From Labor Politics to Machine Politics: The Transformation of Party-Union Linkages in Argentine Peronism, 1983-1999
Author(s)
Levitsky, Steven
Abstract
Few Latin American labor-based parties adapted to the challenge of working-class decline as successfully as the Argentine (Peronist) Justicialista Party (PJ). Beginning in 1983, Peronism underwent a far-reaching process of de-unionization. Reformers dismantled Peronism’s traditional mechanisms of labor participation, and clientelist networks gradually replaced the party’s union-based linkages to the working and lower classes. By the early 1990s, the PJ had transformed from a labor-dominated party into a machine party in which unions were relatively marginal actors. This article seeks to explain the radical transformation of the Peronist party-union linkage.
