Argentina’s 2015 elections saw the right-leaning Mauricio Macri of the Propuesta Republicana (Republican Proposal) Party come back from an early deficit to defeat Peronist Daniel Scioli, the nominee of the incumbent Frente para Victoria (Front for Victory) Party, whose leader, incumbent Christina Fernández de Kirchner, was term-limited. This victory represented the first time that a candidate who was not affiliated with either the Peronist movement or the Radical Party won the presidency in Argentina, and it raises questions about what structures undergird the Argentine party system and how they are evolving. Moreover, after a decade of leftist victories in many Latin American presidential elections, Macri’s victory also raised questions about whether voters in the region might be turning away from the statist policies that were enacted during the the left wave, and that this outcome might be the start of a “conservative wave.”
This volume brings together leading scholars of Argentine politics to answer these questions. To do so, they rely on a two-wave panel survey, the Argentina Panel Election Study. While public opinion polling is ubiquitous in Latin America, academically focused election surveys generally, and multiwave panels in particular, remain rare; this survey is the first of its kind in Argentina. The contributions to this volume demonstrate the value of these kinds of projects.
The chapters focus on three main themes. The first is diagnosing whether this election was a deliberate right turn. Most of the evidence suggests that the election of a conservative politician did not reflect a preference for conservative policies. Kenneth Greene’s analysis shows that voters who switched from supporting Scioli to supporting Macri also had become less supportive of redistribution during the campaign, but the chapters by Lupu and by Schiumerini each find that the correlation between respondents’ evaluations of the state’s role in managing markets and voter choices was weak. Meanwhile, the chapter by Carlos Gervasoni and María Laura Tagina demonstrates that support for Scioli was not connected to a broader set of issue positions. Moreover, Schiumerini documents that most Argentines have continued to prefer a strong state role in managing the economy and that support for economic statism did not decline before the 2015 election. Macri’s victory was not a mandate for a reduced state role in managing the economy or for less redistribution.
If the election was not a referendum on the economic policies of the left, what, then, was it about? Several answers emerge. First, voters in Argentina have partisan attachments that orient them to the political system, although Andy Baker and Dalton Dorr show that the stability of partisan attachments in Argentina varies across parties (identification with the Peronist movement being stronger than identification with Macri’s PRO). It is weaker in Argentina than in Mexico and in the established, programmatic party systems of the United States and the United Kingdom. Second, Gervasoni and Tagina, and also Schiumerini, show that evaluations of recent economic trends were strongly connected to voter choices, and that this was true regardless of voters’ ideological predispositions or issue preferences.
Third, voters who received economic benefits from the state via various social welfare programs were significantly more likely to vote for the incumbent Peronist candidate. Lupu’s chapter even shows that this is the only factor that explains why poor voters were more likely to vote for Scioli than for other candidates. Finally, several chapters demonstrate that voter preferences changed over the campaign and reflected voters’ media consumption (Gervasoni and Tagina), campaign effects that shifted how voters viewed the competence of the candidates and evaluated the incumbent government (Greene), and strategic voting (Rebecca Weitz-Shapiro and Matthew Winters). Thus the defeat of the incumbent party occurred not because voters rejected its policies but because of concerns about the government’s performance, because voters are only weakly tied to parties, and because Macri positioned himself as someone who would generate improved performance without instituting dramatic policy changes.
The book’s second major theme is to place these patterns in comparative perspective, given the lack of programmatic competition in Argentina. The lack of issue-based voting in the election is not surprising, given how little attention the campaigns gave to issues. Schiumerini’s data, for example, show that voters did not strongly differentiate between the candidates on the basis of either ideology or specific issue positions. The large literature on clientelism in Argentina is also consistent with a lack of programmatic competition, although in her chapter, Oliveros suggests that the role of a quid pro quo and party monitoring of voter behavior in Argentina might be overstated.
All three editors argue that parties’ weak programmatic commitments weaken party attachments; they explain the weak role of demographic cleavages and issue divisions documented in the volume. Although only a small handful of chapters engage in explicit comparative analysis, the evidence presented about Argentina here is consistent with other work suggesting that voting behavior reflects the choices that parties make to emphasize programmatic competition or not.
The last theme is whether the weakness of parties and the lack of programmatic competition in countries like Argentina has negative implications for the functioning of democracy. Oliveros shows that while most voters believed that votes were secret and that personal experiences with clientelism did not reduce beliefs in election integrity, voters who perceived that clientelism was rampant were less trusting that votes would be kept secret. Then, in a comparative chapter, Elizabeth Zechmeister finds that voters who switch between parties, and especially those who withdraw from partisan competition, are less likely to believe that the system is responsive to people like them, although this pattern does not emerge as strongly in Argentina and other countries where voting is compulsory. Taken together, these results confirm that a lack of programmatic representation and stable parties can undermine satisfaction with democratic processes.
While these themes will be of broad interest to scholars of the region, the book is also a snapshot of a pivotal moment in Argentine politics. María Victoria Murillo and Steven Levitsky outline the shifts that weakened the Kirchner movement and examine the initial choices of the Macri government in shaping policy while dealing with an opposition-controlled legislature. Ernesto Calvo documents the strategic choices made by leading candidates in the run-up to the national primaries to consolidate their position, and also the dynamics within the Peronist movement as different factions sought to maintain their influence within the expected Scioli government—which ultimately weakened his candidacy. Both these chapters also document the role that electoral geography and subnational party organizations and institutions play in electoral dynamics in Argentina.
This book has much to recommend it. Its major themes capture central questions that preoccupy scholars of Latin American politics. The chapters each tackle a central question of electoral behavior, and the authors present their answers in easy to understand ways, frequently through figures instead of tables. The chapters by Greene and by Weitz-Shapiro, which take advantage of the panel structure of the data to document short-term changes in voter preferences, fill a particular hole in the Latin American elections literature, as campaign effects and strategic voting have been dramatically understudied in Latin America. This volume reminds us that our understanding of voting behavior in the region will be incomplete without data specifically timed to campaigns that can capture these important dynamics. Then the public release of the Argentine Panel Study with these data will generate additional scholarship on the book’s themes and on additional research questions.
As with all such projects, there are issues that I wish the book had covered in more detail. First, while the book argues that dissatisfaction with the Kirchner regime and with economic outputs drove the swing toward the opposition, it pays little systematic attention to how voters actually perceived the economy and incorporated it into their vote, or to the role of corruption scandals in shaping views of the government. The volume might have benefited from a chapter that focused specifically on how voters viewed these elements of the accountability process and that documented the origins of the anti-incumbent sentiment that helped split the Peronist movement and also ultimately helped propel Macri to victory.
Second, the book looks at how dynamics in Argentina have evolved over time, but a lack of comparable data makes it difficult to directly compare the dynamics documented in this book with those in previous elections. I would have loved to see analyses putting the 2015 elections in context by looking at comparable models of how demographic divides, partisanship, or issues shaped those elections (albeit without panel data). Finally, the book’s ambition to address multiple themes means that it does not emerge with a single, coherent message, and the chapters do not all build on each other. The book could have benefited from a strong concluding chapter by the editors to bring the analyses back together, draw common conclusions, and lay out steps for further research on these questions.
These concerns should not diminish, however, what the contributors to this volume have achieved. The ambitious data collection by the editors and broad analyses by the contributors should be a model for scholarship on the region. Scholars interested in understanding the evolving nature of Argentine party politics or the nature of political representation in Latin America will learn a lot from this book.
