Party-building and Supporting Coalitions: Construction of the Political Bases for a Promarket Program in Argentina (2015-2018)

GABRIEL VOMMARO; MARIANA GENÉ

Congreso; REPAL Conference; 2019

REPAL

The government of Cambiemos represents a change in recent Argentine politics. For the first time, a center-right party comes to power through elections, overcoming the historical weakness of the right (Gibson, 1996). For the first time in democratic times, the president is not a member of Peronism or Radicalism. These features make the question of the political support of a pro-market program in Argentina relevant.After three years of government, two important dimensions can be identified to study the construction of support for the Macri administration: the mobilization of business support and the political coordination within the government coalition. In both cases, the performance of the government has been deficient.What explains these difficulties? We show the critical role played by three factors: two of them endogenous, related to the PRO party-building, and one exogenous, related to the “left turn” policy legacies. First, new politicians showing distance and distrust towards traditional politicians control the party (Vommaro & Armesto, 2015) and centralize the party branding as well as the definition of electoral alliances (Vommaro & Morresi, 2015). This iron grip creates permanent tensions with the political allies coming from traditional parties like the UCR who do not participate in the decision-making process. Secondly, PRO is built as a pro-market force that manages to partially mobilize the business world: through its foundations it recruited managers and CEOS (Vommaro, 2017), but it did not establish permanent and organic relationships with businessmen corporate bodies. PRO modes of aggregation of interests do not improve the low coordination capacity of businessmen in Argentina (Schneider, 2004). A fundamental exogenous factor must be added: the policy legacies of the previous cycle (Niedzwiecki & Pribble, 2017), which formed interest systems with blocking and mobilization capacity that not only hinder the progress of pro-market reforms, but also reduce incentives to mobilize support from more friendly sectors (Vommaro & Gené, 2017).We study how these factors influenced the construction of support for the government policies in three fundamental junctures in terms of policies: 1) the accession to power in 2015, 2) the 2017 legislative elections, and 3) the agreement with the IMF reached in 2018. They exemplify the decision-making during the Macri administration, that attempted, on the one hand, to strengthen its supporting coalition, and on the other, to prevent resistance and sustain social governability.We will contribute to three theoretical discussions: 1) the weight of the policy legacies in the right turn; 2) the supporting coalition building in minority governments; 3) The conditioning of the party building (Levitsky et al, 2016) in the way in which the new Latin American parties govern.We use a process tracing methodology, with the aim of constructing causal imputations based on qualitative data. The research is based on a systematic tracking of the social and economic policies carried out at each juncture and the type of link between the government and its allies at those times. Data comes from a long-term research using surveys, in-depth interviews with politicians and experts and secondary sources.