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3 - An “Organized Disorganization”: The Peronist Party Structure in the 1990s

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 December 2009

Steven Levitsky
Affiliation:
Harvard University, Massachusetts
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Summary

The contemporary PJ retains important features from its populist and movementist past. Although it possesses a powerful mass organization with deep roots in working- and lower-class society, that organization lacks a central authority structure, an effective bureaucracy, and widely accepted and binding rules of the game. This internal fluidity has led scholars to conclude that the PJ's organizational structure is inoperative or even nonexistent, and that party leaders maintain personalistic and largely unmediated relationships with the Peronist rank and file (Novaro 1994: 76–89; Palermo and Novaro 1996: 370–6; Weyland 1999).

This chapter presents a somewhat different view. It characterizes the PJ as an informal mass party. It is a mass party in that it maintains both a large membership and activist base and an extensive base-level organization with deep roots in working- and lower-class society. Yet the PJ differs from prototypical mass working-class parties (such as European social democratic and communist parties) in that it is informally organized and weakly routinized. It is informal in that most Peronist subunits are self-organized and -operated networks – run out of unions, clubs, nongovernmental organizations, and even activists' homes – that do not appear in the party's statutes or records, and which remain unconnected to (and autonomous of) the party bureaucracy. It is weakly routinized in that its internal rules and procedures are not widely known, accepted, and complied with, but rather are fluid, contested, and widely circumvented or ignored.

Type
Chapter
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Transforming Labor-Based Parties in Latin America
Argentine Peronism in Comparative Perspective
, pp. 58 - 90
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2003

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