“From the ¡Que se vayan todos! to the reconfiguration of the Argentine political elites. Continuities and transformations in the composition of the Senate”

GABRIEL LEVITA

Sheffield

Congreso; 48º Annual Conference, Society for Latin American Studies; 2012

Society for Latin American Studies

This paper contributes to the literature on Argentine political elites by shedding light on the way that the Senate composition has changed since the social, political and economic crisis of 2001. The prosopographical analysis of Senator profiles drawn from the 2001-2011 period illustrates both an increasing diversification of their basic social characteristics and also their political careers. In Argentine political history, the Senate has always been more conservative than the lower chamber of the Congress. Whilst its members have belonged to the most powerful political groupings, they have also occupied the highest positions in the national and provincial State structures and political parties. Since 2001 this defining characteristic of the Senate has been called into question as a consequence of a series of legal reforms. In this paper we investigate this widely demanded and so-called political renewal in order to find out to what extent it has occurred as a consequence of institutional reforms, social pressure and/or long-term social changes in political elites. As the preliminary results of a wider research, we propose a typology of senators’ trajectories which demonstrates the pluralization of the chamber and, in relation to this, of Argentine political elites. Thus, this also leads us to rethink the category of political outsider.