Reshaping the Political Arena in Latin America

From Resisting Neoliberalism to the Second Incorporation

Eduardo Silva, Federico Rossi, Eduardo Silva, Federico Rossi

• Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780822983101
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Política mundial

Neoliberalism changed the face of Latin America and left average citizens struggling to cope in many ways. Popular sectors were especially hard hit as wages declined and unemployment increased. The backlash to neoliberalism in the form of popular protest and electoral mobilization opened space for leftist governments to emerge. The turn to left governments raised popular expectations for a second wave of incorporation. Although a growing literature has analyzed many aspects of left governments, there is no study of how the redefinition of the organized popular sectors, their allies, and their struggles have reshaped the political arena to include their interests—until now. This volume examines the role played in the second wave of incorporation by political parties, trade unions, and social movements in five cases: Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador, and Venezuela. The cases shed new light on a subject critical to understanding the change in the distribution of political power related to popular sectors and their interests—a key issue in the study of postneoliberalism.

Chapter 1

INTRODUCTION

Reshaping the Political Arena in Latin America

FEDERICO M. ROSSI AND EDUARDO SILVA

Neoliberalism changed the face of Latin America and left average citizens struggling to cope with changes. The popular sectors, broadly defined, were especially hard-hit as wages declined and unemployment and precarious employment expanded.¹ Protracted backlash to neoliberalism in the form of popular sector protest and electoral mobilization opened space for left governments throughout Latin America (Silva 2009). Where do the popular sectors that struggled so long to create the conditions for the left turn stand today?

Neoliberal reforms unquestionably caused profound transformations in the relationship of the popular sectors to the political arena. Collier and Collier (1991) argued that the national populist period (1930s to 1970s) selectively incorporated popular sector actors (mainly unions) into the political sphere. Later, neoliberal policies sought to exclude them, especially from socioeconomic policy-making arenas. Because the neoliberal period marginalized urban and rural popular sectors, the turn to left governments raised expectations for a second wave of incorporation (Rossi 2015a, 2017). And yet, although a growing literature has analyzed many aspects of left governments (Burdick, Oxhorn, and Roberts 2009; Cameron and Hershberg 2010; Weyland, Madrid, and Hunter 2010; Levitsky and Roberts 2011), we lack a systematic, comprehensive, comparative study of how the redefinition of the organized popular sectors, their political allies, and their struggles have reshaped the political arena to include their interests.

Our volume analyzes this problem in five paradigmatic cases: Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador, and Venezuela, following Rossi’s (2015a, 2017) thesis of the second wave of incorporation in Latin America. The subject is critical for understanding the extent of change in the distribution of political power in relation to the popular sectors and their interests. This is a key issue in the study of post-neoliberalism because the emerging new developmental path in Latin America includes an expansion of the political arena.

Case selection centered on the most paradigmatic instances of incorporation in countries that include varying levels of socioeconomic and political development in high-to-medium to low-middle-income countries. These were cases that experienced significant anti-neoliberal mobilization precisely because of the economic, social, and political exclusionary nature of that project where popular sectors were concerned—a contemporary version of Polanyi’s double movement against the imposition of contemporary forms of market society (Polanyi 1944; Silva 2009; Roberts 2014). Because the expressed interests of aggrieved popular sectors were plainly revealed in protests and electoral mobilization, one can measure the extent to which those interests were incorporated. We also have variation on institutional constraints and how they affected the incorporation process. These were greater in Brazil and Argentina, where incorporation was more bounded in existing institutional frameworks, and weaker in the Andean cases, where experimentation was consequently greater.

We ask three central questions. How did neoliberal adjustment and its second-generation reforms affect the transformation of key popular sector social and political actors, their interests, demands, and actions? How have reconstituted organized popular sectors been (re)incorporated into politics by center-left or left governments and what is their role in the social coalitions that support them? What are the consequences of the mode of incorporation for policy and politics?

The book addresses these questions in three sections focused on transformations affecting social movements, trade unions, and political parties. The section on social movements analyzes the emergence of new movements and the transformation of more established ones in terms of their demands, repertoire of strategies, and their relationship to political parties, the state, and the policy-making process in general. The section on unions concentrates on transformations in the structure of representation and redefinition of demands, repertoire of action, and strategies, as well as changes in their connection to the state, political parties, and the policy-making process in general. The section on political parties and party systems analyzes transformations in party systems, such as the emergence of new labor parties, populist parties, and transformation in existing ones. It also examines the social coalition they appeal to and their connections to the social groups that compose them. Each section also explores cooperation and tension among the principal actors on key policy issues, such as reforms to free-market economics and democracy.

We use a historical analytic framework to address these questions. The book analyzes how the transformations produced by neoliberal economic and political reforms affected patterns of popular sector incorporation in the political arena from the 1980s to the present. The country chapters begin with a brief overview of the previous conditions that set a benchmark by which to assess each process of relative disincorporation under free-market economic restructuring and the politics that supported it.

The chapters then trace key processes through two distinct periods. The first of these is the neoliberal period. The chapters begin with a quick review of how neoliberal economic and political reforms (1980s to early 2000s) attempted to dismantle the arrangements of the national populist period by decollectivizing popular sector organizations, especially unions. However, we do not ignore how neoliberal projects also reordered politics in ways that opened spaces for new popular sector actors at the local level and/or in other spaces disconnected from economic policy making. We then turn to an examination of the reactive phase to neoliberal reforms (1990s to 2000s). During this phase, popular sectors and their allies mobilized in the streets and electorally. How labor unions, left political parties, and social movements reconstituted themselves to challenge neoliberal economic, political, and social reforms profoundly affected the second incorporation in each case.

The second period, of course, is that of the second incorporation and reshaping of the political arena under left governments claiming to advance post-neoliberal projects (1999 to the present). This is the heart of the case studies. Here we examine the rearticulation of unions and social movements to political parties and the state. We also analyze the role of the politically significant popular organizations in the policy process and in social coalitions that support left projects. We pay careful attention to patterns of cooperation and conflict between popular organizations, parties, and the state, as well as to cooperation and conflict among popular organizations: who is in, who is out, and why.

The substance of the book spans a period from the late 1990s to the mid-2010s, which is when the second incorporation took shape in Latin America. To be sure, the end of the commodity boom and shifting winds to the right raise questions about the legacies of this new incorporation. However, incorporation projects began before the commodity boom during the reactive phase to neoliberalism and thus they cannot be attributed to windfall increases in the price of raw material exports.² Because these shifting economic and political winds are new, their impact cannot yet be fully gauged, only guessed at. We cannot yet discern what was fleeting and what sank deeper roots. Therefore, we end our study just before these very recent events. We are confident that this volume will set a benchmark for measuring what was lasting from this push for popular sector incorporation and what was more fleeting, which will most certainly be a matter of degrees in many instances rather than wholesale rollback.

Here in one collection, then, we have detailed studies of the three key actors—social movements, trade unions, and political parties—in a process of transformation that has profoundly affected politics in Latin America. Most studies only analyze one of the actors, and frequently only in single cases. Understanding the broader, cumulative effects and meanings of those discrete processes eludes us. We offer this volume as a corrective and hope that it will open a lively conversation.

CENTRAL CONCEPTS

Neoliberalism

This book focuses on the consequences of neoliberalism for the second incorporation of popular sectors in the political arena in the left governments that followed. Thus, it behooves us to clarify what we mean by the concept. In so doing, we also lay a narrative foundation for the country cases that reduces repetition of its core elements.

We use the concept of neoliberalism to refer to a specific form of capitalism and a series of reforms to reorganize economic relations along neoclassical economic principles beginning in Chile in 1975. The neoliberal project also had a political and social dimension once redemocratization got under way in the 1980s. This development model stressed the price system as the sole allocator of capital, labor, and land. Politics, meaning the state and representative institutions of democracy, as well as social policy, should be restructured so as to minimally interfere with the market (Silva 2009).

The timing, sequencing, and intensity of policies designed to accomplish neoliberal restructuring varied significantly across cases (Weyland 2002). However, all followed a similar pattern. So-called first stage stabilization policies addressed deep fiscal crises, balance of payments crises, and hyperinflation of the national populist period. Policy prescriptions emphasized balanced budgets, stable unitary exchange rates, and restrictive monetary and fiscal policies, primarily high interest rates and slashing government expenditures by firing state employees and cutting programs (Birdsall, de la Torre, and Valencia Caicedo 2011).

Structural adjustment reforms followed initial stabilization policies (Edwards 1995). First stage structural adjustment focused on the liberalization of trade, finance, investment, and agricultural sectors. They encouraged deregulation, privatization of public enterprise, and foreign investment. The idea was to free the price system to allocate resources more efficiently. Second stage structural adjustment restructured social institutions along market principles in health care, education, pensions, and social assistance programs. Policy encouraged privatization of services, decentralization, and means-tested coverage. These policies shifted risk onto individuals and downsized public services, narrowly targeted basic services, and social safety nets to the poor.

Neoliberal economic reforms had a political corollary: the consolidation of liberal, representative democracy and state reform (Silva 2009). Liberal democracy was understood as small government structured to support the neoliberal economic and social project. Thus, redistributive issues and a larger role for the state in economy and society were off the table. State reform meant strengthening central banks and finance ministries and circumscribing the reach of most other ministries. Having abdicated an active role of the state in economic and social development, liberal democracy emphasized procedural processes and rights for fair and free elections. Individual rights against discrimination by creed, race, religion, and gender were also advocated. Who was elected to office, however, should not affect neoliberal economic and social policy.

Electoral reforms and advances, however, could have unintended consequences. They opened spaces for popular and subaltern groups to organize against the neoliberal project. This was sometimes the case with decentralization, electoral engineering, and cultural inclusion for indigenous peoples (Falleti 2010; Lucero 2008; Willis, da C. B. Garman, and Haggard 1999; Weyland 2002; Yashar 2005). They opened the door for the development of left parties at the local level who then learned to compete on a national basis, as in the case of Brazil. They could also strengthen the organization of indigenous social movements that later pressed their territorial and material claims, as occurred in Bolivia and Ecuador.

Popular Sector Incorporation

The concept of popular sector incorporation is multidimensional because it refers to the recognition of the claims of politically active popular sectors, the creation or adaptation of formal and informal rules that regulate their participation in politics, and their links to the policy process (Collier and Collier 1991; Rossi 2015a, 2017). Thus, one may conceptualize the principal relationship of popular sectors to the state on three dimensions: individual rights (particularly the universal right to vote); collective rights (the right to form associations and to participate in the polity); and substantive citizenship rights (the capacity to influence public policy to ensure that governments respond to core social and economic claims).

However, popular sector incorporation is a historical process and its specific forms vary over time. Collier and Collier (1991) analyzed the processes that culminated in the initial incorporation of the mid-twentieth century. Following Rossi (2015a, 2017), the neoliberal period and the ensuing reaction to them that culminated in left governments can be understood as periods of relative disincorporation and reincorporation. This volume examines these processes in depth.

The first incorporation in the mid-twentieth century focused on the formal recognition, legalization, and regulation of labor unions; it codified the relationship of unions to the state, business, and policy making. Corporatism emerged as the dominant (but not only) form of popular interest intermediation, in which party-affiliated unions were the politically dominant representatives of popular sectors. The state chartered and licensed privileged union confederations to represent the interests of workers in the political arena and vis-à-vis business (Collier and Collier 1991; Collier in this volume).

The neoliberal period was one of relative disincorporation as a result of the application of economic and political reforms that reduced the power of the organized popular sectors vis-à-vis other segments of society (Rossi 2015a, 2017). It involved efforts by the political and economic elites to weaken and exclude collective popular actors and their organizations from the political arena. It was never absolute, as in returning to the conditions of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Popular sector organizations, especially unions, were still recognized legally and regulated. However, the point was to decollectivize and depoliticize them as much as possible. This entailed measures to weaken popular organizational capacity, to tightly circumscribe their sphere of legitimate action, and to remove them from influencing socioeconomic policy making (Cook 2006). The goal was to atomize and fragment them and limit their action to the private sphere; that is, a firm-level union can only bargain with the firm’s management under conditions that greatly tilt power in favor of the firm. Labor code changes that emphasized labor flexibilization, along with high unemployment and underemployment due to the shedding of formal sector jobs created by privatization, the decline of domestic industry with trade liberalization, subcontracting, and state downsizing, all took their toll. Of course the extent to which this occurred varied significantly across the cases, as we shall see. Furthermore, because state corporatism was the principal type of interest intermediation that emerged from the national populist period, neoliberal economic social reforms sought to supplant it with neopluralist forms (Oxhorn 1998).

By contrast, the period after neoliberalism is one of partial reincorporation for the popular sectors (Rossi 2015a, 2017). Because reincorporation takes place after redemocratization, basic individual rights (such as voting) already existed, as did the collective rights to organize. The emphasis, therefore, is on the third dimension: the expansion of substantive rights in ways that the expressed interests of major, politically significant new and old popular sector organizations find, at minimum, programmatic expression in left governments. Reincorporation also involves the concrete institutional mechanisms that link popular sector organizations to the political arena and policy making. These are the mechanisms by which popular sector organizations connect to new, transformed, or established political parties and the state in order to have their expressed interests recognized and acted upon in the policy process (Rossi 2015a, 2017).

The best way to understand the second incorporation is to contrast it to the first because it is fundamentally different (this comparison is developed by Rossi in the next chapter). Disincorporation under neoliberalism left traditional labor unions weakened. They could not lead challenges to neoliberalism from below nor subsequent reincorporation efforts. Instead, neoliberalism and the reactive phase to it gave rise to a fragmented, heterogeneous popular sector landscape. New, often territorially based popular actors rose to the fore, such as indigenous peoples’ movements, unemployed workers, neighborhood organizations, shantytown dwellers, and landless peasants, among others (Rossi 2015a, 2017). In this context, the labor movement was one more participant among many in anti-neoliberal protests, and its relationship to territorially based movements varied greatly from case to case (Silva 2009).

This context was not propitious for the re-creation of state corporatism as the modal form of popular interest intermediation. Instead, as Rossi points out in the next chapter and as Silva argues in the conclusion, when governments developed reincorporation strategies they acted selectively and with differentiated mechanisms, depending on the type of popular social subject and their needs. Under these circumstances, the fate of organized labor differed greatly. In some cases, unions were not subjects of reincorporation strategies; instead, they were largely marginalized. In other cases, they fared somewhat better.

Because of the heterogeneity and fragmentation of the popular sectors in the context of democratization in highly unequal societies, the second incorporation is less structured, less institutionalized, and exhibits a greater variety of mechanisms of incorporation for a much more varied sociopolitical base than the first incorporation. The new incorporation is primarily not about state corporatism; it is about social citizenship (as Roberts and Rossi each stress in this volume), mechanisms of direct participatory democracy, and social inclusion. The inclusion of territorially based rather than functionally differentiated groups is part of what makes the second incorporation both potentially more democratic but also potentially fraught (as Rossi argues in this volume and elsewhere). Fragmented and territorially based groups can win collective and individual rights but can also be co-opted and managed by technocrats and clientelistic brokers.³

In sum, as Rossi (2015a, 2) has persuasively argued, the new incorporation amounts to “ . . . the second major redefinition of the sociopolitical arena . . . caused by the broad and selective inclusion of the popular sectors in the polity after being excluded or disincorporated by military authoritarian regimes and democratic neoliberal reforms.” The second incorporation is about the recognition and inclusion of popular and poor subaltern social groups’ interests in the political arena, which comprises political parties, elections, executive and legislative institutions, and policy making. However, the mechanisms that articulate the popular sectors are more varied, often ad hoc, and less institutionalized with the presence of more informal arrangements (Rossi 2017).

Significantly, inclusion in reincorporation processes frequently but not necessarily concerns popular sector organizations. At the very least, however, they entail policies that attend to their expressed or revealed interests, especially those raised during the cycles of anti-neoliberal contention that preceded left turns (Roberts 2014; Silva 2009). Therefore, social policy may be considered reincorporation when programs found a new explicit or implicit social contract that extends or universalizes basic social rights to groups that had been disincorporated or marginalized by neoliberalism (Rossi 2015a). This is especially true when the implementation of social policy ent...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1. Introduction: Reshaping the Political Arena in Latin America
• Part I: Social Movements
• Part II: Trade Unions
• Part III: Political Parties
• Notes
• References
• About the Contributors
• Index