Political Culture, Social Movements, and Democratic Transitions in South America in the Twentieth Century

Fernando Devoto and Torcuato Di Tella have put together a volume that is impressive for its scope and detail. Bringing together a group of 16 renowned scholars from North and South America, Political Culture, Social Movements, and Democratic Transitions in South America in the Twentieth Century amply succeeds in fulfilling the publisher’s goal of creating “a set of sources which can be used by scholars for their own present or future research” (p. ix). The volume is divided into two sections: the first is entitled “Historical Perspectives”; and the second part consists of a somewhat shorter series of chapters on “Contemporary Problems.” Useful overviews in each section set the context for several detailed case studies of Argentina, Brazil, and Chile that are found in both parts of the book, as well as single case studies of Uruguay and Venezuela in the first half of this century and more recent studies of Peru, Colombia, and Bolivia. In lieu of a concluding chapter, the volume ends with a useful discussion of postwar capital flows in the region by Adolfo Canitrot.One of the volume’s unique strengths is that it provides well-known authors with a forum for expanding on many of their original ideas found in earlier works. While offering relatively few new theories and conceptualizations, the volume is rich in in-depth analyses that allow authors like Paul Drake, J. Samuel Valenzuela, Juan Carlos Torre, James Malloy, and Di Tella himself to refine and reflect on their already influential work. Such an approach does have certain drawbacks in that readers less familiar with the authors’ previous work or the specific case studies may at times find the factual material a bit daunting, but historians in general and more advanced students of Latin America will find any such minor inconveniences well worth the effort. Scholars working on Argentina, Brazil and Chile—the three countries which together account for over half of the volume—in particular will find this collection of essays to be an invaluable resource.Among the variety of topics covered by the volume, the formation and evolution of political parties stands out as predominant. While the volume’s title suggests that political culture will be a central concern, its significance tends to be reflected through political parties rather than as an independent variable. This is particularly true in the authors’ treatment of recent transitions to democracy where political culture does not seem to be an important factor, although, in a more limited sense, it enters into Tomás Moullián’s analysis of the evolution of the Chilean Socialist Party and Lisa North’s and Jacques Doyer’s sociological analysis of Peru’s Alianza Popular Revolucionaria Americana (APRA). Similarly, despite the title’s implied emphasis on the role of social movements in democratic transitions during this century, most authors limit their discussion to organized labor, particularly in the Argentine case, given labor’s importance in understanding Peronism. An interesting exception is Leôncio Martins Rodrigues’s discussion of the Brazilian Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT), which highlights the sometimes problematic relationship between the organized working class and various new social movements, frequently sponsored by the Catholic Church.Martin’s chapter also underscores what is perhaps the principal shortcoming of this volume, which is that the authors sometimes appear to be unduly constrained by categories of analyses better suited to earlier periods in Latin American history. This is not to say that the authors writing about contemporary problems in the second part of the volume are unaware of the important changes that have swept the region in recent decades, but that the significance and nature of these changes may warrant more careful analysis if we are to fully appreciate both the shortfalls and promise of Latin America’s unprecedented wave of democratization. For example, the women’s, environmental, religious (both those inspired by liberation theology and the progressive Catholic Church, as well as more conservative Protestant groups), and indigenous rights movements, to name only the most prominent, all reflect changes in the patterns of lower-class social mobilization and the experiences of recent democratic transitions that are very different from those of the earlier part of this century in which, as Di Tella notes in his own chapters, the middle class was a more prominent actor and organized labor was itself a “new” social and political actor. While at a certain level Di Tella’s observation that political parties are increasingly polarizing in class terms is certainly correct, the presence of these new actors, combined with the consequences of economic restructuring, including the weakening of organized labor, has meant that the politics of social classes are very different than they were even 20 years ago, just before the onset of the debt crisis.Still, this “shortcoming” is a minor one given the book’s ambitious scope. And, as James Malloy reminds us in his chapter, we cannot fully understand the challenges facing the region today unless we bring in much more historical depth than has frequently been the case. It is in providing such historical depth for a number of countries that this volume makes an important contribution that will help enrich future research.

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