Argentina´s Democracy four Decades after Modernization
and Bureaucratic-Authoritarianism
Carlos Gervasoni
Universidad Torcuato Di Tella
[email protected]
Abstract
O´Donnell´s Bureaucratic-Authoritarian description was inspired by
prominent regime developments in his own country and region. According
to his account, modernization theory did not work as linearly as expected,
not at least in countries following the typical Southern Cone developmental
path. More recent research finds that, in broader comparative perspective,
“the richer the country, the more likely it is to sustain democracy, except in
Argentina” (Przeworski and Limongi´s 1997, my stress). If Argentina was
until the 1970s a deviant case in terms of modernization theory, since 1983
it has been another sort of deviant: a country that has remained stubbornly
(if imperfectly) democratic despite its own precedents and despite
undergoing several economic and political earthquakes. Drawing on existing
indices of democracy and on qualitative evidence, this paper analyzes
Argentina´s current democratic period under the light of O´Donnell´s ideas
and of recent theoretical and empirical advances in the study of political
regimes. It first uses cross-national and times-series data on political
regimes to compare Argentina to the rest of the region and the world.
Secondly it provides a critical assessment of the country´s national and
subnational democratic institutions during the current democratic period.
Finally, it resorts to the growing body of theory on political regimes to
account for the evolution and characteristics of Argentina´s regime since
1983. International factors and the decreasing level of political polarization
and violence appear to be significant causes behind Argentina’s
“normalization” after 1983.
***Work in progress – Please do not cite without author´s permission***
Prepared for the Conference “Guillermo O'Donnell and the Study of Democracy". Kellogg
Institute for International Studies. University of Notre Dame. Buenos Aires, March 26-27,
2012.
Argentina´s Democracy four Decades after Modernization
and Bureaucratic-Authoritarianism
Carlos Gervasoni
Universidad Torcuato Di Tella
[email protected]
“[I]ndeed, no democracy has ever been subverted, not during the period we studied, nor even before or after, regardless of everything else, in a country with a per capita income higher than that of Argentina in 1975: $6055” (Przeworski et al., 2000). Simply put, the following quotes (and the epigraph) motivate this paper:
“However, there is one blatant exception. By any standards,
Argentina´s position in the political dimension is significantly
different from what would be expected o the basis of the paradigm,
considering its comparatively high level of socio-economic
development” (O´Donnell 1973, 12).
“[T]he richer the country, the more likely it is to sustain
democracy, except in Argentina” (Przeworski and Limongi´s 1997,
my emphasis).
Both quotes stress that Argentina was a, few decades ago, a stark deviant case in
terms of modernization theory. O´Donnell´s Modernization and BureaucraticAuthoritarianism interpreted Argentina´s reluctance to behave as expected as a symptom of
a more general disease. In a nutshell, under certain economic, social and international
circumstances (i.e., the end of easy ISI, fast political activation, and the “Cuban threat”),
modernization may, contrary to Lipset´s “optimistic equation” (O´Donnell 1973, 4), lead to
(bureaucratic) authoritarianism. Przeworski, Alvarez, Cheibub and Limongi, on the other
hand, see Argentina as downward weird, as the epigraph makes sufficiently clear. The
figures in Table 1 stress the country´s penchant for anomaly even more convincingly.
1 Table 1. Transitions to dictatorship, 1951-1990 by per capital income (highest to
lowest).
Country
Year
Argentina
Argentina
Argentina
Uruguay
Argentina
Surinam
Chile
Greece
Turkey
Peru
1976
1966
1962
1973
1955
1980
1973
1967
1980
1968
GDP per
Capita*
6.055
5.011
4.790
4.034
3,989
3,923
3,857
3,176
2,957
2,694
* In 1985 constant dollars (PPP; Penn World Tables).
Source: Based on Przeworski, Alvarez, Cheibub y Limongi (2000).
That is, four of the five instances of democratic breakdown at highest levels of
income per capital during 1951-1990 (the period studied by Przeworski et al.) happened, of
all places, in Argentina. Notice, however, that six of the cases in this table are consistent
with O´Donnell´s hypothesis: All the Argentine breakdowns plus those of Uruguay and
Chile (which occurred after writing his book, as did the 1976 coup in Argentina) took place
in modern, ISI, politically activated South American nations.
Notice also, however, that Argentina´s “weirdness” precedes the exhaustion of ISI.
Table 2 shows how in the period studied by Przeworski et al., the country is by far the one
with most transitions (from and to democracy) during those four decades. Argentina´s 8
transitions make countries such as Guatemala, Pakistan and Sudan pale by comparison.
Democracies (and authoritarianisms) in O´Donnell´s country had been unstable since 1930.
What was new was the nature of the new authoritarian regimes.
Argentina, then, seems to have been a difficult country for the survival of democracy
even before the exhaustion of ISI and the emergence of bureaucratic-authoritarianism.
What is without doubt, however, is that things changed drastically after 1983. In the
following 29 years Argentina experienced zero transitions.
2 Table 2. Number of transitions from and to Democracy; 1951-1990.
Number of
N
Transitions
0 (Democracies) 33
0 (Authoritar.)
67
1 (to Democ.)
12
1 (to Authorit.)
5
2
9
3
8
4
2
5
2
6
2
7
0
8
1
Total
141
Examples
Canada, Costa Rica, USA, India, Italy, Japan, New Zealand
Cuba, China, Egypt, Haiti, Iran, Liberia, Mexico, Syria, USSR
Colombia, El Salvador, Spain, Nicaragua, Poland, Venezuela
Congo, Sierra Leona, Somalia, Sri Lanka
Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, Indonesia, Uruguay
Bolivia, South Korea, Nigeria, Thailand, Turkey
Ghana and Pakistan
Sudan and Honduras
Guatemala and Peru
Argentina (55, 58, 62, 63, 66, 73, 76, 83)
Mean: 0,68 transitions; Median: 0 transitions
Source: Based on Przeworski, Alvarez, Cheibub y Limongi (2000).
1. Learning from Argentina: Why Has the Poster Child Been Stubbornly
Democratic since 1983?
If Argentina was until the 1970s a deviant case in terms of modernization theory,
since 1983 it has been another sort of deviant: a country that has remained stubbornly (if
imperfectly) democratic despite its own precedents and despite undergoing several
economic and political earthquakes. The same country that for decades was characterized
by brittle, collapse-prone, stints of democracy, has sustained over the last three decades a
democratic regime that was never in real danger of dying despite military upheavals (in
1986, 1987 and 1989), some of the harshest economic crises in history (1989 and 2001-2),
and political crises that resulted in the resignation of the president or the vice president
(1989, 2000, 2001, and 2003). Surprisingly for a country with Argentina´s political history,
not only democracy endured these daunting challenges, but an authoritarian “solution” was
not in the agenda even in the chaotic days of July 1989 and December 2001.
In methodological terms, then, Argentina gives us lots of interesting longitudinal
variance on the dependent variable. In substantive terms, the case under study is an
excellent opportunity to learn both about the country and about theories of democracy. In
personal terms, it allows us to keep studying the country of Guillermo (and my own), in the
hope that learning about its regime will give us tools to understand more fully our troubling
history and to construct a less troubling future.
In the next section I provide a quantitative description of Argentina´s regime since
the mid 20th century in absolute terms, in comparison with Latin America and the whole
3 world, and in relation to modernization theory. Section 3 is critical assessment of the
country´s national and subnational democratic institutions during the current democratic
period, emphasizing both their resiliency and their weaknesses. In section 4 I resort to the
growing body of theories of political regimes to account for the change of Argentina´s
regime trajectory since 1983.
2. Argentina´s Democracy since 1946 in Comparative and Theoretical
Perspective
First the facts: how has Argentina´s regime evolved over time in absolute terms and
in comparison to its region and the world? Figure 1, which displays the historical trends of
the classic Polity score (Marshall, Jaggers and Gurr 2010) for Argentina, Latin America
and the whole world, provides a first answer to this question.
Figure 1. Democracy 1946-2008: Argentina, LA and World
0
-10
-5
Polity Score
5
10
(Polity Scores)
1945 1950 1955 1960 1965 1970 1975 1980 1985 1990 1995 2000 2005 2010
Year
Argentina
LA Mean
World Mean
The blue line (corresponding to Argentina) shows the well-known pre 1983 regime
instability, but also the lesser known fact that during those years Argentina was generally
below the world and regional mean. That is, despite its comparatively high level of
development, educated population, Western culture, and other allegedly pro-democratic
4 characteristics, Argentina was a democratic underperformer both with respect to the world
and to its own region. O´Donnell´s point of departure was indeed very real.
In spite of its popularity, the Polity scores contain significant measurement error. A
case in point: Even those us who judge the first two Perón presidencies as rather
authoritarian would hesitate to score them with a -9, a figure equal to that of North Korea
and Oman today, and worse than the -7 currently assigned to Cuba, China or Syria. Recent
methodological advances in the measurement of democracy allow for a more accurate
operationalization of regimes in Argentina and other countries. In Figure 2 below I resort to
the recent index of contestation developed by Michael Coppedge, Ángel Alvarez and
Claudia Maldonado (2008) –which summarizes many existing indices in an aggregate one
through principal components analysis– to provide a more rigorous version of Figure 1.
The only cost of this decision is having to drop some years from the analysis (the Coppedge
et al. data are available only for 1950-2000).
Figure 2. Democracy, 1950-2000: Argentina, LA and World
-1.5
-1
-.5
0
.5
CAM´s Contestation
1
1.5
(Contestation [Coppedge et al. 2008])
1950
1955
1960
1965
1970
Argentina
LA mean
1975
Year
1980
1985
1990
1995
2000
World mean
Argentina looks a little better (especially during the mentioned Perón years), but the
general picture does not change: with the exception of the 1973-76 democratic stint,
Argentina tended to lag behind the region and the world until 1983. Since then, both figures
agree, the country has been much more democratic than the world average, and somewhat
5 more democratic than that of Latin America (although this is to a large extent due to the
Cuban authoritarian outlier, which depresses the regional average).
What about Argentina´s regime with respect to the predictions of modernization
theory? Figures 1 and 2 show absolute levels of democracy. Below, I analyze democracy
conditioned on level of development or, in other words, the deviation of Argentina´s
democracy scores with respect to the prediction of a regression model of democracy on
development.
First two caveats:
1. As is standard in the literature, I use GDP per capita as a measure of development or
modernization1. This is convenient because this indicator, unlike its alternatives, is
available for most countries and for many decades. However, it has significant
validity problems (see Teorell 2010). O´Donnell himself had misgivings regarding
the use GDP per capita as a measure of modernization (see pages XXX of
Modernization and Bureaucratic Authoritarianism). One (but not the only) issue is
the impact of oil wealth on sparsely-populated countries. All the “most developed”
country-years in the dataset (i.e., the highest per capita GDP figures) correspond to
Brunei, Kuwait and Qatar. The analysis I present below would be more rigorous if
we had a more valid measure of development with wide temporal and geographic
coverage. It would be also more rigorous if it was clear what the relationship
between modernization and development is, and which of the two (if different) is
the expected causal factor.
2. Development seems to be losing explanatory power over time, basically because
more and more less-developed countries are becoming democratic (such as Ghana,
Mongolia, and Bolivia), as documented by Coppedge (forthcoming). Figure 3
shows the proportion of the Coppedge, Alvarez and Maldonado (CAM)
Contestation and Polity indices explained by the Log of GDP per capita in crosssectional simple regressions since 1950. Clearly modernization by itself is a weaker
predictor of democracy in the present than when Lipset proposed his thesis (at the
heyday of the modernization-democracy correlation).
1
I use the natural logarithm of Real GDP per capita (Constant Prices: Chain series) from the Penn World
Table (Heston, Summers and Aten 2009), which I took from the Quality of Government dataset (Teorell et al.
2011).
6 R-squared of Democracy Indices on Log GDPpc
Figure 3. R-Squared of Democracy on Development, 1950-2010
0
.1
.2
.3
.4
.5
(CAM Contestation & Polity)
1950 1955 1960 1965 1970 1975 1980 1985 1990 1995 2000 2005 2010
Year
Polity
CAM Contestation
If we take the modernization benchmark, that is, the regime expected on the grounds
of the level of development, we can observe not just the absolute level of democracy in a
given country or region, but the extent to which it conforms to that prediction. Some
countries are clearly underpredicted (e.g., Mongolia) while a few others are grossly
overpredicted (e.g., Qatar). What about Argentina?
To answer this question I calculated the absolute residuals for the country for every
year available in the CAM Contestation data (1950-2000), and plotted them in Figure 4.
The red flat line represents the model´s prediction (that is, the level of democracy expected
for Argentina based on its GDP per capita in each year). Negative (positive) residuals occur
when the blue line is below (above) the red one.
7 Figure 4. Argentina´s Deviation from 'Modernization Model'
-1.5
-1
-.5
0
Argentina´s Residual
.5
1
1.5
(Regression Residual: CAM Contestation on Log GDPpc)
1950
1955
1960
1965
1970
1975
Year
1980
1985
1990
1995
2000
From the 1950s to the early 1980s Argentina struggled to reach its “predicted”
(high) level of democracy, a goal that only achieved briefly in 1973-1975. Since 1983,
however, the country has been somewhat more democratic than expected, with a tendency
to converge with its predicted level of democracy since 1990 (i.e., the blue line starts to
decline towards the red line after that year).
In methodological terms, Argentina was a (negative) deviant case for many years
before and after O´Donnell thought up his Bureaucratic-authoritarian model. Since 1983,
however, it has either been a positive deviant case or, more recently, an “on-the-line” case
(Lieberman 2005), that is, a case that is roughly in the position expected on the ground of
its values in the hypothesized explanatory variables.
Of course, one should not exaggerate the explanatory powers of a single variable or,
more generally, of structural factors. As Figure 3 shows GDP per capita never explains
(statistically) more that 45% or so of regime variance, and in the last three decades the
figure has been in the neighborhood of 20%. Multivariate, cross-national, models predicting
change in democracy levels also leave most variance unexplained (Teorell 2010). In other
words, “[e]ven over the long haul, some countries deviate far from their structurally
predicted long-run equilibrium levels of democracy” (Teorell 2010, 13). Or, more
generally, “often even a long list of variables does not do a good job of explaining
individual cases well” (Coppedge forthcoming). Argentina was for most of the 1955-1983
8 a clear deviant case. Modernization and Bureaucratic-Authoritarianism appears to have
gone a long way toward providing country-specific reasons for such anomaly. The post
1983 question is, precisely, about the “normalization” of Argentina: why has the deviant
case that gave rise to O´Donnell´s theorization finally adopted the regime predicted by
structural factors?
3. Argentina since 1983: A Robust but Imperfect (National and Subnational)
Democracy
By “robust” (in the subtitle) I mean that Argentina´s democracy has proved resilient
in the face of major challenges. By “imperfect” I mean that important aspects of the regime
remain less than democratic.
Undoubtedly, something important changed in the country since 1983. Having
endured the political and economic earthquakes summarized above, the survival of the
current democratic regime has been beyond doubt. However, underneath this solid
foundation, political and institutional instability continues to plague the Argentina.
Evidence of such instability is abundant. For example, only two of the six presidential
terms since 1983 lasted the six (until 1994) or four years established by the national
constitution (those of Carlos Menem 1995-1999 and Cristina Fernández de Kirchner 20072011). That three out of six presidents resigned before finishing their terms (Alfonsín, De la
Rúa and Duhalde) is striking, and very unusual in comparative perspective. A recent
analysis of 52 third-wave presidential democracies (Kim and Bahry 2008) found that for
the 1974-2003 period, there were only 22 presidential interruptions (due to resignation or
impeachment) in 18 countries, most of them in Sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America.
Argentina is one of the four countries (along with Bolivia, Ecuador and the Dominican
Republic) which suffered two such interruptions (the study does not include the Duhalde
case).
Vice-presidents were problematic too. Two of the six during this period resigned
(Eduardo Duhalde and Carlos Alvarez) and two more went through major political conflicts
with their running mates (Daniel Scioli and Julio Cobos). Political parties have gone
through an acute process of de-institutionalization, which is manifested in increasing levels
of party system fragmentation, party system denationalization, and electoral volatility.
What about democracy itself? Has it been healthy since 1983? It has, in the sense
that no significant political actor has explicitly sought to overthrow the democratic regime
(as many did in the 1930-1983 period). The military revolts of colonels Rico and Seineldín
in 1987-1990 were serious and sometimes violent, but not aimed at taking power. The
ultimate goals of the takeover of the La Tablada barracks by the leftist Movimiento Todos
por la Patria in 1989 is less clear, but this bloody episode was by no means a serious threat
to the survival of democracy.
9 During the 1990s there were no such incidents, and the only potential threat to
democracy came from the government itself, when it tried to force a second reelection for
President Menem through illegal means (the constitution forbade him from running again,
so he tried a judicial strategy). Tensions were high, but they were resolved institutionally.
Menem did not run and the opposition won the presidential elections of 1999.
Notably, neither the economic, social and political crisis of 1989 (marked by
hyperinflation and the resignation of President Raúl Alfonsín) nor the even worse 2001
collapse (associated with the fall of President Fernando De la Rúa, the mega-devaluation of
the peso, and the default on the public debt) even put on the agenda a non-democratic
alternative. There were chaos and confusion, there were presidents that did not complete
their terms, there were even riots and deaths, but the basic democratic institutions endured
both episodes.
Since 2002-3 Argentina has been free of both organized instances of political
violence and economic crises. True, there has not been rotation of parties in power (which
did occur electorally in 1989 and 1999, and through a congressional decision in 2001), but
there is no doubt that the Peronists victories in the 2003, 2007, and 2011 presidential
elections were legitimately won in reasonably fair elections.
Many analysts (Guillermo O´Donnell and myself included), however, have worried
about efforts to undermine democracy “from within” during the presidencies of Néstor and
Cristina Kirchner. The most clear instances of such tendency have been the official
harassment of the independent and critical media, the blatant use of many supposedly
public media outlets for the private ends of the rulers, the “soft” punishment of journalists,
intellectuals, businessmen and union leaders who express criticisms of the government, the
noncompliance with Supreme Court rulings, the systematic refusal to disclose public
information, the use of intelligence agencies for politically-motivated spying, the
neutralization of all “agencies of horizontal accountability” (O´Donnell 1999a) and, very
recently, a worrying increase in instances of police repression of protesters.
Despite these serious shortcomings, Argentina´s national regime has remained
essentially democratic, in the (minimalist) sense that there is real electoral contestation, real
political parties that oppose the government and that are represented in Congress, and
important alternative sources of information. If at its barest “democracy is a system in
which parties lose elections” (Przeworski 1991), Argentina would most likely qualify: most
analysts would agree that the incumbent government can lose (and in fact lost the 2009
midterm) elections, and eventually step down as a consequence.
This apparent contradiction between a regime that is essentially (if minimally)
democratic but that, at the same time, is being undermined from within, is reflected in
Figure 5. The classic Polity and Freedom House indices (standardized from 0 to 10 for
comparison) remain in the upper part of the figure throughout the nine years of
kirchnerismo, at levels similar to those of the earlier democratic years. A fourth measure
10 (Freedom House´s Press Freedom Index), however, does show a clear downward trend:
starting in the mid 1990s (during Menem´s administration), the index started a declining
trend, which was reversed during De la Rúa´s short stint in office, only to turn back down
at the beginning of Nestor Kirchner’s administration. By 2009 the press freedom index was
almost two points below its 1994 level.2
0
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
Standardized Scores (0 to 10)
9 10
Figure 5. Democracy and Freedom, Argentina 1984-2009
1984
1989
1994
Polity
FH Civil Liberties
Year
1999
2004
2009
FH Political Rights
FH Press Freedom
The subnational picture: As national democracy became established after the 1983
transition, political analysts (journalistic before academic) started to notice the dubiously
democratic features of some provincial regimes. The names of a couple of early books
written by investigative journalists constitute a good summary: Catamarca (Cuando el
Tirano cae su Poder Termina. Cuando la Víctima Muere su Poder Empieza), by Norma
Morandini (1991), and El Último Feudo. San Luis y el Caudillismo de los Rodríguez Saá,
by Miguel Wiñazki (1995). Not surprisingly, Guillermo O´Donnell´s broad research agenda
on democracy was among the first pay attention to this issue in the academic world (with
due recognition to our journalistic predecessors): He wondered “how one conceptualizes a
polyarchical regime that may contain regional regimes that are not at all polyarchical”, and
2
It is somewhat strange that this deterioration in press freedom has not been reflected in the overall Freedom
House ratings; it is likely that the weight of this particular freedom is not large enough to produce a sizeable
impact in a context in which other freedoms do not decline.
11 pointed to “abundant journalistic information and reports of human rights organizations,
that some of these regions function in a less than polyarchical way” (O’Donnell 1999b,
315). His hunch was right: wherever researchers following his hint looked, they found
“illiberal peripheries” (Snyder 2001, 101-2) in new national democracies. A early work on
Mexico´s subnational regimes, for example, called attention to the “survival and even
strengthening of subnational authoritarian enclaves in states like Puebla, Tabasco,
Guerrero, Chiapas, Oaxaca, Campeche, and Yucatán” (Cornelius 1999, 3-4). In Argentina,
as I will soon show, things have been no better. Authorities below the national level can be
nondemocratic in very significant ways. For example, blacks were famously segregated by
state governments in the US South until the 1960s. Likewise, Argentines who oppose the
provincial government have faced non-trivial costs in places such as Formosa, San Luis,
Santiago del Estero and Santa Cruz.
Should we worry about deficiencies in subnational democracy?3 Yes, for at least
two reasons. First, even though provincial governments are less autonomous tan their
national counterparts, they are not necessarily less important. In Argentina almost half of
all public sector expenditures are executed by provinces, which also concentrate almost two
thirds of all public employees (about 80% if we add municipal employees). The teachers,
doctors, nurses, policemen, and judicial officials that so critically affect people´s lives are
largely provincial employees in Argentina.
Secondly, weaknesses in subnational democracy impact on the national regime in
several ways (Fox 1994). The bosses of less-democratic provinces are influential in
national politics, not only as governors, senators and ministers, but frequently as Presidents.
Argentine politics has to a large extent been dominated by two figures since 1983, the
Peronists Carlos Menem (1989-1999) and Néstor Kirchner (who ruled, as president or “first
gentleman”, during the 2003-2010 period), both of which had been before the governors of
demographically minuscule provinces (La Rioja and Santa Cruz, respectively). There are
many reasons to believe that this unlikely domination has something to do with the fact that
these districts are among the country´s least democratic, 4 and also many to believe that the
notorious “delegative” practices that characterized both presidents were “imports” from
their provincial administrations.
I have developed two alternative indices of subnational democracy in Argentina,
one based on objective institutional and electoral indicators (Gervasoni 2010a) and another
based on the judgments of experts on the politics of each province (Gervasoni 2010b). I do
not have space here to discuss the characteristics of each index, their comparative
advantages and disadvantages, and their detailed results.5 These indices, however, do
produce a few clear “not guilty” provinces, and a few that are “guilty beyond reasonable
3
In this and the next paragraph I follow Gervasoni 2011b.
The Rodríguez Saá brothers, from the also small and undemocratic San Luis, have run several times for
president, and one of them was briefly president (elected by Congress) during the 2001 crisis.
5
This information can be found in Gervasoni 2011a, chapters 4 and 5.
4
12 doubt.” That is, some provinces are consistently low or high in both types of measures. The
Federal Capital and Mendoza always appear among the most democratic provinces, while
Buenos Aires, Córdoba, Entre Ríos, Santa Fe and Tierra del Fuego can also be acquitted
with confidence. Formosa, San Luis, Santa Cruz and Santiago del Estero, on the other hand,
are portrayed as very imperfectly democratic by both measurement strategies, followed by
Jujuy, Salta, Misiones and La Rioja.
None of the latter provinces is an authoritarian regime. They are clear instances of
“hybrid regimes” (Karl 1995) and their conceptual cousins, “illiberal democracies”
(Zakaria 1997), “competitive authoritarianisms” (Levitsky and Way 2002), “semiauthoritarianisms” (Ottaway 2003) and “electoral authoritarianisms” (Schedler 2006). The
electoral institutions all provinces have are not meaningless, but in some of them the game
is so biased in favor of incumbents that one doubts whether there is a chance that
incumbent parties lose elections. In fact, in seven provinces the same party has won the
eight gubernatorial elections since 1983: Formosa, Jujuy, La Pampa, La Rioja, Neuquén,
San Luis, and Santa Cruz. All of them have been under Peronist control but Neuquén (ruled
by the local Movimiento Popular Neuquino). One obvious, prominent and consequential
way in which the dice are charged in favor of the incumbent is media control: the experts
consulted say (and any attentive traveler can confirm) that the provincial media are heavily
biased in favor of incumbent campaigns in San Luis, Jujuy, Santa Cruz and Formosa. At
the same time, the experts on provinces such as Córdoba, Santa Fe or the Federal Capital
report almost no media bias. In a nutshell, there are no provincial Cubas, North Koreas or
Saudi Arabias in Argentina, but there are several Malaysias, Russias and Venezuelas.
In sum, the essential and minimal elements of democracy have been strong at the
national level, but incumbents have attempted to undermine democratic institutions that
bothered them, such as agencies of horizontal accountability, the judiciary, and the
independent media. Democracy is even more imperfect in a few provinces, which although
demographically small, are politically overrepresented not only in Congress, but also at the
Casa Rosada.
4. What do Theories of Democracy Say about Argentina? (and What Argentina
about Theories of Democracy?)
In this section I provide my own systematization of theories of democracy, and
make them dialogue with the evidence provided by the Argentine case in longitudinal
perspective, that is, during the period under study. I attempt “intensive testing,” in two
senses: as a way to reveal “which of several competing explanations best explains a specific
outcome in a single case” (Coppedge forthcoming), and as a way to draw some (admittedly
limited) inferences about theories of democracy from the ample variance provided by the
Argentine case.
13 The debate about the causes of democracy and authoritarianism is as lively as ever.
Modernization theory has recently been refined (Przeworski et al. 2000), reinterpreted
(Boix 2003), challenged (Acemoglu and Robinson), and reasserted (Epstein et al. 2006;
Teorell 2010). Even those who support modernization, however, admit that its explanatory
power has been declining over time (as shown in Figure 3; see Coppedge forthcoming).
Moreover, several new and exciting theoretical perspectives have entered the fray over the
last couple of decades. The so called “curse” of natural resources had a large impact on the
field (Ross 2001, 2012; Jensen and Watchekon 2004; Smith 2004; Ulfelder 2007; Dunning
2008; Aslaksen 2010; Jones Luong and Weinthal 2010), and gave rise to a related literature
trying to expand the main “rentier insight” to other nontax resources with similar
characteristics such as foreign aid (Smith 2008, Morrison 2009) and federal transfers to
subnational units (Gervasoni 2010a). Despite dissenting voices (e.g., Haber and Menaldo
2011), most of the evidence points in the direction of a significant negative causal effect of
rents on democracy.
A second, relatively novel theory of political regimes is diffusion. Diffusion
approaches had been used before for other purposes, and the relatively old idea that
democracies come in “waves” was to a large extent due to alleged diffusion effects
(Whitehead 1986; Huntington 1991; Starr 1991). Only recently, however, the theory was
developed in detail (Whitehead 1996) and empirically tested (Brinks and Coppedge 2006;
Gleditsch and Ward 2006).
Some of the authors mentioned above in the context of the debate about
modernization theory also proposed new theoretical insights that have enlivened the field,
for example the idea that democracy has something to do with the mobility of capital (Boix
2003; Acemoglu and Robinson 2006), or that what really drives regimes is the
“institutional package” with which countries came into existence, often in the distance past
(Acemoglu et al. 2008).
These and other rich ideas and debates on the causes of political regimes have led to
at least two very recent works of theoretical integration, the books Determinants of
Democratization (Teorell 2010) and Approaching Democracy (Coppedge forthcoming).
Drawing on these works and on the recent contributions briefly reviewed above, in Table 3
I provide a systematization of theories of political regimes, identify the main explanatory
variable associated with each theory, state in which direction these variables have moved in
Argentina during the period under analysis (1945-2011), and indicate whether such changes
are consistent or not with the behavior of the dependent variable, that is, the clear
democratization of Argentina´s regime after 1983. The list of theories in Table 3 is far from
exhaustive, but it identifies most of the main plausible general, non-idiosyncratic factors
that have been proposed in the literature and that have found at least some empirical
support.
14 In rather standard fashion, I classify theoretical approaches, first, as structural or
agency-based. This distinction is not as clear-cut as it is sometimes presented. I consider
structural anything which is largely out of the control of the relevant political actors, from
the level of modernization to political culture to the prevalence of democracies in the
world. Agency-related factors are about the strategies and preferences of actors: they may
not be able to do anything about the regime in neighboring countries, but they may use the
transition to democracy in one of them as a model to follow and as an inspiration to
mobilize public support. Agency-based approaches are then simply divided in those looking
at the elites and those looking at the masses or the general public. Structural approaches,
much more numerous, are divided, first, into domestic and international, and then into
economic, political, cultural and institutional. I do not provide the details of the
classification criteria (and cannot guarantee at this point that my categories are exhaustive
and exclusive), but common sense and the membership of each variable in each category
should provide readers enough information about them. Some of the explanatory variables
may legitimately be seen as belonging to more than one category and some may be seen as
causes of other causes (e.g., the level of political violence is probably causally related to the
ratio of soft liners to hard liners). These and other issues make the classification in Table 3
no more than a rough attempt to put some order in the otherwise complex and diverse world
of theories of democracy, with the ultimate goal of learning what type of factors seem to be
(or not be) candidates to explain Argentina´s regime trajectory over the last few decades.
One can easily discard from the analysis many independent variables that have
changed little or nothing during the period under analysis (“=” sign in the next-to-last
column in Table 3). For example, factors such as the country´s level or rentierism or
ethnolinguistic heterogeneity, or the nature of its presidential system remained essentially
unchanged for decades. These factors, then, cannot account for Argentina´s regime
turnaround, which is not the same as saying that they are not causally relevant: one could
speculate that if Argentina had become an oil-based rentier state during the 1970s, a
transition to democracy could have been less likely in the subsequent decades. What the
empirical evidence at hand says is that these variables did not vary, and therefore cannot
account for the portion of regime variance under analysis, that is, Argentina´s longitudinal
variability since the mid 20th century. It is in this sense that the lat column indicates that the
case is “uninformative” with respect to these explanations: we do not know what impact
they would have had on the country´s regime if they had varied significantly over time.
15 Table 3. A Classification of Theories of Democracy and their Performance in Explaining Argentina´s Regime Trajectory.
Grand
approach
Dimension
Structural
Domestic
Subdimension
Economic
Political
Cultural
Institutional
International
Economic
Political
Cultural
Agencybased
Elites
Masses
Institutional
Authoritarian
Democratic
Explanatory variable (representative author/s)
Modernization (Lipset 1959)
Inequality (Muller 1988)
Capital mobility (Boix 2003)
Natural-resource rentierism (Ross 2001)
Non-tax revenues (Morrison 2009)
Statism (Bellin 2000)
Capitalism (Moore 1966)
Economic Growth (Gasiorowski 1995)
Political violence (Finkel, Pérez-Liñán & Seligson 2007)
Policy radicalism (Mainwaring & Pérez-Liñán 2012)
Ethnolinguistic Heterogeneity (Dahl 1971)
Colonial legacy (Bernhard, Reenock & Nordstrom 2003)
Postmaterialistic values (Inglehart & Welzel 2005)
Dominant Religion (Fish 2002)
Presidentialism (Linz 1994)
Type of authoritarianism (Linz & Stepan 1996)
Colonial institutions (Acemoglu & Robinson 2001)
Dependency (Bollen 1983)
Hegemon’s support of democracy (Whitehead 1996)
International polarization/cold war (Huntington 1991)
International legitimacy of Democracy (Diamond 2008)
International Diffusion (Starr 1991)
Regional Diffusion (Brinks & Coppedge 2006)
Membership in regional international organizations (Pevehouse 2002)
Ratio of Soft to Hard-liners (O´Donnell, Schmitter & Whitehead 1986)
Ratio of Soft to Hard-liners (O´Donnell, Schmitter & Whitehead 1986)
Peacefulness of participation (Teorell 2010)
Temporal
change in
Argentina
+&–
++
+
=
=
=
=
–
––
––
=
=
+
=
=
=
=
=
+
–
+
++
++
+
+
+
+
¿Case
confirms
theory?
Ambiguous
No
Yes
Uninformative
Uninformative
Uninformative
Uninformative
No
Yes
Yes
Uninformative
Uninformative
Yes
Uninformative
Uninformative
Uninformative
Uninformative
Uninformative
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
16 The case evidence does turn up strong evidence against one proposed explanatory
variable, inequality. Argentina reasonable level of socioeconomic equality from the 1940s
to the 1960s started to decline in the 1970s. In fact, the current democratic regime came
about and consolidated during years in which inequality increased sharply, allegedly
because of labor repression (under the military), economic volatility (from 1974 to 2002),
high inflation (throughout the period except 1992-2001), structural economic reforms
(1989-1995), and global economic and technological developments. Argentina does not
seem to be alone in providing this kind of evidence: many countries with high levels of
inequality (such as Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay and South Africa) successfully
democratized during the third wave (Coppedge forthcoming).
There is also (weaker) evidence against the economic growth/crisis thesis: the
growth performance of Argentina was reasonable (though volatile and comparatively low)
until 1974, but very poor during the first years of the new democracy (1983-1990). The
evidence here, however, does not speak so clearly: the last military regime also suffered
from bad growth performance (which may have contributed to its demise), whereas in
several democratic periods the economy did quite well (1991-1994, 1996-1998, 20032008). What is clear, and contrary to the economic growth thesis, is that Argentina´s
democracy survived two truly dramatic economic crises (1988-1990 and 1999-2002).
Interestingly –and fittingly given O´Donnell´s ideas on the matter– the standard
modernization hypothesis (which associates political regimes to levels of wealth, education,
urbanization, industrialization and media penetration), turns up ambiguous results. In many
ways and in the long run, Argentina did modernize during the period. However, the picture
is not so clear for the 1974-1989 sub-period, which contains the transition years. Economic
performance was so poor during those fifteen years (one of the worst in the world in terms
of growth and inflation), that one could not easily say whether Argentina was more or less
modern in 1990 than in 1973. On the one hand urbanization, average years of schooling,
and media penetration were higher in 1990. On the other hand, GDP per capita, the
industrial share of GDP, and the proportion of workers in the formal sector were higher in
1973. In sum, in a long term perspective one could argue that the consolidation of the
democratic regime after 1983 had something to do with the accumulated increases in
modernization leading up to that year (and with those occurring after 1990). This positive
change in modernization, however, was not as significant as that taking place in most other
developing countries during the same period (in part because of Argentina´s high starting
level and partly because of its ulterior poor performance), and in many ways receded during
1974-1989. Modernization, then, is unlikely to have been causally central in explaining the
post-1983 “normalization”
Several hypotheses are consistent with Argentina´s trajectory after 1983 (bolded in
Table 3). Two of them are somehow related to modernization: capital mobility and postmaterialistic values. Both variables are posited (by Boix 2003 and Inglehart and Welzel
17 2005, respectively) to be effects of modernization and causes of democracy, that is,
mediating factors between changes in a country’s socioeconomic structure and its political
regime. As modernization advances, capital moves from fixed economic activities such as
mining and agriculture to more mobile undertakings such and industrial production,
information technologies, services and finance. Likewise, citizens in more modern societies
are less worried about survival values and more concerned with self-expression values. It is
undeniable that capital become more mobile and people more postmaterialistic in Argentina
from the 1960s to the 1990s. However, detailed case evidence does not suggest that these
factors were especially relevant: fixed-capital owners were never especially threatened by
democracy in Argentina (as they were in Bolivia or Chile), and people´s values do not
appear to have been the main drivers of democracy´s weakness before 1983. These factors
seem, at best, to have contributed marginally to Argentina´s regime turnaround.
The evolution of several variables is consistent with the temporal variance in the
dependent variable. They can be reasonably grouped in two categories: those related to
international influences and those related to declining levels of domestic political conflict
(or to the wane of “hardliners” on all sides). These two groups broadly coincide with the
factors highlighted by Mainwaring and Pérez-Liñán (2012) in their recent contribution: in
their words, democracy´s chances of survival in Latin America (the empirical domain of
their research) have been a function of the “regional political environment” and of the level
of “policy radicalism.”
International factors. Argentina’s transition to and consolidation of democracy
coincided with a) a worldwide wave of democratization, b) a regional wave of
democratization, c) a pro-democratic turn in the foreign policy of the global and regional
hegemon (with Carter and, after 1982, Regan), d) a change in the cold war, bipolar global
balance of power in favor of the democratic pole, e) membership in regional organizations
that promote democracy, and f) an increase in the global prestige of democracy as the only
legitimate principle of government. In sum, the international context was more favorable to
democracy in the 1980s than in the 1970s, and it has become increasingly more supportive
of democracy since then. Argentina´s turnaround, then, appears to be partially explainable
by the variables highlighted by the substantial body of academic research on the
international causes of democratization produced over the last couple of decades
(Whitehead 1986, 1996; Starr 1991; Pevehouse 2002; Starr and Lindborg 2003; Brinks and
Coppedge 2006; Gleditsch and Ward 2006; Levitsky and Way 2010).
Domestic political conflict. Although political conflict was not processed through
violent means in Argentina in the same scale as it was, for example, in several Central
American countries, political polarization and violence started to increase in the third
quarter of the 20th century, first around the Peronist-Antiperonist cleavage, and later around
the left-right cleavage, especially when guerrilla attacks and state repression become
18 prominent features of the political landscape in the 1970s.6 By the mid 1970s different
factions of the Peronist party were killing each other, including the right-wing, paramilitary
Alianza Anticomunista Argentina led by Juan and Isabel Perón´s right hand, José López
Rega. Leftist guerrilla groups even launched full-blown attacks against military barracks
during the 1973-76 democratic period. The subsequent coup only brought much higher
levels of state repression, including thousands of people incarcerated, tortured and killed.
By comparison, the post 1983 years have been very peaceful. A few instances of political
violence (some of them mentioned above) have been the exception. Radical, left- or rightwing political organizations have been politically and electorally very weak, and have
hardly ever resorted to violence. Political conflict was mainly processed through elections,
negotiations, congressional and judicial decisions, and even instances of direct democracy.
Although demonstrations, strikes and blockades have been a common political strategy
since 1983, they have been largely peaceful.
It could be argued that these factors are “too close to the dependent variable” to be
causally informative, and that the question should then be “why did violence and radicalism
decline after 1983.” Many explanations come to mind (learning, the political or military
defeat of hard-liners, the end of the cold war and consequent decline of ideological conflict
throughout the world, etc.). I would first question the notion that these factors are “too
close to the dependent variable to be informative.” Democracy has survived in the midst of
significant domestic armed conflict (e.g., Colombia, El Salvador, Philippines) and has died
in peaceful times (for example in Argentina in 1930 and 1966). Second, I would point out
that decisions about causal distance are necessarily arbitrary, and that learning about causes
at different degrees of separation from the effects adds to our understanding or reality.
Finally, a close cause can also be seen as a causal mechanism through which explanatory
factors farther back exert their influence. Political science has been developing a consensus
regarding the importance of causal mechanisms to build a more solid discipline, so “close”
causes should not be lightly disregarded.
Conclusion: What Else Does Argentina Suggest?
I finish with a quick note on other factors that the regime trajectory of Argentina
suggests are causally important and that are not clearly captured by any of the theoretical
frameworks in Table 3.
First, the performance of the previous authoritarian regime: conventional wisdom
holds that the utter failure of the military in fixing the economy and in the Malvinas war,
6
Violence was present earlier, for example in the incarceration of opposition leaders during the first two
Perón administrations, and, more cruelly, in the execution of several Peronist counter-coup participants by
the military government led by General Aramburu in 1956.
19 coupled with its atrocious human rights violations, convinced both civilian elites and the
public that authoritarianism (or at least the military kind) was far from guaranteeing better
results than democracy. This explanatory factor can also be framed in terms of learning: the
same business, political, intellectual and union elites that used to think of the military as a
solution became convinced that it was in fact a problem.
Second, and more in line with the theme of O´Donnell´s Modernization and
Bureaucratic-Authoritarianism, the constraints associated with “ISI deepening” are not
there anymore. The deep global economic transformations that took place between the
1970s oil crises and the liberalizing 1990s changed the game radically. Industry lost, in
Argentina and most of the middle and high income world, its role as the dynamic core of
the economy, while import substitution went out of fashion, both intellectually and in
practice. The contrast between the inward-oriented and stagnant Latin American economies
(and other similar economies in other regions, such as India) and the export-oriented
“miracles” of the Asian tigers (and Chile) suggested alternative pathways to development.
Foreign exchange constrains, central to the economic syndrome that according to
O´Donnell gave rise to bureaucratic authoritarianism, were eventually eased by the wide
availability of foreign investment, both real and financial. Moreover, the wave of
privatizations in Argentina and much of the developing world brought in much foreign
capital, further reducing current account bottlenecks. More recently, the boom in the price
of commodities has provided a new source of hard currency for food, oil and mineral
exporting countries such as Argentina. Its economic structure has not changed that much in
some important respects (it still has a relatively inefficient, import-intensive industrial
sector along a very efficient agricultural sector that provides most of the foreign exchange).
But the global context has changed in dramatic ways. If O´Donnell was right in positing a
tension between the imperatives of capitalistic development in the 1960s and those of
democracy, the new realities of globalized capitalism in the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s may
call for a reinterpretation of that relationship. The literal meaning of O´Donnell´s (1973)
hypotheses may not be true anymore, but the need for a theoretical understanding of the
subtleties and nonlinearities of modernization, and of the complex relationship between the
global context, the domestic economic structure, and the political regime, are as needed as
they were when he wrote his pathbreaking Modernization and BureaucraticAuthoritarianism.
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