The last two decades saw a new wave of popular-sector (poor and working-class) organization, mobilization, and claim making in Latin America. Occurring after the region’s embrace of market reforms and concurrently with its turn to the left, this surge in popular mobilization has attracted great attention from scholars seeking to theorize an emerging “postneoliberal” interest politics in the region. Editors Eduardo Silva and Federico M. Rossi’s Reshaping the Political Arena in Latin America represents a landmark addition to this burgeoning line of research, standing out for its analytic rigor, careful attention to concepts, and impressive empirical contributions.
Silva and Rossi’s approach to new trends in popular-sector interest politics explicitly builds upon Ruth Berins Collier and David Collier’s (1991) analysis of the politics of labor incorporation in twentieth-century Latin America, in Shaping the Political Arena: Critical Junctures, the Labor Movement, and Regime Dynamics in Latin America. Collier and Collier’s study of the “first incorporation” (as termed by Silva and Rossi) examined the recognition, formal legalization, and political integration of the labor movement and how variation in labor incorporation drove subsequent patterns of party-system competition and, ultimately, the dynamics of political regimes. Silva and Rossi propose that a “second incorporation” has occurred in the last two decades (a notion also advanced by Rossi in previous work), which has also been highly consequential for regional politics.
In their introduction, the editors advance a carefully crafted conceptual and theoretical framework for analyzing the second incorporation. Latin America’s age of market liberalism was a period of popular “disincorporation,” as it greatly undermined the unions and labor-based parties that emerged during the first incorporation and became core institutions of popular-sector representation. The subsequent era was marked by “partial reincorporation.” Political rights like voting and the right to organize were already in place. Therefore, reincorporation was partial and mainly involved the expansion of “substantive” rights like the recognition of popular-sector claims for representation and, in some cases, the formal integration of popular-sector collective actors into policymaking processes. The new leading players in these processes have been “territorially based” social movements representing constituencies that were previously largely excluded from the arena of interest politics (such as the indigenous, unemployed, landless peasants, and shantytown denizens). But labor unions have remained important to the infrastructure of popular representation, and political parties have also played vital roles, responding to popular-sector mobilization and actively shaping the ways in which popular-sector collective actors have been formally and informally integrated into politics.
The volume is divided into three sections that, respectively, examine the three actors just mentioned: social movements, labor unions, and left-wing political parties. Each begins with a short thematic introduction and contains three empirical chapters that analyze the same five cases following the same pattern (a Bolivia–Ecuador comparison, a chapter on Venezuela, and an Argentina–Brazil comparison). By employing this structure and by enforcing discipline in the use of concepts, the editors have managed to bring a remarkable level of coherence and organization to an edited volume.
The first section focuses on the territorially based social movements that are the new protagonists of the second incorporation. A section introduction by Rossi frames the study of these movements as collective actors struggling for reincorporation in a postneoliberal era. Silva’s chapter offers a novel and compelling argument for differences in movement-based incorporation in Ecuador and Bolivia, focusing on the strength of movements, their relationship to left parties, and the ideological frames of political leaders. María Pilar García-Guadilla analyzes how the highly exclusionary model of interest politics of Punto Fijo–era Venezuela gave way to a series of Chavista initiatives to spur popular-sector mobilization that were highly exclusionary in their own right. Rossi offers an insightful and detailed analysis of movement reincorporation in Argentina and Brazil.
The next section turns to labor unions. Ruth Berins Collier’s section introduction offers a sweeping overview of patterns of change across the five countries. The following chapters explore and reveal cross-national variation. Jorge León Trujillo and Susan Spronk suggest that labor politics in Bolivia and Ecuador have been marked by different forms of “contestatory interest intermediation.” Steve Ellner’s chapter on Venezuela complicates the simplistic notion that interest politics have been exclusively “top-down,” showing that the Bolivarian labor movement engaged in substantial grassroots mobilization and achieved significant organizational power, albeit while toeing the party line. Julián Gindin and Adalberto Cardoso analyze how union fortunes were partially revived in Brazil and Argentina when labor-based parties came to power.
The final section analyzes the politics of the second incorporation from the perspective of the major left-wing political parties in each country. Ken Roberts’s section introduction outlines how the neoliberal era and its aftermath shaped patterns of party politics in the region. Catherine Conaghan’s insightful comparison of Ecuador and Bolivia analyzes how new-left movements remade party systems and achieved hegemony. Daniel Hellinger’s close analysis of the Venezuelan case looks granularly at the staged evolution of the Venezuelan party system from the Punto Fijo era to the Nicolás Maduro presidency. Pierre Ostiguy and Aaron Schneider examine the twin cases of Brazil and Argentina, where party systems displayed much greater continuity than in the other three countries.
While the volume provides an invaluable framework for exploring the second incorporation, it is on shakier ground when discussing broader implications. The second incorporation has entailed important changes in popular-sector interest representation, with real consequences that should not be dismissed lightly. But there is little evidence—at least when viewed from today’s perspective, with only limited temporal distance—that alternative modes of incorporation have driven patterns of party competition or the dynamics of political regimes, as was true of the first incorporation. As such, can we really say that the second incorporation has been responsible for “reshaping the political arena,” as the volume’s provocative title claims? Silva’s thoughtful conclusion offers some insightful reflections, as well as an interesting analysis of cross-case differences seen through the lens of “segmented interest intermediation regimes.” But the volume never fully grapples with the possibility that the second incorporation, and variation in modes of incorporation, might have had negligible impact on patterns of party contestation and political conflict in contemporary Latin America. This may be an essential characteristic of the second incorporation that distinguishes it from the first.
Another question regards whether the concept of a second incorporation accurately captures the new landscape of popular-sector interest politics across Latin America. The project focuses on five “paradigmatic cases” in which new social movements were particularly impactful and left parties and governments actively forged relationships with collective actors. This approach offers real advantages, allowing the volume to plumb important cases in depth. Yet in many other Latin American countries, new forms of popular mobilization have been less politically salient and have triggered little response from partisan and state actors. Does the notion of a second incorporation really capture the dynamics of contemporary popular-sector interest politics in those cases? This seems like another potential contrast with the first incorporation, during which some degree of state initiative to regulate the labor movement was nearly universal, even in highly agrarian societies where labor was relatively weak.
Ultimately, these are questions for further investigation, and scholars may reasonably arrive at different conclusions. Reshaping the Political Arena in Latin America has provided an invaluable set of conceptual tools, theoretical propositions, and empirical insights to guide this research agenda, and will be an enduring contribution for these reasons.
