Institutions, parties, and coalitions in Argentine politics

the long version

In this wide-ranging summary of research about contemporary Argentine politics, Luigi Manzetti scans the political culture and the power conflicts that define today's Argentina. He uses a variety of sources, including public opinion data, voting behavior, and detailed interviews with policy makers, business leaders, and analysts. Each chapter in this timely and thorough introduction briefly describes an interest group's origins, organization and structure, and current activities, bringing readers up to date with events of the last several decades. Manzetti's achievement is to develop a general theory of interest group behavior from the inception of these groups in Argentina until the Menem administration. Argentine political parties have not served the ideal function of reconciling social conflicts. Nor have they brought legitimacy to key national institutions like the presidency, Congress, and the judiciary. In the absence of such mediation, vested interests such as the armed forces, organized labor, agricultural producers, and industrialists have taken matters into their own hands in a brutal struggle for power in Argentina. The savage competition among groups and their attempts to rival the role and function of parties have meant the subversion of democracy by special interests, with devastating results for the nation. Manzetti argues that the weakness of democratic institutions has contributed to Argentina's bitter political strife and socioeconomic decline over the past sixty years. This valuable book will be not only essential reading for academic professionals and college-level courses in Latin American history and politics but also indispensable for policy researchers, government officials, and business leaders, and all concerned with contemporary political events in this hemisphere.