Latin America as the were in Europe
• nor, indeed, were parties organized only within one class...most were at least partially multi-class
• this meant that labor either supported historical parties, or became a major supporter of populist/cross-class parties (11)
• though populism did not generate strict class cleavages, it did create stratified fault lines that differentiated elite adn mass parties (12)
• but the impportance of labor unions as backers for populist and left parties at least meant that some stratficiation occurred in class cleavages for left and labor mobilizing parties
• for elite/traditional parties, the relationship with labor was usually patronage-based, and did not encapsulate voters within a party, could be more personalistic (113)
• labor movemetns were, thus, weaker in elite-party systems
• Countries with l abor-mobilizing parties tended to adopt more and deeper ISI measures, thus the neoliberal turn buffeted both socioeconomic and political connections between parties and popular sectors (14)
• Party Systems in the Transition from ISI to Neoliberalism
• Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Mexico were regional leaders in ISI, joined by Bolivia, Peru, Venzuela
• in all these coutnries, the state became the focal point of social deamnds (15)
• thus the fundamental change in development model (from ISI to neoliberalism), and its commensurate withdrawing of the state from development, posed the greater political and economic shock to parties with labor mobilizing party systems (16)
• (up to that point) the most stable electoral party systems are those that have eschewed the organization of class cleavages and are grounded in intra-elite schisms (Roberts pulls this back and makes a different claim in a 2012 article!) (18)
• Market reforms pose a threat to the resources available for clientelism, but they pose little threat to the segmented organizational logic (19)
• in contrast, beoliberalism produced sharp discontinuities in labor-mobilizing systems with stratified organizations
• the stratified logic have been undermined by the more individualistic nature of neoliberalism
• The Erosion of Class Cleavages in the Neoliberal Era
• Argentina, Chile, and Peru demonstrated (in the past) that all three dimensions of class cleavage can develop in Latin America (20-21)
• But the new economic model has thrown much of that into doubt (21-26)
• the new economic model creates dispersion and segmentation among workers, with only a few having stable jobs, which fragments the labor movement (22)
• unionization has also dropped, meaning unions have a smaller political voice
• many labor-based parties have relaxed their ties to labor (Levitsky 1998, 2001, 2003, Murillo 1997, 2001)(23-24)
• class has also been less important in determining voting patterns (24-25)
• The Transformation of Political Representation in Comparative Perspective
• Brazil seems the last labor-mobilizing party left, but class still hasn't been important recently as it has in the past for voting (26)
• there has been an erosion of stratified axes of electoral competition, and a reinforcement of segmented patterns
• labor unions remain political actors, but their ties to parties and state institutions have loosened, their access to policy-making has narrowed, and their voice has diminished (26-27)
• suggests their is a "re-oligarchization" of politics

Roberts 2007

"The Crisis of Labor Politics in Latin America: Parties and Labor Movements during the Transition to Neoliberalism". 2007. International Labor and Working-Class History. 72 (1): 116-133.

•  Introduction
• the neoliberal turn dislocated the mode of political representation of the popular (working) class(es), as this incorporation was rooted in the state-led development model (116)
•  domestic consumption was previoulsy the driver of the economy
• this meant that wages generally rose over time, and unions flourished (117)
• "An elective affinity existed, then, between strong developmentalist states, mass party organizations, and dense trade-union movements"
• the neoliberal disruption undercut organized labor both in the political realm and in teh workplace
• Party System Differentiation Under ISI: Elitist and Labor-Mobilizing Patterns
• elitist
• 19th century oligarchic parties (or new, elite-driven parties) (Colombia, Uruguay, Paraguay)
• attracted support from the popular classes but did not drive union creation/membership (118)
• Labor-mobilizing
• new parties (usually)
• party could be populist (Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Mexico, Peru, Venezuela) of leftist (Chile, Nicaragua after 1979)
• in these countries, level of trade union membership and degree of organizational concentration were much higher, which usually is read as meaning unions were much stronger in these places
• labor-mobilizing countires tended to have a deeper commitment to ISI (119), elitist countries didn't stray nearly as far from liberal economic development (120)
• the depth of ISI system also helps predict which countries made neoliberal turn last
• stabilization was frequently delayed until a deep crisis
• needed austerity measures were usually worse, "shock treatment"
• contractions, crises, and disequilibria were not as strong in elite countries(121)
• paradoxically, the places with teh strongest labor movements endured the deepest and most painful wage cuts, adjustment (122)
• But what were the political consequences?!
• Economic Crisis, Market Reform, and the Transformation of Political Representation
• after neoliberal adjustment, there was an erosion of the social alignments and organizational forms that distinguished elite and labor-mobilizing party systems (123)
• the groups (unions) that used to supply grassroots activists, identities, and loyal voters are now much weakers
• at the same time, mass media has become more prevalent
• NEW parties: top-down, largely detached from an increasingly individualized, independent, and more volatile electorate
• with the dominance of neoliberal thinking, party programs have converged a great deal (124)
• bait-and-switch occurrences by many left and populist parties in 1980s and 1990s meant:
• they were saddled with the political costs of the transition, and
• the transition weakened their traditional supporters (125)
• this has forced many of these parties to seek new connections with the electorate, and they tend to do so using patron-clientelism, leadership appeal, or political marketing (instead of offering to change the economic system)
• The Puzzle of Electoral Volatility in Latin America
• lots of intraregional differences in electoral volatility (126)
• volatility increased in the context of growing economic stability and democratic consolidation in the 1990s
• thus volatility is not explained by "tough economic times"
• party systems anchored in mass parties saw lots of dislocation in the 1980s and 1990s during transition, whereas elite party systems were relatively stable (127)
• BUT recent divisions in elite party states f Uruguay and Colombia suggest the elite/mass differentiation isn't perfect either
• Overall, it seems that voters just don't identify with any party nearly as strongly as they used to (128)
• this volatility is especially striking given that many of these parties had all the institutionalization that should have made them very stable (129)
• strong grassroots organizations
• linkages to social blocs
• as labor unions grew weaker and more detached from political parties, electoral competition became less polarize but also less programmatic, less grounded in popular interests, and more fluid and personalistic
• Conclusion
• "Latin America's widely noted 'crisis of representation' is, at least in part, a crisis of a particular type of socialpolitical representation" (130)
• the Left might be able to fix this, but it's a long way away from being able to do that/actually doing that (130-131)

Levitsky 2005

"Crisis and Renovation: Institutional Weakness and the Transformation of Argentine Peronism, 1983-2003" Levitsky, p181-206

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

• Introduction
• although the PJ is well-organized it's internal structures are weakly institutionalized, its lacks stable internal rules and bureaucracy (181)
• the PJs weakly institutionalized party-union linkages allowed reformers to dismantle traditional mechanism of labor participation (182)
• this enabled the party to 
• attract the middle class
• create a clientelistic relationship with the urban poor
• The fluidity of the PJ sent it into crisis in 2000-2001 along with the rest of the country, but this fluidity also allowed it to adapt and survive the crisis
• Institutionalization and Party Adaptation
• institutionalization creates stable expectations, rules of the game (O'Donnell 1994) (182)
• but institutionalization also inhibits organizational change (Zucker 1977) (183)
• they are sticky
• The PJ as a Weakly Institutionalized Party
• PJ is well-organized with deep roots in working- and lower-class society (184)
• but it lacks even a minimal bureaucratic structure
• in the years following Perón's death, no faction was able to impose an organizational structure or binding rules (185)
• The Renovators in the 1980s tried to create more rules, but essentially failed
• "We use the party statutes when they are useful. When they are not useful, we don't use them."
• Three areas of institutional weakness
• Weak leadership bodies (186)
• the party's national leaders are routinely ignored by lower-level branches and officeholders
• the government runs the party, especially when their is a seated executive
• Fluid Party Hierarchy
• politicians and those with power have often parachuted into top leadership/electoral positions  (187)
• in many provinces internal elections are negotiated or imposed by party bosses
• Loosely Structured party-union linkage
• 62 organizations and the tercio (188)
• The effects of weak institutionalization
• the PJ suffers from low levels of trust in the organization (188-189)
• the PJ is highly malleable, and may be changed quickly to line up with short-term goals of dominant actors (189)
• Pj experiences bandwagoning effect (190)
• PJ officeholders have substantial autonomy from the party
• Peronism's dual transformation int eh 1980s and 1990s
• Crisis:
• working class had eroded (191)
• debt crisis and exhaustion of ISI left the PJ without the ability to continue a statist program
• to adapt the PJ dismantle union-party inks and replaced them with clientelistic links
• labor participation had been based entirely on need of party leaders for the resources unions had (192)
• 62 orgs and tercio were often imposed by union leaders
• as PJ won office, politicians were able to use state resources instead of union resources
• Erosion of union influence enhanced the PJ's autonomy, allowing it to attract the middle class... (195)
• ...meanwhile it created clientelistic networks to maintain ties to urban poor in era of de-industrialization, and shrinking working class
• but clientelism generated political costs, as the Pj became the part of corruption (196)
• though most of the Party didn't agree with Menem and neoliberal turn, bandwagon was created since he had control over appointments to office/government (197-198)
• The Crisis
• The PJ's fluid structure meant the party had no unified response to the 2000 crisis, sending Pj into its own internal conflict/crisis (200)
• no one had enough power to find a unified program or to discipline party members (201)
• Menem and Duhalde were bitter enemies and fought over control of the party (202)
• this rivalry meant there was no agreement on primaries, candidates
• in 2003 PJ supported no presidential candidate, allowed all three to run outside the party (202-203)
• Kirchner's victory pushed the party to the center-left (204)
• even though the PJ had undertaken the neoliberal reforms themselves, the internal fluidity allowed this leftist, dark horse candidate (Kirchner) to rise and have a chance in the election
• Kirchner realigned the PJ with leftist politicians, progressive intellectuals, and humans rights groups (205)
• Conclusion
• Peronisms current coalition change seem to be more permanent (ie away from labor unions) (206)
• PJ remains the party of the poor, but will likely never again be a labor backed party

Wibbels and Roberts 2010

Wibbels, Erik, and Kenneth Roberts. 2010. "The Politics of Economic Crisis in Latin America". Studies in Comparative International Development. 45 (4): 383-409.

• Introduction
• Most quantitative models show that strong unions and powerful left parties are associated with severe economic crises (383)
• BUT some evidence that the combination of left parties and strong unions can actually alleviate inflationary crises
• crisis differ in depth, duration, and frequency (384)
• but crises also need to be analytically separated from neoliberal economic reforms (previous scholarship tends to conflate these things)
• authors examine three types of crises (385)
• inflationary
• growth
• fiscal
• Political conditions tested:
• are new democracies more vulnerable to crises?
• what effects do sub-regime variables have, including executive powers, party systems, and electoral competition?
• how organized/powerful is labor and the left?
• Early reporting of results:
• different types of crises are independent and have distinct political correlates
• neither powerful executives nor high levels of democracy are correlated with crisis events or duration
• strength of electoral left and labor are correlated to more frequent crises...
• BUT left in power + strong unions can facilitate early exits from crises
• Methodological considerations
• drawbacks to current literature
• economic crises are often conflated with economic performance (386)
• crises differ in depth and duration
• any attempt to relate crises to political factors needs to include factors that explain variation in severity and duration
• Crises vary in type
• are some type of governments more prone to certain types of crises?
• finally, really need to disentangle crises from neoliberal turn (387)
• explanation of their variables (387-388)
• The Political Determinants of Economic Crisis
• most of these hypotheses built off existing literature
• regime level of analysis:
• literature supports two hypotheses regard new democracies, combined to form this one hypothesis: (388-389)
• H1: Economic crises will be more severe and prolonged in new democracies (389)
• sub-regime level
• party system fragmentation is an impediment to economic efficiency (Haggard and Kaufman 1995; Mainwaring 1999) -- mans executive can easily get legislative majority and push reforms/policies
• BUT also: fragmented party systems could make it less likely the executive will have legislative majority, and just add more veto players (Tsebelis 1995) -- meaning parties will have short-time horizons and not want to enact unfavorable policies
• but more veot players may result in gridlock, a sort of backdoor to stability, which will improve investors' outlook
• H2: the severity and duration of crises will have a U-shaped relationship with the number of effective political parties (390)
• close electoral compeititon could result in both parties uniting behind reforms, realizing that their future ability to govern may be constrained iuf current crisis isn't dealt with
• H3: economic crises will be more severe and prolonged in less competitive electoral environments
• presidents with a ton of power can push reforms
• H3: economic crises will be longer and more severe when the chief executive is weaker (391)
• Labor and the Left (392)
• H5a: economic crises will be longer and more severe when labor mobilizing or populist parties are strong
• H5b: economic crises will be longer and more severe when organized labor movements are strong
• H5c: economic crises will be longer and more severe when combined strength of left and labor is high
• Finally, politics should have the greatest impact on financial crises, less impact on inflationary crises, and the least impact on growth crises (393)
• Research Design
• crises are measured as deviations from the regional mean performance for the entire period under study (394)
• 13% of country-years experienced GDP crises
• 11% of country-years experienced inflationary crises
• 11% of country-years experienced fiscal crises
• the correlations between these crises are quite low
• countries predisposed to one type of crisis are not necessarily predisposed to another (395)
• on average, GDP crises (1.5 years) are shorter than fiscal crises (3.4 year) which are shorter than inflationary crises (5 years)
• also, depth and duration are distinct
• Results and Discussion
• "politics play a much stronger role in producing crises than they do in year-to-year performance" (397)
• more significant effect on the probability of inflationary and fiscal crises than growth crises
• Strongest indicators: labor and the Left
• strong left significantly increases probability of inflationary crises (397)
• strong unions significantly increases probability of inflationary crises , even more than left parties(398)
• BUT!!!!  electoral strength of the left increases probability of inflationary crises ONLY WHEN UNIONS ARE WEAK (398-399)
• strong left and labor unions allows governments to negotiate pacts between labor and capital on wages, investment, and employments that can temper redistributive demands (399)
• Other important indicators
• new regimes are more likely to have inflationary and/or fiscal crises (400)
• political competition was not significant
• increasing the power to the chief executive increases the probability of a fiscal crisis (emphasis in original)
• party system fragmentation is weird...has an inverted u-shaped relationship with inflationary and fiscal crises (401)
• could be that fragemented party systems block adjustment, but do block risky policies that could result in crisis
• My take: that sounds unlikely...fitting the theory to the data, not finding an explanation
• global economic conditions are not associated with inflation or fiscal crises
• Outside of the variables on the left and labor unions, no other variable is consistent across all the models (401)
• Duration of crisis
• political variables provide less insight into this (402)
• left will increase inflationary crisis length when labor is weak (402-403)
• left + labor = shorter inflationary crises (by about 3 months) (403)
• crises are shorter as party system fractionalization increases (404) -- ?????
• Conclusions
• the most important factor seems to be the nature of party-society linkages (405)
• countries with conservative parties and weak labor unions were less susceptible to crises in general

Szwarcberg 2013

Mariela Szwarcberg. "The Microfoundations of Political Clientelism: Lessons from the Argentine Case." Latin American Research Review 48.2 (2013): 32-54.

• Introduction
• while clientelism is often taken as a given, party operatives in Argentina and elsewhere can prefer not to distribute goods in exchange of electoral support (33)
• argument:  a party operative's capacity to turn to clientelistic strategies of mobilization is a necessary but insufficient condition to explain the use of clientelism...party operatives have to prefer to build clientelistic linkages with voters
• study of municipal candidates in Argentina
• Mobilizing Voters: Lit review
• while the poor are targets of clientelistic strategies, scholars have convincingly shown that the poor are strategic and sophisticated in making political decisions
• to explain candidates' strategic choices to turn out voters, I distinguish between a candidates CAPACITY and PREFERENCE to use clientelism (34)
• political parties contribute to shaping politicians' strategies by providing (or not providing) incentives to use clientelism to turn out voters (35)
• Choosing Strategies of Political Mobilization
• Assumption: candidates interested in a political career have to demonstrate their ability to get votes for the party
• Table 1: (36)

Candidate has Capacity to use Clientelism	Candidate Prefers to use Clientelism
	Yes	No
Yes	Pragmatist	Idealist
No	Resentful	Utopist

•   Without observing explicit choice, can't tell the difference between resentful and utopist
• Data
• ballot positions reflect the value of each candidate to the party (39)
• data suggests the longer a candidate uses clientelism to build a constituency the more likely they will have a higher ballot position
• Candidates Capacity
• Incumbent candidates are more likely to have access to material goods (39)
• access to resources is also conditioned by level of government
• candidate who has party members in national and/or regional office has more resources than one who is just a local incumbent (40)
• also, to effectively use clientelism a candidate need to have access to resources AND a network of party activists to spread resources around
• in Argentina this means only the PJ and Radical party (my take: though maybe not the Radicals anymore?) (41)
• given the data, cast majority of the sample is PJ activists
• Some new parties do have minimal clientelist networks if candidates brought activists and networks with them from a previous party (PJ or UCR) (42)
• Candidate's Preferences
• Candidates that engage in "solving voter problems" will obtain electoral support and will also monitor political participation (43)
• usually by taking attendance at political rallies
• this works because voting is mandatory, but finding who voted what is still impossible
• for this paper, a candidate who takes attendance is clientelistic
• Explaining variation in candidate preferences
• interesting thing is that idealists are almost equal in number to the pragmatists (44)
• now focus on PJ, since they are the ones with the most resources
• in José C Paz neighborhood, unemployment rate is 80%ish (45)
• easy to mobilize voters by distributing goods
• intraparty competition induces candidates to use clientelism (46)
• if one doesn't do it, another will
• if candidate doesn't go clientelistic, sends signal to party that he's not willing to do "whatever it takes" to win
• idealist candidates essentially know they are committing political suicide (47)
• candidates realize that the best way to mobilize voters is to help and then coerce them
• but if this doesn't happen, party "doesn't forgive you" (48)
• its bad, but "these are the rules of the game"
• in Río Cuarto, another municipality, two Radical candidates faced off
• one wanted to create electoral alliance with another party
• the other wanted to keep "purity" of Radical ideology
• electoral coalition won because able to attract more voters!
• Resentful candidates blame their electoral failure entirely on their incapacity to provide benefits (49)
• strong correlation between pragmatist candidates and PJ (49), fewer pragmatists in UCR (50)
• Conclusion
• THE PARTIES CREATE THE INCENTIVES THAT CAUSE MOST CANDIDATES TO TURN TO CLIENTELISM (51)
• But not all candidates prefer to use clientelism...parties could create ways to get these "cleaner" politicians to rise through the ranks

Holzner 2007

Holzner, Claudio A. 2007. "The Poverty of Democracy: Neoliberal Reforms and Political Participation of the Poor in Mexico". Latin American Politics & Society. 49 (2): 87-122.

• Introduction
• Focus on core of democratic politics: citizen participation in the political process (87) 
• this paper on the non-electoral forms of political action, such as petitioning activity and protests (88) 
• Free market reforms require governments actively to suppress political participation and citizen voice by weakening trade unions, leftist parties, and other social organizations that advocate redistributive social and economic policies (citing Przeworksi 1991) 
• Though elected officials court the popular vote with promises of redistribution, once in office they face pressures to continue market reforms (citing Stokes 2001) (89) 
• "After an initial surge in political activity and growing feelings of political engagement by the poor during the 1990s [in Mexico], voter turnout, petitioning activity, and feelings of political interest and efficacy have declined overall since 1997” (91) 
• some of this apathy comes from Left’s inability to complete credibly in elections 
• BUT the changing structure and actions of the Mexican state in the 2000s are creating obstacles and disincentives for political mobilization, especially for the poor 
• Net effect of institutional reforms has been to stifle poor peoples political activity, especially in comparison to more affluent
• Political Participation in Mexico
• By 2000, high-income individuals participated in politics more frequently than low-income individuals, reversal from the past (92)
• Frequency of political activity peaked after 1982, declined after 1997
• after narrowing during 1990s participation gap widened between poor and affluent after 1997 
• affluent are now twice as likely to petition than the poor 
• Puzzle: why is political activity decreasing (for the poor) just as democratization should be opening up more avenues? (93) 
• Explanation: changes in the relationship between the state and the poor (95)
• suggestions seems to be that institutional reforms have created obstacles and disincentives to participation that affect the poor more adversely
• three possible mechanisms of discouragement
•  poverty, severity of poverty, and income inequality has worsened, meaning poor people find it difficult to muster the material and organizational resources necessary for petitioning the state
• free-market forces have weakened lower-class mobilization organizations, like labor unions
• technocratic policymaking sends the signal that the state doesn't have the interests of the poor in mind (96) 
•  Poverty and  Declining Resources for Participation
• Graph showing national survey results: (97)
• EVERY income group thinks they are worse off in 2003 compared to 2000
• in income groups 10x minimum wage and below, proportion is between 35 and 45%
• Petitioning government officials for direct assistance has historically been the most common form of participation of Mexico's poor, reflecting clientelism (98)
• this requires an investment of time, money, and lost wages
• but now the cost of petitioning too high for many poor (99)
• by 2003 income = best determinant of petitioning and protest activity. (Positive relationship)
• Declining Resources for Mobilization: Organizations
• organizations in civil society became more diverse in the 1990s as new groups came to fill in vacuum for retreating corporatist groups (101)
• BUT this also meant that political parties became the only/best game in town for articulating interests at the regional/national level
• organizations that now represent the popular sector, replacing old corporatist ones, haven't been able to gather the material resources or aggregate demands enough to become important in regional/national politics (101-102)
• Changing State-Society Relations
• neoliberalism radically changed the relationship between the state and the poor (102)
• by changing the basic functions of the state, neoliberal policies also changed the logic of political participation (103)
• the shrinking state made the state/politics less relevant to the poor
• other reforms have made it clear that the state cannot or will not provide for popular groups
• for example, new targeted poverty relief measures use formulas, which eliminates the discretion of implementing these policies by politicians
• my take: that sounds too naive...politicians can still game the system, no?
• poor people increasingly feel like petitioning is useless because traditional channels are closed (104-105)
• feeling that that government has abandoned their traditional role as caretaker of the poor (106)
• the poor are tired of neoliberal methods for fighting poverty and inequality (106-107)
• by the time the neoliberal changes to civil service institutions had been cemented by the late 1990s, the poor had little confidence in these institutions' ability to actually help them (107)
• poor see little relevance in political action, and thus see little importance in paying attention to politics
• neoliberal policies have alienated the poor to a much greater extent than affluent citizens (108)
• when the poor do act, they are more likely to target the local and state governments than the federal government (109)
• More affluent target federal government, less often state or local governments
• BUT ALL THE MACROECONOMIC DECISIONS ARE MADE AT THE FEDERAL LEVEL
• the poor simply cannot bear the costs of actually protesting/petitioning the level of government that has control of the economy (110)
• Statistical Analysis
• income is the most important predictor of protesting and petitioning activity (112)...make more money, more likely to petition/protest!...this basically meditated everything!
• membership in traditional corporatist organizations has no effect on petitioning (surprising....)
• respondents who believed the parties would listen to them were more likely to petition, but even then the effect was stronger for higher incomes (114)
• BUT poor people who receive government aid were more likely to petition
• this could be because of clientelism (114) or because the receipt of assistance creates incentives to petition again (115)
• Conclusions
• the decline of corporatism in Mexico has not meant an end to clientelism (116)
• nor have autonomous organizations been capable to mobilizing the poor effectively
• elections are losing their luster for the poor
• politics for the poor increasingly revolves around how to meet basic needs, less about the political ideology or directing reform of the state (117)

Roberts 2003

Roberts, Kenneth M. 2003. "Social Correlates of Party System Demise and Populist Resurgence in Venezuela". Latin American Politics and Society. 45 (3): 35-57.

• Peru’s attempt at populism in 1980s ended in inflationary spiral and political upheaval (35)
• many assumed populism was now dead, thanks in part to to Washington Consensus (35-36)
• Rise of Washington consensus undermined the party and labor institutions that had been the left in LA (36)
• void left after these parties collapsed was filled by personalistic leaders who cultivated direct relationship with the masses
• appears to be a dialectical relationship between the demise of traditional representative institutions and the eruption of new forms of populism
• Chávez was a master of the politics of antipolitics
• he capitalized on and deepened public antipathy toward established institutions
• Populism asirse most forcefully during times of political and economic crisis, when established patterns of representation are breaking down and have yet to be replaced with new ones (37)
• first period in the 1920s
• another period in the 1980s
• BUT, given Venezuela’s strong institutions, no one would have guessed they would crumble and be replaced by populism (38)
• these were founded on a mix of corporatist and clientelistic linkages that could not withstand the decline of the oil economy and several attempts at market liberalization (38-39)
• then successive administrations by each dominant party failed to fix the economy (39)
• Dominant theories provide no reason why Venezuela’s system would collapse (41)
• institutionalism, structuralism, rational choice, and political culture
• all focused on two critical variables, design of political institutions and oil money
• BUT Coppedge (1990) argues that over-institutionalization can be just as problematic as under-institutionalization
• Cartelization and bureaucratic routinization made the AD overly rigid, restricted its ability to adopt economic reforms (Levitsky 2001 and Corrales 2000) (42)
• along the lines of Crisp (2000) parties became frozen in status quo, allowing them to control policymaking and keep new groups out of politics and new issues off the agenda
• undependable oil revenues eventually left parties unable to fund their clientelistic relations (structural approach)
• political culture: oil created rentier mentality, people supported democracy only as long as the money flowed...when money stopped, no one cared for democracy (Romero 1997)
• Venezuela’s parties were more bureaucratic, but they did not differ significantly from other LA countries in their societal bonds (43)
• their bonds were made through ISI, and were strained by the 1980s (43-44)
• Venezuela’s system was set up more along corporatist lines, to complement clientelism (44)
• in 1980s Venezuela avoided hyperinflation because labor tempered its demands thanks to connections between unions and parties (45)
• Economic and political trauma worse in countries with labor based parties, as old forms of representation totally erode
• to replace corporatist linkages, many parties had to form larger networks of more contingent clientelism (46)
• VENEZUELAN CASE
• post-1958 party system had corporatism and clientelism (46-47)
• everyone participated in distribution of oil rents, capitalists, campesinos, middle-class, workers (48)
• by 1970 two dominant parties were almost indistinguishable from each other
• plunging oil prices in the 1980s emasculated campesino and unions, and new independent union movement stripped out more voters from corporatist system (48-49)
• neoliberal reforms in 1989 generate violent backlash, military repressed riots (49)
• organized labor lost its ability to channel opposition to neoliberal reforms because they stayed too close to party (49-50)
• Venezuela’s parties were unable to maintain balance of: distributing enough payouts to reproduce collective identities, but not so much as to harm macroeconomic health (50)
• parties continuing use of patronage in hard times increased their delegitimization (51)
• Prolonged economic crisis + social change = erosion of corporatist and clientelist linkages
• both parties lost legitimacy since neither were able to fix the problem (52, 53)
• Chávez replaced party-based mediation between state and society with direct, personalistic relationship between president and masses