Towards Clientelistic Democracy in Argentina

EMILIA CASTORINA

University of British Columbia (Vancouver)

Congreso; 77 Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences; 2008

Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences

The term democracy has been accompanied by tons of qualifiers and adjectives (particularly in Latin America) –“social”, “formal”, “liberal”, “delegative”, “populist”, “neo-populist”, “post-populist”, “hybrid”, “fragile”, “unconsolidated”, “weakly institutionalized”, “low intensity” and so on and so forth. This paper, however, is not an attempt to provide a new one but to explore a problematic assumption that cuts across many studies on Latin American democratization –i.e. that political clientelism (as well as patronage-politics) is incompatible with “efficient” forms of democratic governance. Or to put it differently, that “low levels of institutionalization” necessary lead to “weak democracies”. On the contrary, the aim of my paper is to draw on a different understanding of democratization that goes beyond formal institutional design towards the more complex terrain of political strength. I intend to discuss the extent to which neo-liberalism in Argentina, far from eradicating clientelism, “populism”, patronage-politics –as the World Bank and other institutionalist perspectives prophesied through the 1980s and 1990s- it involved a “re-packing” and a revitalization of them to be viable or plausible at all. My main contention is that the increasing reliance on these “non-liberal” informal practices should not be seen as a “deviation” or “anomaly” from an ideal type of democracy, but rather as a condition for market discipline and therefore a constitutive aspect of democratic neo-liberalism in Argentina. In fact, this argument raises the question as to what is indeed an “efficient democracy” as political clientelism and patronage politics seem to provide a politically effective form of disciplining popular politics –though what can be defined as a “new politics of poverty”- necessary for locking-in the power gains of elites and big capital.