Crabtree On Peru

J. Lat. Amer. Stud.
42, 357–382 f Cambridge University Press 2010 357

doi:10.1017/S0022216X10000477
C O M M E N TA R Y
Democracy without Parties ? Some

Lessons from Peru*
J O H N C RA B T RE E
Abstract. Thirty years on from Peru’s return to democracy in 1980, the country’s
record with democratisation has been chequered. Not only was the process of
‘ consolidation ’ reversed in the 1990s under the Fujimori government, but the degree
to which durable linkages have been established between state and society is very
limited. More than in most countries of Latin America, the party system has failed
to fulfil the representative role allotted to it in the literature, a role that cannot
easily be assumed by other sorts of institution. It is therefore an important case
study for those concerned with the more structural obstacles to the development
of representative politics. The article seeks to look at some key issues affecting
party development : the chimera of consolidation, the persistence of clientelism
and patrimonialism, the interaction with social movements and the significance of
political culture.
Keywords: Peru, party development, democratisation, clientelism, social movements,

political culture
Introduction
Thirty years have passed since Peru restored civilian government, following
the docenio of military dictatorship. Elected in May 1980, the Belaúnde
government took office in July of that year, initiating a new period in Peru’s
political development, based on a constitutional disposition in which, for
the first time, all Peruvians over the age of eighteen were eligible to vote.
Belaúnde’s election generated considerable optimism for the future at the
beginning of that decade, as well as a belief that new institutional mechan-
isms could be created that would ensure participation by the mass of the
population, much of it previously excluded. The process had begun two
John Crabtree is Research Associate at the Latin American Centre, Oxford University.
Email : [email protected].
* The author is grateful for comments given by friends and colleagues, among them
Laurence Whitehead, Joe Foweraker, Julio Cotler, Lewis Taylor, Cynthia McClintock,
Martin Tanaka and Barry Axford. This text has also benefited from the suggestions made
by the JLAS editors and three anonymous reviewers.
358 John Crabtree
years earlier with the election of a Constituent Assembly. This had brought
together most of the country’s ideologically heterogeneous parties under the
presidency of Vı́ctor Raúl Haya de la Torre, the founder of the Alianza
Popular Revolucionaria Americana (American Revolutionary Popular Alliance,
APRA), Peru’s oldest mass party. As well as generating optimism within,
Peru’s transition was watched with interest well beyond its frontiers. It was
one of Latin America’s forerunners in the process of democratisation, but
one where hopes for the future were tinged with understandable concern
about how democracy would work in one of the region’s most socially
polarised countries, where democratic traditions and practices were notably
absent.
Since that time, the record of democratisation in Peru has been chequered.
Although there have been regular elections since 1980 and – with some
notable exceptions – these have been deemed free and fair, the quality of
Peruvian democracy has been repeatedly questioned.1 The country has had
to contend with extremes of economic and political volatility. On the econ-
omic side, it has undergone hyperinflation, balance of payments crises and
wild gyrations in its pattern of economic growth. Politically, it has seen
striking electoral volatility giving way to deep disenchantment with party
politics. It has experienced the effects of a protracted and bloody conflict
between insurrectionary groups and the country’s armed forces, a conflict
that resulted in some 70,000 deaths and hundreds of thousands of people
displaced.2 In the 1990s, under Alberto Fujimori, Peru underwent a decade
of autocracy, with an open breach of the Constitution. It saw restrictions
placed on the rule of law and it gained one of Latin America’s worst
reputations for human rights violation. Since the fall of Fujimori, there have
been attempts to revive democratic institutions, but these have failed to instil
in the voting population a strong sense of confidence and trust in either
political elites or institutions. As we will see, Peru routinely comes near the
bottom of the league tables that measure faith in democratic institutions in
Latin America.
This Commentary concerns itself with the role played by political parties
in a representative democracy such as Peru’s, exploring the extent to which
parties have been able to mediate and structure relations between the state
and society in ways that provide fluid channels for communication and
underpin democratic governance. Although Peru has never had a strong
and vibrant party system, it has had considerable experience with political
parties which, during the course of the twentieth century, sought to mobilise
1
The 2000 presidential contest did not meet high standards of freedom or fairness.
2
Comisión de la Verdad y Reconciliación, Informe final (Lima, 2003).
Democracy without Parties ? Some Lessons from Peru 359
3
opinion and influence state decisions. By the 1980s, a party system of sorts
seemed to be establishing itself, not just providing for electoral competition
but also achieving a degree of social insertion. However, in the 1990s, this
fell victim to the volatility of political and economic conditions and the
popular reaction that these engendered among voters. Although he based his
legitimacy on an attack on what he called the partidocracia, Fujimori himself
owed his election to an extraordinary implosion in public support for parties
and their leaders. And despite the subsequent attempts to rebuild a func-
tioning party system, Peru remains a country where the ‘ democratic deficit’
is marked and most political parties are little more than personalist groupings
with scant institutional life except at times of elections. They have virtually
no structured existence over much of the country and, even where they have,
they have shallow roots. They therefore fail to act as a channel for public
participation in the decision-making processes of the state.
In highlighting political parties, I would argue that they have a special
role to play in democratic societies in harnessing a range of social actors,
processing their different demands and projecting an ideological message
that encapsulates these demands. This is a role not easily abrogated to or
assumed by other forms of political mediation. This is consonant with much
of the writing on political parties, and picks up on Giovanni Sartori’s view
that parties are eminently ‘ channelling’ organisations, channelling in two
directions: from society upwards and from government downwards.4 He
argues that parties must be ‘ responsible’ as well as ‘ responsive’, performing
an aggregating role as well as a representative one. When he pushes himself
to saying which he believes to be the most important, Sartori says that
‘ a party system lends itself to expression from below far more than to
manipulation from above ’.5 Writing a few years before Sartori, Seymour
Lipset and Stein Rokkam add another important dimension to the discussion
of party systems, insisting that parties reflect social cleavages ‘ around which
interests, identities and value systems emerge ’ in different historical con-
texts.6 Other sorts of institution may mediate between state and society, but
not as their prime function.
Referring specifically to the Peruvian context, Kenneth Roberts asks
whether political parties ‘matter ’, and concludes, to my mind convincingly,
3
APRA was founded by Haya de la Torre in 1924, although the Peruvian Aprista Party
(PAP) was founded only in 1930, two years after the Peruvian Socialist Party (which
became the Communist Party in 1930). Two reformist parties, Acción Popular (AP) and the
Partido Democrático Cristiano (Christian Democrat Party, PDC), emerged in the 1950s and
1960s. However, periods of open electoral competition proved fleeting.
4
Giovanni Sartori, Parties and Party Systems : Framework for Analysis (Oxford, 2005 [1976]),
5
p. 31. Ibid., p. 24.
6
Seymour Lipset and Stein Rokkam, Party Systems and Voter Alignments : Cross-National
Perspectives (New York, 1967).
360 John Crabtree
that they do.7 Their functions cannot easily be replaced by other sorts of
institution, and Peruvian democracy will continue to be precarious until
such time as it acquires the institutional grounding that rooted political
parties can offer. Roberts sees the political climate of the Fujimori period as
being dominated by ‘ pseudoparties’ that do not represent people or interest
groups in any real sense, and arguably this is still the case today.8
Pseudoparties contribute little to the mechanisms of accountability essential
in underpinning democratic government and in providing regime legit-
imation. Although Peru is by no means exceptional in this respect in Latin
America, it constitutes an egregious case. Its very marked social cleavages –
not to mention its ethnic and geographical divides – are not adequately ex-
pressed in party political terms. In this respect, the Peruvian experience
differs markedly from that of neighbouring Bolivia.9
Before looking at some of the main problems afflicting representative
democracy in Peru, a short synopsis of the key literature follows as it relates
to party formation, particularly since the 1970s. As will be seen, this synopsis
follows a chronological sequence that reflects the various different phases of
Peru’s recent political development.
Some Literature on Parties and Democratisation in Peru

An abundant literature has emerged on parties and democratisation in Peru
since the 1970s, but it is uneven and patchy. Firstly, a good deal of it is fairly
episodic in that it relates to specific periods or instances over this time-span.
The problem of dealing with narrow conjunctures is that their long-term
significance is often difficult to assess and the implications are overly influ-
enced by consideration of what turn out to be transient variables. The future
is not easy to predict in countries like Peru, and what seems a common-sense
projection at one moment often proves well wide of the mark when revisited
later on with the advantages of hindsight. Secondly, academic interest in Peru
has also tended to go in waves ; it was a hot topic that attracted a great deal
of scholarly attention during the military government between 1968 and
1980 – especially regarding the achievements and limitations of military
reformism – but then much less so during the subsequent period of civilian
rule in the 1980s under Belaúnde (1980–85) and Alan Garcı́a (1985–90).
There was a further bout of research and writing in the 1990s and immediately
7
Kenneth Roberts, ‘ Do Parties Matter? Lessons from the Fujimori Experience ’, in Julio
Carrión (ed.) The Fujimori Legacy : The Rise of Electoral Authoritarianism in Peru (University Park
8
PA, 2006), pp. 81–101. Ibid., p. 82.
9
On the significance of indigenous parties for deepening democracy in Latin America, see
Raúl Madrid, ‘ Indigenous Parties and Democracy in Latin America’, Latin American Politics
and Society, vol. 47, no. 5 (2005), pp. 161–79.
afterwards on the nature of the Fujimori administration (1990–2000), with
particular attention being paid to the thin line between democratic and
authoritarian regimes and the contradictions between economic and political
liberalisation. The subsequent period under Alejandro Toledo (2001–06) and
the return of Garcı́a (2006–) have stimulated somewhat less interest, at least
internationally. Perhaps authoritarianism has more appeal – to academics at
least – than low-key democratic forms of government. Thirdly, Peruvian
academic output has tended to be highly Lima-centric, reflecting the con-
cerns of elites and policymakers in the capital rather than across the country
as a whole. It is also indicative of the paucity of solid academic institutions
and research centres in provincial Peru.
A good starting point for a review of the literature is Julio Cotler’s now
classic text Clases, Estado y nación en el Perú, although this needs to be read in
conjunction with his earlier work, notably La mecánica de la dominación interna.10
Cotler’s work influenced a whole generation of students of Peruvian political
sociology. He rightly argues that the reading of history is indispensable to an
understanding of the politics of the present, and that Peru remains hobbled
in its institutional development by a colonial heritage of profound inequal-
ities broken neither during the Independence period nor since. He says
that it is difficult to talk of Peru as a ‘nation’ or a ‘demos’, given the legacy of
uneven development and the lack of political rights among a large swathe
of the population. He also argues that the Peruvian political class has lacked
the capacity to direct a process of change that would mobilise society
or transform the social structure in such a way as to build the basis for a
liberal democratic state. Peru, Cotler maintains, lacked what he calls a ‘corte
histórico’, a point of rupture that transforms traditional society and the state.11
Peru in this sense differs from countries such as Mexico, Bolivia, Cuba
and Nicaragua, all of which experienced ‘new beginnings ’ with new actors
helping to change patterns of traditional socio-political dominance. The
attempts by new actors and interests, not least from outside Lima, to
articulate reformist agendas in the period after 1930 were met by violence
and repression rather than accommodation, thereby setting back Peru’s
institutional development.12
Most writers agree on the importance of the military government for what
was to follow. Among the most cogent analyses of the shortcomings of the
Velasco period is still that of Al Stepan.13 Stepan concludes that the military
10
Julio Cotler, Clases, Estado y nación en el Perú (Lima, 1978) ; Julio Cotler, La mecánica de la
11
dominación interna (Lima, 1967). Cotler, Clases, Estado y nación, pp. 15–16.
12
See, for example, James Payne, Labour and Politics in Peru : The System of Political Bargaining
(New Haven and London, 1965). Payne details how political bargaining by unions re-
inforced authoritarian traditions in the decades prior to the 1960s.
13
Alfred Stepan, The State and Society : Peru in Comparative Perspective (Princeton NJ, 1978).
362 John Crabtree
government conspicuously failed to create the systems of participation
needed to build a new order, while others have blamed the military regime
for failing to create channels for institutionalised negotiation in a variety
of spheres, not least in subnational politics. Martı́n Tanaka has taken this
further, arguing that Velasco compounded many of the changes already
observable in Peru from the 1940s onwards, destroying aspects of the old
hierarchical social order but without building a new order to replace it.14 The
military government closed off previously existing parliamentary channels
through which provincial elites had been able to influence state decisions,
reinforcing thereby the extreme centralisation of the Peruvian state.15 While
Velasco stimulated mobilisation by new sectors, he shied away from building
channels for democratic participation. Nowhere was this clearer than in
highland Peru, where the institutional dearth helped spawn and sustain
Sendero Luminoso (The Shining Path) as it launched its ‘prolonged popular
war ’ on the very day in May 1980 that the first presidential elections in
17 years were held.16 Even though Sendero was eventually subdued in the
early 1990s, the record of building this sort of institutional presence in the
sierra is still largely absent today.
The lack of a corte histórico, of course, has much to do with the history of
APRA and its failure to take power and enact its reformist agenda in the
1930s and 1940s. Steve Stein stresses the continuities of paternalistic, patri-
monial politics within a process of (ultimately unsuccessful) mobilisation.17
Both Aprismo and Sanchezcerrismo, its ideological nemesis, evolved as vertical
movements, structured around clientelism and lacking in internal democracy.
The experience in the 1960s of Belaúnde’s Acción Popular (AP), a reformist
but paternalistic party, also failed to transform Peru’s traditional structures,
falling victim to Velasco’s coup d’état in 1968.18 Writing at the height of the
14
Martı́n Tanaka, ‘ Las relaciones entre Estado y sociedad en el Perú : desestructuración sin
reestructuración’ (unpublished paper prepared for UK Department for International
Development, 2002).
15
Up to this point, the Chamber of Deputies had an important say in the distribution of
government spending at the local level, affording representatives the ability to legitimise
themselves by ensuring funds for specific local projects.
16
Regarding the impact of agrarian change on the emergence of Sendero Luminoso, see
Linda Seligman, Between Reform and Revolution: Political Struggles in the Peruvian Andes, 1969–1991
(Stanford, 1995). For recollections of the agrarian reform and its consequences, many
unintended, see Enrique Mayer, Ugly Stories of the Peruvian Agrarian Reform (Durham NC,
2009). Sendero emerged with particular force in those parts of the highlands where the
institutional innovations created by the agrarian reform were absent.
17
Steve Stein, Populism in Peru : The Emergence of the Masses and the Politics of Social Control
(Madison, 1980).
18
It is worth noting that both APRA and AP had a strong regional flavour to them. APRA
grew up on the northern coast, an area which it has always considered to be its electoral
stronghold. AP grew in the 1960s largely as a result of Belaúnde’s attempts to appeal to
opinion in the south of the country and in Amazonia.
economic crisis of the late 1980s, Stein and Carlos Monge updated Stein’s
original state paternalism thesis. They drew attention to the hopes and dis-
illusionment generated by the Garcı́a government (1985–90), the first ever
APRA-led government, which failed so conspicuously to engage with
popular sectors, urban or rural, in any sustained way.19 Other writers have
drawn attention to Garcı́a’s clientelistic instincts and to his abject failure to
build the base for a more genuinely democratic state concerned more with
the recognition of rights than the distribution of favours.20
The electoral success of the parties of the Left in the early 1980s provided
them with a major opportunity to build that organised link between the
newly mobilised popular movements and the state. Although they never
won presidential office, they exercised considerable power in other formally
constituted spheres, notably in Congress and at the municipal level.21 The
restoration of constitutional government opened up new spaces for popular
participation. The potential to develop this was noted by Eduardo Ballón,
who examined the politics of a range of social movements – unions, slum-
dwellers, peasants, women, and regional groups – and emphasised their
quest for autonomy of action, as well as the incongruence between ‘ top-
down ’ institutionality and ‘bottom-up ’ mobilisation.22 He highlighted the
potential for a new form of politics, but at the same time the inability of
political parties to engage with society – the Right out of preference and the
Left out of incapacity. Ballón pointed to the culture of authoritarianism,
patrimonialism and clientelism – points we return to below – that underlay
the lack of party democracy and militated against the opening up of new,
more democratic spaces at the sub-national level. Romeo Grompone, writing
after the split within the Izquierda Unida (United Left, IU) in 1989, empha-
sised the failure of the Left to communicate with a wider public. He was
strongly critical of the more radical parties of the IU, whose message
of revolutionary change failed to find an echo among the more mundane
concerns of the public they sought to mobilise.23 Although in the mid–1980s
the Peruvian Left had possibly become the most powerful electoral force
anywhere in Latin America since Unidad Popular in Chile, with hindsight it
19
Steve Stein and Carlos Monge, La crisis del Estado patrimonial en el Perú (Lima and Miami,
1988), pp. 217–32.
20
See, for instance, Carlos Monge, ‘ La práctica polı́tica aprista como respuesta a la crisis de
los 80 ’, in Heraclio Bonilla and Paul Drake (eds.), El APRA : de la ideologı́a a la praxis (Lima,
1989) ; and Carol Graham, Peru’s APRA: Parties, Politics and the Elusive Quest for Democracy
(Boulder, 1992). Also, on the Garcı́a government more generally, see John Crabtree, Peru
under Garcı́a: An Opportunity Lost (Basingstoke, 1992).
21
See Kenneth Roberts, Deepening Democracy : The Modern Left in Chile and Peru (Stanford, 1998).
22
Eduardo Ballón, Movimiento social y democracia : la fundación de un nuevo orden (Lima, 1986).
23
Romeo Grompone, El velero en el viento: polı́tica y sociedad en Lima (Lima, 1991).
364 John Crabtree
seems that the degree of social insertion it achieved was exaggerated; in
reality its presence proved uneven and often superficial.
The demise of the parties of the Left was swift indeed in the early 1990s.
This was, in part, a function of the actions and tactical decisions of their
leaders and their lack of a clear line towards dealing with hyperinflation and
the guerrilla challenge. However, the more structural explanation lies in the
changes that were taking place in Peruvian society at the time, changes that
also impeded the evolution of parties on the Right.24 Maxwell Cameron sees
the fast and furious growth of the informal sector in the late 1980s as the key
explanation for the breakdown of the party system.25 For him, the flight
from the formal economy and the ‘informalisation ’ of politics were two
sides of the same coin. In the economic crisis of the 1980s, Cameron sees
both Left and Right as ‘ trapped in ideological ghettoes ’ with the centre
becoming ‘dangerously vacant ’.26 The breakdown of a party-based demo-
cracy can thus be traced to the failure of parties to adapt and respond to
rapidly changing identities and ideological preferences. It also has to be said
that the war against Sendero had a devastating impact not just on the
Peruvian Left but on the party system as a whole.27
The extent to which fujimorismo was cause or consequence of the party
system breakdown is a moot point. Carlos Iván Degregori and Grompone,
writing shortly after Fujimori’s electoral victory in 1990, emphasise the for-
mer, arguing that the incipient party system had fallen into irremediable
24
The main parties of the Right in the 1980s were AP, Belaunde’s originally reformist party
that had first ruled in the 1960s (1963–68), and the Partido Popular Cristiano (Popular
Christian Party, PPC), a right-wing offshoot from Peru’s original Christian Democrat Party
(PDC). Discredited by their experience in government in the early 1980s, these two parties
aligned themselves with Mario Vargas Llosa’s Movimiento Libertad in the Frente Democrático
(FREDEMO) coalition in the 1990 elections. AP’s popularity was closely bound up with
that of Belaúnde and has had difficulty surviving his death. The PPC is a more tightly
organised party, with its support strongest in the business sector. However, business
elites have traditionally tended to use channels other than political parties to influence
government decisions, an important reason for the failure of strong right-wing parties to
develop in Peru. On this, see Francisco Durand, Riqueza económica y pobreza polı́tica : reflexiones
sobre las elites del poder en un paı́s inestable (Lima, 2003).
25
Maxwell Cameron, Democracy and Authoritarianism in Peru (Basingstoke, 1994).
26
Maxwell Cameron, ‘Political and Economic Origins of Regime Change in Peru : The
Eighteenth Brumaire of Alberto Fujimori ’, in Maxwell Cameron and Philip Mauceri (eds.),
The Peruvian Labyrinth : Polity, Society, Economy (University Park PA, 1997), pp. 37–69.
27
In the short run, the counterinsurgency war in the Andes had a serious impact on the ability
of peasant unions and left-wing parties to operate. In the longer run, the climate of fear and
insecurity the war created helped to inculcate an aversion to parties and party politics and
to generate support for ‘strong ’ government. See, for example, Steve Stern (ed.) Shining and
Other Paths : War and Society in Peru 1980–1995 (Durham NC and London, 1998), especially
pp. 377–470. On Sendero itself there is a large literature, of which probably the best work is
Carlos Iván Degregori, Sendero Luminoso : Los hondos y mortales desencuentros (Lima, 1985) and
his Ayacucho : los raı́ces de una crisis (Lima, 1986).
28
decay by that time. Others stress the manipulation of Alan Garcı́a as a key
factor in explaining Fujimori’s victory.29 Charles Kenney argues that it was
Fujimori’s ability to manipulate the rules and attract the support of business
elites that explains the parties’ demise.30 With the benefit of hindsight, we can
see that Kenney’s argument that the party system ‘died’ to be ‘reborn’ after
Fujimori’s fall is perhaps a little exaggerated. Still, it is true that Fujimori
made it very difficult for parties of either the Left or the Right to operate
during his decade in power. Both structural causes and agency are important
here and it seems to make little sense to plump for one at the expense of the
other. Tanaka points out that Fujimori in Peru was unique in confronting the
parties rather than converting them (as in Bolivia, Mexico and Argentina) to
the new neoliberal message.31
How best to classify the Fujimori regime has given rise to considerable
discussion. It certainly called into doubt some of the assumptions contained
in the early consolidation literature, helping to generate appeals for more
flexible and contextual measures of democratic advance.32 The Fujimori
government has been variously described as neo-populist, a delegative
democracy, a ‘ plebiscitarian ’ democracy, a democradura, and the like, while
some authors question whether it was in any sense a democracy at all, with or
without adjectives. Conaghan, for example, opts for the term ‘ competitive
authoritarianism’, where democratic forms are devoid of any substance.33
My own reading here is that it was a personalist regime which shifted
its ground over time, starting off subject to (albeit limited) democratic
28
Carlos Iván Degregori and Romeo Grompone, Demonios y redentores en el nuevo Perú : una
tragedia en dos vueltas (Lima, 1991). The successful candidacy of Ricardo Belmont, a TV
personality, in the 1989 mayoral elections in Lima is often taken as evidence that parties
were in decline before Fujimori appeared on the scene a year later.
29
See, for example Gregory Schmidt, ‘Fujimori’s 1990 Upset Victory in Peru : Electoral
Rules, Contingencies and Adaptive Strategies ’, Comparative Politics, vol. 28, no. 3 (1996),
pp. 321–54.
30
Charles Kenney, ‘ The Death and Rebirth of a Party System, Peru 1978–2001 ’, Comparative
Political Studies, vol. 36, no. 10 (2003), pp. 1210–39.
31
Martı́n Tanaka, Los espejismos de la democracia : el colapso del sistema de partidos en el Perú (Lima,
1998). In Bolivia, President Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada helped transform his party, the
previously statist Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario (National Revolutionary Movement,
MNR) into the engine of neoliberal transformation. In Argentina, Carlos Menem did much
the same with the old Peronist party, and Carlos Salinas likewise with the Partido
Revolucionario Institucional (Institutional Revolutionary Party, PRI) in Mexico. Fujimori, by
contrast, a political outsider, eschewed Peru’s traditional parties and bolstered his own
legitimacy by vilifying them.
32
Laurence Whitehead has advanced the notion of democratic ‘ viability ’ as a more appro-
priate metaphor than consolidation in that it takes into account the possibility of demo-
cratic retreat as well as advance. See Laurence Whitehead, ‘The Viability of Democracy’, in
John Crabtree and Laurence Whitehead (eds.) Towards Democratic Viability: The Bolivian
Experience (Basingstoke, 2001), pp. 5–8.
33
Catherine Conaghan, Fujimori’s Peru: Deception in the Public Sphere (Pittsburgh, 2005).
366 John Crabtree
constraints but forced, by virtue of the need to perpetuate itself, into ever
more brazen manipulation in ways that would ultimately lead to its downfall.
It was neither fully authoritarian nor properly democratic, yet it was a regime
that was unable to dispense altogether with popular validation and en-
dorsement in generating legitimacy.34 Fujimori’s use of traditional client-
elistic methods to legitimise his neoliberal project has also provoked
considerable discussion. Roberts highlights the ‘ unexpected symmetries and
affinities ’ between neoliberalism and old-style populism, arguing that popu-
lism reflects the fragility of popular organisation and mediating institutions.35
Kurt Weyland defines populism as a political strategy that has little or
nothing to do with economics but is more concerned with domination than
with distribution; he argues for the ‘ autonomy of politics ’.36 But this sort of
approach involves placing into the same conceptual basket regimes which
represent very different sorts of project, Fujimori in Peru and Chávez in
Venezuela for instance.37
With the sudden and largely unanticipated fall of Fujimori at the end of
2000, attention shifted from considering the structural conditions that sus-
tained this sort of regime towards the concrete policy options available to
create a more participatory and pluralist alternative. In the policy sphere,
attention was focused on designing a Law of Political Parties, finally enacted
in 2003. Consideration was also given to how to push ahead with creating a
more decentralised administrative structure in ways that would potentially
open up new spheres for democratic participation. However, this had to
encounter the paucity of institutions at the local level capable of encouraging
and channelling such participation. It is still probably too early to judge
definitively whether these innovations have brought lasting change. Some
authors have tended to highlight the importance of institutional design in
determining changes in political behaviour.38 Fernando Tuesta, for example,
emphasises that, though institutional design and regulations need to be
congruent with historical practices and customs, the rules matter a lot.39
Others suggest ways in which the reforms initiated under the Paniagua and
34
John Crabtree, ‘ The Collapse of Fujimorismo : Authoritarianism and its Limits ’, Bulletin of
Latin American Research, vol. 20, no. 3 (2001), pp. 287–303.
35
See Kenneth Roberts, ‘ Neoliberalism and the Transformation of Populism in Latin
America : the Peruvian case ’, World Politics, vol. 48, no. 1 (1995), pp. 82–116.
36
Kurt Weyland, ‘ Clarifying a Contested Concept : Populism in the Study of Latin American
Politics ’, Comparative Politics, vol. 34, no. 1 (2001), pp. 1–22.
37
A comparison between the two cases is to be found in Steve Ellner, ‘ The Contrasting
Variants of Hugo Chávez and Alberto Fujimori ’, Journal of Latin American Studies, vol. 35,
no. 1 (2003), pp. 139–62.
38
See, for instance, Carlos Meléndez, ‘Partidos y sistema de partidos en el Perú ’, in Rafael
Roncagliolo and Carlos Meléndez (eds.), La polı́tica por dentro : cambios y continuidades en las
organizaciones polı́ticas de los paı́ses andinos (Lima, 2007), pp. 213–72.
39
Fernando Tuesta, Representación polı́tica : las reglas también cuentan (Lima, 2005).
Toledo administrations needed to be complemented by further institutional
changes.40 However, powerful countervailing forces arguably remained that
impeded the development of a more participatory political system, even
where institutions to that end had begun to take root. While decentralisation
and the regulation of party behaviour may be steps in the right direction,
they require a strong political will to make them effective, a will at best
intermittent and vacillating in contemporary Peru.41 The elections of
2006 – presidential, congressional, regional and municipal – did not suggest
that a new and more stable party system was emerging. Steven Levitsky and
Maxwell Cameron, as well as Lewis Taylor, argue against the party ‘resur-
rection’ thesis advanced by Kenney, suggesting that both structural factors
and the lack of agency on the part of party leaders weigh against the
emergence of democratic and open political parties.42 They maintain that
strong parties are not just the consequences of electoral engineering; like
Humpty Dumpty, once destroyed it is difficult to put the pieces back
together again, no matter how much institutional engineering may be in-
volved.
Some Key Issues

Having sought to provide a synopsis of some of the literature on the various
stages of the Peruvian democratisation since the late 1970s, I now seek to
identify a number of key and interrelated issues that seem relevant for ana-
lysing the problems that currently afflict that process and, in particular, the
workings of the party system. A key theme running through this discussion is
the importance of representative and embedded political parties in generat-
ing a sense of regime legitimation, especially given the social, ethnic and
regional cleavages in Peru and the lack of a sense of effective citizenship
among large parts of the population.
The chimera of consolidation

The Peruvian case, especially the experience of the Fujimori regime, casts
doubt on some of the assumptions of the North American writing on
40
Martı́n Tanaka, Democracia sin partidos. Perú 2000–2005 (Lima, 2005).
41
John Crabtree, Making Institutions Work in Peru: Democracy, Development and Inequality in Peru
since 1980 (London, 2006).
42
Steven Levitsky and Maxwell Cameron, ‘Democracy without Parties ? Political Parties and
Regime Change in Fujimori’s Peru ’, Latin American Politics and Society, vol. 45, no. 3 (2003),
pp. 1–33 ; Lewis Taylor, ‘Politicians without Parties and Parties without Politicians : The
Foibles of the Peruvian Political Class ’, Government and Opposition, vol. 40, no. 4 (2006),
pp. 565–95.
368 John Crabtree
democratic transitions and consolidation, reflecting, as this has tended to do,
the hopes and aims of the US policymaking community at the time.43 Far
from being a ‘one-way street ’ in which the ‘ right’ policies would lead
towards the deepening of democracy, Peru under Fujimori showed that in
certain circumstances the pendulum could easily swing back towards auto-
cratic government, if not outright dictatorship. Equally, the Fujimori ex-
perience cast doubt on the assumption behind the Washington Consensus
view that economic and political liberalisation ran in tandem and were
mutually reinforcing. By the beginning of the new millennium, the scenarios
contained in the original consolidation literature of the 1980s appeared rather
optimistic and based on some wishful thinking, especially when compared
with the research emanating from many Peruvian scholars at the time. Even
in the 1990s, the tone had begun to change and some of the earlier as-
sumptions about irreversibility were being revised. In 1996, Linz and Stepan
set out their five interlocking ‘arenas’ which they saw as indispensable to
any process of democratisation: a lively civil society; a functioning political
society; the rule of law ; a functioning bureaucratic apparatus; and what they
called ‘ economic society’.44 On any reading of these criteria for crisis-
afflicted Peru at the beginning of the 1990s, the prospects for democracy
appeared none too bright. While in themselves useful, such criteria seemed
rather narrow and inflexible. More account needed to be taken of the anti-
democratic forces present in specific societies, and more weight given to the
determinants of the legitimacy of government (or the lack of it). Unless the
majority of people in a democracy believe that government has the will and
the ability to pursue their long-term interests, they will swiftly lose faith in
democratic institutions, parties included.
Moreover, political parties in Peru had a long way to go before they
complied with the fairly minimal conditions set down by Scott Mainwaring
and Tim Scully as a precondition for party institutionalisation.45 These highly
influential authors argue strongly that institutionalisation is the prerequisite
for consolidation and therefore stability, and they put forward yardsticks
by which institutionalisation can be evaluated in different countries. In
their ‘league table ’ of institutionalisation, Costa Rica, Uruguay and Chile
(fairly predictably) came out on top ; Peru came out firmly at the bottom,
lower even than Bolivia or Ecuador. Where the emphasis perhaps needed to
43
This literature overstated the importance of elections in defining democratic outcomes and
understated the structural obstacles to democratisation. See Thomas Carothers, ‘ The End
of the Transition Paradigm ’, Journal of Democracy, vol. 13, no. 1 (2002), pp. 5–21.
44
Juan Linz and Alfred Stepan, Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation (Baltimore
MD, 1996).
45
Scott Mainwaring and Timothy Scully (eds.), Building Democratic Institutions : Party Systems in
Latin America (Stanford CA, 1995), p. 17.
be laid was in addressing the underlying conditions (social and economic as
well as political) that encourage institutionalisation – or the opposite – and
the factors that lead countries to move up or down the league table. By the
1990s, the prospects for democratisation in Latin America as a whole looked
far less rosy than they had a decade earlier, and the notion of democratic
disenchantment (desencanto democrático), with all its attendant dangers for
legitimation, were clear. Such desencanto can be particularly delegitimising in
those countries where democratic values do not permeate society.46
Such problems were very evident in Peru, even in the late 1980s. In
few countries in Latin America was such a lack of faith more palpable than
in Peru at that time or, indeed, since. The findings of successive
Latinobarómetro surveys placed Peru near to or at the bottom of a variety of
indices construed to measure state legitimacy.47 The Latinobarómetro num-
bers were corroborated subsequently by the United Nations Development
Programme (UNDP). The 2004 UNDP survey underscored the problems
encountered in deepening the roots of democratic attachment in contexts
where poverty is widespread, inequalities deep and entrenched, corruption
abundant, justice inaccessible to most people, the ability to defend rights
lacking, and the institutional mechanisms through which to express ‘ voice’
largely absent.48 An opinion poll conducted the following year by the UNDP
in Peru provided clear evidence of the widespread view among poor people
that democracy served the interests of the rich, not the poor.49 This con-
clusion was of course consonant with opinion poll data showing public
sympathy for more authoritarian modes of government. Such was the case
with Fujimori, whose decision to close down Congress and sack the Supreme
Court in 1992 was strongly influenced by his reading of the opinion polls at
the time. His lasting popularity – notwithstanding his lengthy trial in 2008
and 2009 on human rights and corruption charges – stands as a testament to
the fact that he is held by many poor people to have improved their living
standards in tangible ways.50
Although the collapse of the Fujimori regime resulted in attempts to
overcome some of the institutional legacies of top-down government, the
results of the 2001 ‘ Lima spring ’ proved disappointing. The reformist
46
Larry Diamond and Richard Gunther, ‘Political Parties and Democracy ’, Party Politics,
vol. 9, no. 2, pp. 507–23.
47
Latinobarómetro (Santiago), various years.
48
United Nations Development Programme, Democracy in Latin America : Towards a Citizens’
Democracy (New York, 2004).
49
United Nations Development Programme, La democracia en el Perú: el mensaje de las cifras
(Lima, 2006).
50
The continued popularity of the Fujimori ‘brand name ’ was made clear in the 2006 con-
gressional elections, in which his daughter, Keiko, received far more votes than any other
candidate. She seemed a likely option for the 2011 presidential elections.
370 John Crabtree
impetus that accompanied the brief Paniagua administration (2000–01)
carried on into that of Alejandro Toledo, but it then quickly ran out of steam.
It became clear that there were strong obstacles to reform, not least within
the business community, the Church and the armed forces, all of which had
little need of political parties to bring influence to bear on government de-
cisions.51 The obstacles to democratic consolidation were also evident at the
subnational level, where, in Peru as elsewhere, democratisation implies
changes to long-established relations of power between local elites and em-
powered poor majorities. There were few examples in Peru of ‘ democracy
from below’ emerging in the way that it did, for instance, in Porto Alegre and
some other large Brazilian cities.52 In the absence of strong parties grounded
in social organisation at the local level and in the face of a state bureaucracy
unwilling to antagonise elites, the speed of change was never likely to be
rapid.
The persistence of patrimonialism and clientelism

Julio Cotler long ago emphasised the patrimonial nature of Peruvian political
institutions.53 Notwithstanding the emergence of new actors, this patri-
monialism was inherent in the process of state formation in Peru, blurring
the boundaries between public and private interests. As elsewhere in Latin
America, it proved a major obstacle to the development of a liberal democ-
racy in which rights of citizenship were not only established but capable of
being realised. In the 1980s, Cotler argued that the legacy of patrimonialism
impeded the democratisation of parties and contributed to factionalism
within them, thus undermining public support.54 O’Donnell’s discussion of
‘ delegative democracy ’ also helped bring the issues of patrimonialism back
to the forefront of academic discussion about democratisation in the region.
51
With the process of economic liberalisation in the 1990s, the business community, through
its various lobby organisations, increased its sway over state decision making. This con-
tinued after 2000 under Toledo and Garcı́a, whose policies sought to build on the econ-
omic liberalism introduced by Fujimori. See Francisco Durand, Riqueza económica y pobreza
polı́tica, and his La mano invisible en el Estado (Lima, 2005). Both the Catholic Church and the
armed forces had become increasingly conservative by this time. The Catholic hierarchy
was led by Juan Luis Cipriani, the Cardinal Archbishop of Lima and a member of Opus
Dei. The armed forces, whose power recovered from the debacle at the end of the Fujimori
period, became particularly resistant to attempts to make them judicially responsible for
human rights crimes committed in the war against Sendero. The more conservative el-
ements of the business sector, the Church and the armed forces further tightened their grip
on policymaking under Garcı́a after 2006.
52
While there were some cases of this happening, for instance in Limatambo (Cuzco), such
cases were exceptional and subject to subsequent reverse.
53
Cotler, Clases, Estado y nación, pp. 388–9.
54
Julio Cotler, Polı́tica y sociedad en el Perú : continuidades y cambios (Lima, 1994).
Although his emphasis was on Brazil, the same conditions could be applied
to discussion of politics in Argentina or Peru.55 Clientelism too, long a cen-
tral issue in anthropology and sociology, became a major focus of study,
describing as it does not only the asymmetries in power relations between
those with political influence and their clienteles but also the ways in which
political support is traded for material advantage between patron and client.
It is a product not only of economic inequality but also of cultural and ethnic
subordination in situations where notions of rights are absent. Herbert
Kitschelt and Steven Wilkinson have argued that clientelism is likely to be at
its most pronounced where there are high levels of inequality and where
political competition is weak.56 They make the important observation that
the precise workings of the electoral system are less significant in reducing
levels of clientelism, since patrons usually find ways around the formal rules
of politics when it is in their interest to do so.
As we have seen, both patrimonialism and clientelism are deeply ingrained
as political institutions in Peru: their origins go back to the power relations
that characterised colonial society, and they have been repeatedly reproduced
in new guises since then. Such relationships are determined not just by socio-
economic inequality but are also grounded in racial discrimination. The
persistence of ethnic divides in Peru, despite the effects of urbanisation and
the breakdown of semi-servile relations in the rural sphere, is a topic taken
up by Paulo Drinot.57 We have seen in the review of some of the literature
the persistence of patrimonialism despite the modernising social reforms of
the 1970s, the emergence of new social actors, and the restoration of pluralist
government in the 1980s. Clientelism too has proved a difficult plant to
eradicate, whether in the rural sphere or the urban one. The chapter by
Beatriz Magaloni and colleagues in the Kitschelt and Wilkinson volume
shows how clientelism emerged with new force in Mexico under the Programa
Nacional de Solidaridad (National Solidarity Programme, PRONASOL) of the
1990s.58 Much the same could be said about social spending programmes
elsewhere in Latin America, not least in Peru under Garcı́a in the later 1980s,
Fujimori in the 1990s, and indeed under Garcı́a again in the more recent past.
55
Guillermo O’Donnell, ‘ Delegative Democracy ’, Journal of Democracy, vol. 5, no. 1 (1994),
pp. 55–69. O’Donnell addressed himself here to the first Garcı́a government, but much the
same could be said of the Fujimori administration.
56
Herbert Kitschelt and Steven Wilkinson (eds.), Patrons, Clients and Politics: Patterns of
Democratic Accountability and Political Competition (Cambridge, 2007).
57
Paulo Drinot, ‘Nation-building, Racism and Inequality : Institutional Development in Peru
in Historical Perspective ’, in John Crabtree (ed.), Making Institutions Work in Peru, pp. 5–23.
58
Beatriz Magaloni, Alberto Diaz-Cayeros and Federico Estévez, ‘ Clientelism and Portfolio
Diversification : A Model of Electoral Investment with Applications to Mexico ’, in
Kitschelt and Wilkinson (eds.), Patrons, Clients and Politics, pp. 182–205.
372 John Crabtree
Peru is therefore of particular interest to those concerned to study the ways
in which clientelism perpetuates itself over time.
The concept of clientelism connects to that of populism.59 Problems in
defining what populism is are as old as the term itself, but here it is taken to
mean challenges to the status quo in the name of ‘ the people’, but based less
on empowerment from below than direction from above. Populist move-
ments seek to bring sometimes radical changes through mobilisation,
spearheaded by charismatic leaders who create new clienteles which receive
tangible benefits in return for the support they offer. The literature on
populism gives ample consideration to the sorts of social relations that en-
gender it, both in its traditional manifestations and its more recent variants
(termed by some ‘ neo-populism’). A distinction, however, can be drawn
between the sociological and cultural interpretations that provide the
framework for populism and its more immediate political triggers. The latter
tend to be periodic crises that produce challenges to the existing order, while
the former consist of systemic weaknesses in which popular interests are
expressed at the level of the state. Populism tends to operate to the detriment
of representative democracy, exercised as it usually is by elites that seek to
bypass representative institutions, building instead a direct rapport between a
leader and ‘the people’. Populism thus tends to thrive in conditions where
concepts of rights and citizenship are ill-defined and muted.
The history of traditional populism in Peru found its main expression in
the APRA party of Haya de la Torre in the 1930s and 1940s, although it was
also characteristic of other parties and movements with different ideological
positions, some of them notably right-wing.60 Populist practices, for instance
typified Sanchezcerrismo in the 1930s and the attempts of General Manuel
Odrı́a to build support for himself in the 1950s. But although the story of
APRA paralleled that of populism elsewhere in Latin America, it differed
in that APRA found itself blocked in its attempts to achieve presidential
power – at least, that is, until Garcı́a became the first aprista president in
1985. Thus there are some strong continuities running through twentieth-
century Peruvian politics, with populist movements seeking to rally popular
support, but many proved short-lived and failed to institutionalise them-
selves. Such populist traits have lived on into the more recent past, with both
Belaúnde and especially Garcı́a in the 1980s adopting arguably populist
positions, and with Fujimori redefining the nature of populism, adapting it to
59
Here is not the place to cite the large bibliography on Latin American populism, but it is
worth mentioning Margaret Canovan, Populism (London, 1981) ; Michael Conniff, Populism
in Latin America (Tuscaloosa, 1999) ; and Francisco Panizza (ed.), Populism and the Mirror of
Democracy (London, 2005), especially pp. 1–31.
60
Stein, Populism in Peru. On the right-wing Unión Revolucionaria, see Tirso Molinari
Morales, El fascismo en el Perú (Lima, 2006).
the new emphasis on market-driven economics and rejecting state-led de-
velopment.61
Elements of both patrimonialism and clientelism of course exist in most
political systems, albeit at the margins of their formal modus operandi. It
may be the case, as countries modernise and urbanise, that the more
egregious aspects of these begin to disappear. However, the experience of
some developed states – Berlusconi’s Italy, for example, which bears some
interesting parallels with Fujimori’s Peru – suggests that such practices do
not necessarily vanish in this way. Clientelism tends to dissipate when new
sorts of social relationship emerge, generating new identities that challenge
existing hierarchical arrangements. Patrimonialism should also diminish as
new participative structures take root, since these bring with them higher
levels of public accountability. But, equally, it is possible for the opposite to
happen. The Fujimori period in Peru was one in which the previous class
identities lost their political salience, making it easier for those in government
to use the resources of the state to build up a political clientele. And though
the fall of Fujimori brought with it a return to more open government, it
did little to create a national popular movement capable of defining and
defending notions of rights.
Engagement with society

At various points so far, emphasis has been placed on the need for political
parties to engage with society and both to reflect and represent the social
forces within it. This is a role that cannot simply be assumed by other sorts
of institution, such as non-governmental organisations (NGOs), which have
come to enjoy a close relationship with social movements in Peru in recent
years.62 Nor is this the case for Church-based organisations, which have
played an important role in mobilising society over the years, or even parts of
the state itself, such as the Defensorı́a del Pueblo (Ombudsman’s office), that
fulfil a mediating function.63 Social movements, of course, come in all shapes
61
For a more detailed account of the continuities in populist politics, see John Crabtree,
‘Neo-populism and the Fujimori Phenomenon ’, in John Crabtree and Jim Thomas (eds.),
Fujimori’s Peru : the Political Economy (London, 1998), pp. 7–23.
62
Arguably, NGOs have come to perform some of the mediating functions between social
movements and the state that would otherwise be the role of political parties. The range of
NGOs that has emerged in Peru over the last 30 years is truly impressive, often articulating
the interests of community groups, financing their activities and systematising their ex-
perience through studies and publications. Many of these NGOs adopt an overtly political
stance and have become sources of employment for people who were previously involved
in parties, particularly those of the Left.
63
See Thomas Pegram, ‘ Accountability in Hostile Times : The Case of the Peruvian Human
Rights Ombudsman ’, Journal of Latin American Studies, vol. 40, no. 1 (2008), pp. 51–82.
374 John Crabtree
and forms, not all of them particularly democratic in the ways they are or-
ganised or express themselves. And defining exactly what constitutes a social
movement is not free of problems.64 Still, in the process of democratisation
in Latin America, social movements have played an important part, usually in
conjunction with political parties, although this has been sometimes down-
played in the literature that gives pride of place to institutional engineering
and the creation of elite pacts. Social movements were certainly not absent as
a factor in the process of democratisation in Peru in the late 1970s; the
Velasco government provided an important fillip to social mobilisation while
helping destroy some of the traditional structures that had kept social mo-
bilisation in check. It was the fact that this was getting out of control that led
Velasco’s successor, General Francisco Morales Bermúdez (1975–80), to
seek to steer the country back towards a more open, constitutional system of
government. The flurry of social mobilisation in the 1970s was also steered
by the array of emergent left-wing parties which subsequently, after 1980,
came together in the Izquierda Unida (United Left) coalition. Parties and
movements evolved together.
The efficacy of this interaction between political parties and social move-
ments, which depends on the relative strengths of each, is an important
variable in the democratic process since it is a major factor in regime legit-
imation. The parts played by social movements in forcing the pace of
democratic transitions in Latin America is documented by Joe Foweraker,
who shines light on the ways in which the political system connects with the
‘ underworld’ of social movements and grass-roots activism.65 He argues
against seeing social movements as isolated from their wider political con-
text ; and in common with other writers he emphasises the need for social
movements to interact with the state through such intermediaries as political
parties. But he also points to the sorts of problem that affect social move-
ments : their susceptibility to cooptation, their focus on specific issues, their
often temporary nature, their proneness to internal factionalism, and indeed
their ambivalence towards political parties.
The Peruvian experience, like that of other countries in Latin America,
demonstrates the role played by social movements in articulating the
demands of those who previously had little or no voice within the political
64
I would go along with the definition offered by Charles Tilly, whose many writings on social
movements draw together different theoretical approaches. Tilly identifies three crucial
elements : (i) a sustained public effort making collective claims on target authorities ; (ii) the
use of a repertoire of forms of political action, including demonstrations, vigils, rallies, etc. ;
(iii) the involvement of people who are ‘worthy ’, act in a unified way, are numerically
relevant and display strong commitment. See Charles Tilly, Social Movements, 1768–2004
(Boulder CO, 2004). For a general discussion of the significance of social movements as a
spearhead of change, see Alain Touraine, The Voice of the Eye (Cambridge, 1981).
65
Joe Foweraker, Theorizing Social Movements (London, 1995).
system. It was in the 1980s, more than any time before or since, that this
interaction came closest to taking place in Peru. The parties of the Left, most
of which between 1978 and 1981 chose to abandon insurrectionary politics in
favour of involvement in the formally established political system, provided
the main link between an array of social movements – trade unions, peasant
federations, slum-dwellers’ associations and the like – and the state. Left-
wing parties and grass-roots activists played an important role at this time
both in congressional and municipal politics, combining (to a degree) both
the functions of administration and representation. In retrospect, of course,
the swift demise of the Left at the end of the 1980s and beginning of the
1990s called into doubt some of the claims made at the time that the Left
was the ‘natural expression’ of the popular movement.66 The experiences of
the Fujimori period and since have made such claims look more than a little
premature and presumptuous.
The demise and fragmentation of powerful collective interests as a
result of the twin economic and political crises of the late 1980s contributed
greatly to the decline of mass-based Peruvian political parties at the
time. Hyperinflation and political violence combined to create a climate of
insecurity that reduced the salience of social movements, atomised them
organisationally and placed them on the defensive. At the same time the
weakening of the parties of the Left deprived social movements of a political
apparatus capable of aggregating their different interests and representing
these at the level of the state. Under Fujimori, the state turned its back on
such collective interests, deftly bypassing most forms of political inter-
mediation. The Peruvian case thus contrasted strongly with the rise of the
Partido dos Trabalhadores (Workers’ Party, PT) in Brazil, rooted as this was in
a coming together of a variety of social movements for which the party
provided a voice in national politics.67 Peru also contrasts starkly with the
more recent experience of Bolivia, where the Movimiento al Socialismo
(Movement to Socialism, MAS) emerged in the first few years of the 2000s as
an expression of a motley selection of different social movements, bringing
them together, creating a unifying ideology and giving them a political in-
fluence that went far beyond the sum of their various parts.68
This is not to say that social movements have been absent from the scene
in Peru, particularly since the fall of Fujimori. As in Bolivia, there have been
protest movements that have been representative of substantial communities
66
Roberts, Deepening Democracy. The degree to which the parties of the Left, mainly Leninist in
inspiration and top-down in their praxis, managed to achieve real social insertion at this
time is a topic that is worth revising more critically than was customary at the time.
67
See, for instance, Margaret Keck, The Workers’ Party and Democratization in Brazil (Ithaca NY,
1992).
68
John Crabtree, Patterns of Protest: Politics and Social Movements in Bolivia (London, 2005).
376 John Crabtree
of interest. These have expressed themselves forcefully around such issues as
privatisation, coca eradication,69 mining development,70 the defence of local
interests, the land rights of indigenous peoples in the Amazon, and so on,
but they have tended to act in isolation, have had a localised rather than a
national impact, and have lacked the sort of institutional access to the state
that parties could provide. Because of the disappearance of solid political
parties, these movements have often looked for other sorts of mediation to
exert political pressure (e.g. through NGOs, Church-based local organis-
ations or the Defensorı́a). And, lacking effective political mediation and faced
with an unsympathetic state, conflicts have frequently led to violent con-
frontation. Peru also differs from Bolivia, as well as Ecuador, in terms of the
emergence of an indigenous politics capable of binding together individual
communities of interest around a wider campaign for rights. There are many
reasons why indigenous politics are less salient in Peru than in its Andean
neighbours, but the effect of this has been to weaken the force of social
movements, particularly those of the highlands and jungle.71
The importance of culture

This brings us to the question of culture and its importance in binding
together communities of interest, whether at the local, regional, national, or
even, in some cases, international levels. As in other countries, successful
politicians are those who are able to understand and empathise with popular
culture, or rather ‘ cultures’ in the plural. Political survival depends not just
on the ability to provide the material goods that a society may expect, but
also on the ability to reflect or project certain cultural values that enhance
legitimacy. The recent history of Peru shows how difficult this can be to
achieve in a country where many cultures – or, more accurately, subcultures
– coexist. Regional differences, heightened by stark inequalities of income
and ownership, as well as a long legacy of racism on the part of elites, provide
a cultural backcloth to the sorts of political cleavage made evident in recent
national electoral outcomes.72
69
Ursula Durand, ‘El camino cocalero ’, in Eduardo Toche (ed.), Perú hoy: nuevos rostros en la
escena nacional (Lima, 2006), pp. 89–116.
70
Anthony Bebbington (ed.), Minerı́a, movimientos sociales y respuestas campesinas : una ecologı́a
polı́tica de transformaciones territoriales (Lima, 2007).
71
See Madrid, ‘ Indigenous parties ’. Also see Donna Lee Van Cott, From Movements to Parties in
Latin America : The Evolution of Ethnic Politics (Cambridge, 2003) ; José Antonio Lucero and
Marı́a Elena Garcı́a, ‘In the Shadows of Success : Indigenous Politics in Peru and Ecuador ’,
in A. Kim Clark and Marc Becker (eds.), Highland Indians and the State in Modern Ecuador
(Pittsburgh PA, 2007), pp. 234–49.
72
In particular that of 2006, in which Ollanta Humala’s support was concentrated in the sierra
and selva, whereas support for Alan Garcı́a was concentrated mainly on the coast and in
Cultural explanations, of course, raise many definitional problems. What is
political culture? How do we recognise it ? How do we measure it ? Culture is
a nebulous concept ; as Lucian Pye put it, ‘we are dealing with clouds, not
clocks ’.73 Notwithstanding such difficulties, the issue of culture has an
importance in defining notions of identity and belonging, providing an ex-
planation of what binds people together and makes them feel part of the
same political community. It is less about a set of attitudes (which can be
highly changeable) but more about underlying beliefs or what Eckstein calls
‘ orientations’.74 These, he argues, are the consequence of ‘cumulative ’ pro-
cesses of socialisation. The political actions of individuals are deeply affected
by sets of traditions, traditions that persist and can come to the fore even in
periods of revolutionary change.
The increased salience of identity politics in Latin America has brought
cultural explanations back into focus, based as these are on new senses of
‘ community’. As we have seen, social movements tend to cohere around a
concern for identity, whether based on gender, locality, ethnicity or some
other sense of belonging.75 In most instances, it is not a case of one sort of
identity or another, but a combination of a variety of identities that people
use for different ends in different circumstances.76 Identity, of course, is
difficult to explain simply in institutional or rational choice terms. In many
cases, it is defined by a view of history that backs up or justifies a particular
identity.
The importance of ethnic politics in Ecuador and Bolivia contrasts with
that of Peru, giving rise to parties, such as Pachakutik or the MAS, which
have sought to mobilise around ethnic cleavages. However, this is not to say
that such ‘ ethnic ’ politics is absent from Peru, rather that it has not been
articulated in the same way in national politics. In recent times, there are clear
signs of political divisions expressing themselves in ethnic terms. Such is the
case of the Amazonian indigenous groupings that have become increasingly
Lima. In 2001, support for Toledo was strongest in the sierra, whereas Garcı́a similarly
polled strongest on the coast.
73
Lucian Pye, ‘Asian Values: From Dynamos to Dominos’, in Laurence Harrison and
Samuel Huntington (eds.), Culture Matters: How Values Shape Human Progress (New York,
2000), p. 255.
74
Harry Eckstein, ‘ A Culturalist Theory of Political Change’, American Political Science Review,
vol. 82, no. 3 (1998), pp. 789–803.
75
In their book on political culture in the Andean world, Nils Jacobson and Cristóbal Aljovı́n
de Losada put it thus: ‘ We understand political culture as a malleable ensemble of symbols,
values and norms that constitute the signification linking individuals to social, ethnic,
religious, political and regional communities ’. Nils Jacobson and Cristóbal Aljovı́n de
Losada (eds.), Political Cultures in the Andes, 1750–1950 (Durham NC, 2005), p. 2.
76
See, for instance, Diego Zavaleta, ‘ Oversimplifying Identities: The Debate over What is
Indigena and What is Mestizo ’, in John Crabtree and Laurence Whitehead (eds.), Unresolved
Tensions : Bolivia Past and Present (Pittsburgh PA, 2008), pp. 51–60.
378 John Crabtree
prominent on the national political map in their opposition to the con-
cessions offered to foreign hydrocarbons companies and to the inroads by in-
dividual and corporate interests in the search for other raw materials, notably
timber and minerals. It is also the case that organisations campaigning for the
rights of peasant communities in the sierra have highlighted the ethnic di-
mensions of their struggle.77 In practice, as throughout the Andean region,
the demands arising from ethnic and class identities have always coexisted
and cannot be regarded as mutually exclusive. Rather it has been the language
of political intermediaries seeking to highlight one or the other in different
circumstances that has differed. What appears to be missing in the Peruvian
context is the existence of a party – such as the MAS in Bolivia – capable
of articulating these various different interests in the language that is most
effective.
The difference between Peru and its neighbours is also heightened by the
scale of urban migration and the profound impact that this has had in the
emergence of hybrid cultures and identities (e.g. among Andean migrants in
Lima) and the creation of spaces in which new forms of political leadership
are able to emerge. With nearly three-quarters of Peru’s population now
living in an urban environment, traditional political culture appears to be on
the wane. The rapid and dramatic process of urbanisation in Peru over the
last 30 years, accelerated by the migratory convulsions caused by Sendero
Luminoso, has had a profound effect on the way people live and the strat-
egies they employ to survive (and in some cases prosper) in the urban milieu.
Whether in Lima or smaller provincial towns and cities, the process of
migration has created a cultural melting pot in which old collective identities
have been destroyed and new systems of values, beliefs and identities have
emerged. This is a world typified by intense competition for jobs and one in
which individualism and the quest for self-advantage count for more than
social solidarity. It is also a world where democratic values and belief in
democratic institutions have suffered in a context of widespread corruption,
social insecurity and criminality.78
Peru is therefore not a country which easily lends itself to clear-cut cultural
classification even with respect to democracy and democratic values. It in-
corporates many cultural characteristics, not just one. Its ethnic, regional and
social heterogeneity does not lend itself to a national stereotype. This raises
77
This is the case of Confederación Nacional de Comunidades del Perú Afectadas por la Minerı́a
(National Confederation of Peruvian Mining Communities CONACAMI), whose objec-
tives are expressed in terms of ethnic demands that draw on the Bolivian and Ecuadorean
experiences. See www.conacami.org.
78
Julio F. Carrión and Patricia Zarate, Cultura polı́tica de la democracia en el Perú, 2008 (Lima,
2009). This volume forms part of the Americas Barometer (LAPOP), edited by Mitchell A.
Seligson.
problems for those who seek to articulate social and ethnic demands at the
level of the state, making it difficult for parties to emerge that can encapsulate
that diversity, aggregate such a multiplicity of demands and translate them
into a political message with broad appeal. In order to regain legitimacy,
politicians and parties need to understand better the cultural topography of
the land on which they seek to cultivate support. One way for those new
cultural preferences to make themselves felt is through the development of
new ways of doing politics that pick up on that cultural diversity.
Recent Trends and Research Needs

Ten years on from the fall of Fujimori, and despite attempts to breathe new
life into Peru’s democratic institutions, Peru’s party system is still far from
being one which rises to the standards required by democratic theory. Parties
are little more than electoral vehicles. They lack any real presence in society.
Most are inchoate, personalist groupings that reflect more the interests of
their leaders than any ideological posture. Leading politicians glide easily
between party labels according to their convenience.79 The ‘political class’
does not enjoy the confidence of most of those it purports to represent.
Dissidence is difficult to mediate and often ends in violence. Even the
country’s most important single national party, APRA, is now a much di-
minished force in terms of its organised grassroots presence.80 The left-wing
parties that seemed to promise so much in the 1980s are but scattered rem-
nants of their former selves, able to attract only a tiny proportion of the vote
in recent national elections. The parties of the Right, notably the PPC, lack
any strong electoral base beyond the more affluent suburbs of Lima, and
elites tend to find other ways to influence state decisions than working
through parties. However, political competition between personajes remains
strong, and in spite of the institutional weakness of their various ‘parties’
there is no shortage of those who aspire to compete for public office.81
Among the more electorally significant is probably Ollanta Humala, a former
79
Taylor, ‘Politicians without Parties’.
80
Due largely to the protagonism of its presidential candidate, APRA polled 24 per cent in
the first round of the 2006 presidential elections. However, in his second government,
Garcı́a gave scant priority to the institutional development of his party. APRA’s lack of a
solid regional organisation was made clear in the subsequent regional elections in
November 2006, in which the party won only two regional presidencies. Due partly to the
selection of an unpopular candidate, the party even failed to win the mayoralty of Trujillo
on that occasion. Haya de la Torre surely would have turned in his grave.
81
Typical are figures like Luis Castañeda Lossio, the mayor of Lima ; ex-president Toledo ;
and Keiko Fujimori (Alberto Fujimori’s daughter). All are likely to contest the next presi-
dential elections in 2011.
380 John Crabtree
military officer, whose first-round victory in 2006 led to a prominence on
which he subsequently found it hard to build institutionally.
The 2003 Ley de Partidos Polı́ticos (Law on Political Parties, LPP) was de-
signed to engender a robust, transparent and accountable party system in
which the multiplicity of minor parties would be reduced to two or three
major ones that would provide voters with some real political choice. Three
rounds of elections in 2006 – two rounds of presidential elections in April
and June, followed by municipal elections in November – were contested by
a mass of parties, few of which could reasonably have complied with the
ostensibly tough requirements for registration laid down by the LPP. This is
not to say that there are not deep cleavages in Peruvian politics. Recent
presidential elections (both those of 2001 and 2006) have seen a polarisation
between the political preferences of the more prosperous coast and those of
the poverty-stricken highlands and jungle regions, where opposition to neo-
liberal policies and antipathy towards the capital have been most in evidence.
However, such a cleavage has yet to coalesce into an effective and durable
political force.
Measures taken by the Toledo and Garcı́a governments to decentralise
decision making to the level of departments (now known as regions) have
also had an impact on parties, especially regional parties.82 The November
2006 elections saw the appearance of a number of regional groupings with
apparently more solid electoral foundations than some of their national
counterparts. Regional parties, it should be said, fall outside the mandate of
the LPP, and it is perhaps ironic that it is here that we find some more robust
and socially rooted groupings beginning to appear. The 2010 regional and
municipal elections will provide an important test as to whether these for-
mations prove electorally durable, as will the 2011 presidential and con-
gressional contests. Of the 25 regional presidents elected in 2006, eleven had
a past in the various parties that had made up the United Left in the 1980s.
The truth is that the experiences of regional parties have been very variable,
but in some places they have accomplished an important degree of social
insertion, building on ties with social movements of one sort or another and
mediating with a local state presence with considerably more money than in
the past. The emergence of new elites at the provincial level, coupled with
the transfer of both fiscal resources and public responsibilities to the regions,
has also helped breathe some new life into local politics for the first time in
many years.83
82
See Carlos Monge, ‘Decentralisation : An Opportunity for Democratic Governance ’, in
John Crabtree (ed.), Making Institutions Work in Peru, pp. 45–65.
83
The experiences of some regions, such as Lambayeque in the north and Arequipa in the
south, have proved quite successful. However, the degree of social participation in local
government has been limited and the spaces for dialogue between regional and local
Writing on party politics has been undertaken almost exclusively from a
national perspective, and I argue that it suffers from an overly limeño bias.
Much less attention has been given, particularly in recent times, to the study
of subnational politics, unless – as in the case of Sendero Luminoso in
Ayacucho – it suddenly became a matter of urgency to gain a better under-
standing of political dynamics outside Lima. This needs to change. Already,
with the impact of decentralisation and greater regional assertiveness, fiscal
decentralisation means that more money is available to expand the capacities
and programmes of chronically underfunded regional universities and re-
search centres. The growing effervescence of regional politics is also giving
rise to greater awareness of the need to study politics in a more decentralised
way.84 New actors are appearing with their own regional or local agendas.
Often regional disputes are poorly understood or deliberately misinterpreted
in Lima, where the media has a tendency to sensationalise and distort local
conflicts. The restiveness of provincial Peru has been made clear in the two
last national electoral contests, and may well assert itself again in upcoming
elections this year and next. Regional assertiveness against a still centralised
state seems set to continue.
What are needed, therefore, are comparative studies of regional politics
that focus on some of the general preoccupations outlined in this article.
They need to assess the strengths and autonomy of new regional move-
ments, to evaluate the obstacles to a new and more democratic form of local
politics (such as the persistence of clientelism), to examine the ways in which
party formations interact with social movements and others in civil society,
and to evaluate the extent to which such politics connect with political cul-
ture, and in particular notions of ethnic identity. The focus required, I would
argue, is multidisciplinary, and the approach one of locating current politics
within its changing historical dynamic. Research on Peruvian politics needs
to decentralise.
Spanish and Portuguese abstracts

Spanish abstract. Treinta años después del retorno de Perú a la democracia en 1980,
el desempeño del paı́s en cuanto a la democratización ha sido accidentado. No
solamente el proceso de ‘ consolidación’ se revirtió en los años 90 bajo el gobierno
de Fujimori, sino que hay pocos puentes estables establecidos entre el Estado y la
sociedad. Más que en la mayorı́a de paı́ses de América Latina, el sistema de partidos
government have proved disappointing. See Bruno Revesz, ‘Descentralización, la reforma

inconclusa ’, Perú Hoy, July 2009, pp. 35–50.
84
A welcome, albeit incipient, move in this direction is Julio Cotler (ed.), Poder y cambio en las
regiones (Lima, 2009). This document, sponsored by the UNDP, looks at politics and
patterns of social change in four regions : Piura, La Libertad, Arequipa and Puno.
382 John Crabtree
ha fracasado en llenar el papel representativo que se le ha dado en los textos, un
papel que no puede ser asumido fácilmente por otros tipos de instituciones. Es por
lo tanto un caso de estudio interesante para aquellos preocupados con los obstáculos
más estructurales para el desarrollo de una polı́tica representativa. El artı́culo busca
enfocarse en algunos asuntos clave que afectan el desarrollo partidista : la quimera de
la consolidación, la persistencia del clientelismo y patrimonialismo, la interacción
con los movimientos sociales y el significado de la cultura polı́tica.
Spanish keywords: Perú, desarrollo partidista, democratización, clientelismo, movi-

mientos sociales, cultura polı́tica
Portuguese abstract. Seguidos trinta anos do retorno peruano à democracia em 1980, a

experiência do Peru com a democratização é ambı́gua. Além do processo de ‘ con-
solidação’ ser revertido nos anos 1990 sob o governo Fujimori, o estabelecimento de
conexões de longa duração entre o Estado e a sociedade é extremamente limitado.
Mais do que em outros paı́ses latino-americanos, o sistema partidário fracassou na
tentativa de exercer o papel representativo destinado a ele em tese, sendo este papel
difı́cil de ser desempenhado por outros tipos de instituições. É, portanto, um estudo
de caso que importa àqueles preocupados com obstáculos estruturais ao de-
senvolvimento de polı́ticas representativas. O artigo pretende examinar algumas das
questões-chave afetando o desenvolvimento partidário : a ilusão acerca da con-
solidação, a persistência do clientelismo e patrimonialismo, a interação com movi-
mentos sociais e a importância da cultura polı́tica.
Portuguese keywords : Perú, desenvolvimento partidário, democratização, clientelismo,

movimentos sociais, cultura polı́tica

Crabtree On Peru

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Crabtree On Peru

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Description:

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Crabtree On Peru

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

J. Lat. Amer. Stud.

42, 357–382 f Cambridge University Press 2010 357

Democracy without Parties ? Some

Keywords: Peru, party development, democratisation, clientelism, social movements,

Some Literature on Parties and Democratisation in Peru

Some Key Issues

The chimera of consolidation

The persistence of patrimonialism and clientelism

Engagement with society

The importance of culture

Recent Trends and Research Needs

Spanish and Portuguese abstracts

government have proved disappointing. See Bruno Revesz, ‘Descentralización, la reforma

Spanish keywords: Perú, desarrollo partidista, democratización, clientelismo, movi-

Portuguese abstract. Seguidos trinta anos do retorno peruano à democracia em 1980, a

Portuguese keywords : Perú, desenvolvimento partidário, democratização, clientelismo,

You might also like