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The Study of Argentine Politics Through Survey Research

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2022

Frederick C. Turner
Frederick C. Turner*
Affiliation:
University of Connecticut
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What causes a country that has experienced exceptionally high growth rates and living standards to stagnate with only poor and uneven economic advance, especially after it has achieved one of the lowest rates of population growth among the American republics? What forces lead to the intensification of civil violence and conflict among social and occupational groups, encouraging a pattern of military intervention in politics? What impact do patriotism, popular perceptions of leaders' decisions, and a sense of political legitimacy have upon these processes of economic growth and group conflict, and what kinds of leadership can best utilize appeals to constructive nationalism and self-sacrifice in order to promote growth and reduce conflict? Do long periods of frustrated expectations and economic stagnation tend to give citizens patterns of attitudes and behavior that make conflict more likely and growth more difficult?

Type
Research Reports and Notes
Information
Latin American Research Review , Volume 10 , Issue 2 , Summer 1975 , pp. 73 - 116
Copyright
Copyright © 1975 by Latin American Research Review

Footnotes

*

The research on which this article is based has been supported by the National Science Foundation (grant number GS-35214), the National Endowment for the Humanities (grant number RO-6909–73–1), and the University of Connecticut Research Foundation. Special assistance in the research has come from Carmen Zayuelas, Ruth Schweitzer, and Diane Tuero.

References

Notes

1. Kalman Silvert had these issues in mind when he wrote recently: “Foreign area studies also point up problem areas crying for more adequate explanation. It is highly significant that these themes in applied social inquiry are almost entirely identical with needs newly identified in American society.” Silvert, “Area Studies Look Outward,” in Fred W. Riggs, ed., International Studies: Present Status and Future Prospects (Philadelphia: American Academy of Political and Social Science, 1971), p. 49.

2. See, in particular, José Luis de Imaz, Los que mandan (Buenos Aires: Editorial Universitaria de Buenos Aires, 1964); Gino Germani, Política y sociedad en una época de transición (Buenos Aires: Editorial Paidós, 1966); Gino Germani, “Hacia una democracia de masas,” in Torcuato S. Di Tella et al., Argentina, sociedad de masas (Buenos Aires: Editorial Universitaria de Buenos Aires, 1965); and Robert A. Potash, The Army and Politics in Argentina, 1928–1945 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1969).

3. These data, and the following data on achievement motivation, come from Bruce M. Russett et al., World Handbook of Political and Social Indicators (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1964), pp. 99, 161, 194. See also David C. McClelland, The Achieving Society (New York: D. Van Nostrand Company, 1961), especially chapter 3, “Achieving Societies in the Modern World.”

4. Charles Lewis Taylor and Michael C. Hudson, World Handbook of Political and Social Indicators, 2d ed. (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1972), pp. 116—23. Sanctions summarized in this measure include censorship, martial law decrees, troop mobilization to prevent subversion, banning political party activity, the arrest of demonstrators, and the repression of espionage. For a chronological account of the events behind these statistics, see Manwoo Lee, “Argentine Political Instability Since 1946: A Study of Crises of Authority and Equality” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1969).

5. My analysis of the data on national income, deaths from group violence, and achievement motivation in some thirty-two nations where there is quantitative material available indicates no consistent relationship among them, even though an eminently logical relationship does occur in the case of Argentina. During the 1950s, other nations with apparently high achievement motivation and low or only moderate growth, such as Turkey, Canada, and Ireland, had very low rates of domestic group violence. A fundamental problem here lies in our measures of stability and need achievement. Reporting on deaths from violence in some countries is not accurate, and McClelland's analysis of children's stories provides only an indirect measure of the achievement factor. For the group violence statistics, the dates of collection of the data take on great importance when the time span is small, as, for example, where data from the 1950s attributes a very high incidence of violence to Hungary and a low incidence to Pakistan, whereas data from the early 1970s would do just the opposite. As researchers try to gather more accurate aggregate data in order better to measure the relationship among these variables, an alternative strategy of investigation is through survey research in one or more countries.

6. K. H. Silvert, “The Costs of Anti-Nationalism: Argentina,” in Silvert, ed., Expectant Peoples: Nationalism and Development (New York: Random House, 1963), especially pp. 367–68. The survey data of Silvert and Bonilla on the attitudes of students in three faculties at the University of Buenos Aires tend to support this interpretation of factionalism. Although the students and professionals in the same fields outside the University generally agreed in their acclaim for equality before the law and the need for inexpensive public education, they differed sharply in their attitudes toward social class, mobility, and secularism. See “Argentina: Elites, Professionals, and the University/' chapter 5 in Kalman H. Silvert, Frank Bonilla, and Frieda M. Silvert, ”Education and the Social Meaning of Development“ (unpublished manuscript, 1971).

7. Gale Stokes, “Cognition and the Function of Nationalism” (unpublished paper, 1972), pp. 20–27.

8. Underlying the more immediate causes of the Córdoba conflict was the unwillingness of labor and student groups to accept the limitations that the Onganía government attempted to place upon wage increases and student power within the universities. Thoughtful discussions of the cordobazo are George I. Oclander, “Córdoba; May 1969: Modernization, Grass-roots Demands, and Political Instability,” in Alberto Ciria et al., New Perspectives on Modern Argentina (Bloomington, Ind.: Latin American Studies Program, Indiana University, 1972); and Carlos S. Fayt, El político armado: Dinámica del proceso político argentino (1960/1971) (Buenos Aires: Ediciones Pannedille, 1971), pp. 174–86.

9. Peter G. Snow, Political Forces in Argentina (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1971), pp. 62–64.

10. Lucian W. Pye, “The Legitimacy Crisis,” in Leonard Binder et al., Crises and Sequences in Political Development (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1971), pp. 148–49.

11. Sidney Verba, “Comparative Political Culture,” in Lucian W. Pye and Sidney Verba, eds., Political Culture and Political Development (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1965), p. 529.

12. For a detailed discussion of the nationalist campaigns of the Perón regime, see Samuel L. Bailey, Labor, Nationalism and Politics in Argentina (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1967).

13. Michael Mann, “The Social Cohesion of Liberal Democracy,” in David E. Apter and Charles F. Andrain, eds., Contemporary Analytical Theory (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1972), pp. 226—27.

14. Robert A. Packenham, “Political Development Research,” in Michael Haas and Henry S. Kariel, eds., Approaches to the Study of Political Science (Scranton, Penn.: Chandler Publishing Company, 1970), p. 182.

15. William A. Welsh, Methodological Problems in the Study of Political Leadership in Latin America (Iowa City, Iowa: Laboratory for Political Research, Department of Political Science, University of Iowa, 1970), p. 4. Welsh's italics.

16. Paul N. Rosenstein-Rodan, “The Alliance for Progress and Peaceful Revolution,” in Irving Louis Horowitz, Josué de Castro, and John Gerassi, eds., Latin American Radicalism: A Documentary Report on Left and Nationalist Movements (New York: Random House, 1969), p. 60.

17. See Frederick C. Turner, The Dynamic of Mexican Nationalism (Chapel Hill, N. C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1968), especially chapters 1 and 4.

18. Jacques Lambert, Amérique latine: Structures sociales et institutions politiques (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1963), p. 422.

19. Daniel Goldrich, “Toward the Comparative Study of Politicization in Latin America,” in Peter G. Snow, ed., Government and Politics in Latin America: A Reader (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1967), p. 260.

20. William Kornhauser, The Politics of Mass Society (New York: The Free Press, 1959), pp. 156—58.

21. Dankwart A. Rustow, “The Study of Leadership,” in Rustow, ed., Philosophers and Kings: Studies in Leadership (New York: George Braziller, 1970), p. 16.

22. Seymour Martin Lipset, The First New Nation: The United States in Historical and Comparative Perspective (New York: Basic Books, 1963), pp. 90, 97. For a short statement of this position, see Lipset, “Formulating a National Identity,” in S. N. Eisenstadt, ed., Political Sociology: A Reader (New York: Basic Books, 1971), pp. 470–74.

23. See, in particular, the survey findings reported in Arthur H. Miller, “Political Issues and Trust in Government: 1964–1970,” American Political Science Review 68, no. 3 (September 1974); and Daniel Yankelovich, The New Morelity: A Profile of American Youth in the 70's (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1974).

24. Comment by Wiarda in a private conversation at a meeting of the New England Council of Latin American Studies, Norton, Massachusetts, 26 October 1974.

25. On the basis of his case study of Bolivia since 1952, Norman H. Keehn concludes: “When evaluating regimes, we should not be guided solely by ideological preferences or moral imperatives. … Regimes should be evaluated on the basis of performance. … It is performance that counts; performance nourishes legitimacy and promotes a sense of identification with the state. Whether performance takes place under the aegis of capitalism, communism, socialism, corporatism, or Maoism is beside the point.” Keehn, “Building Authority: A Return to Fundamentals,” World Politics 26, no. 3 (April 1974): 351. For a similar prescription that “the United States should grant recognition to all Latin American governments but provide the heaviest aid to those countries that are best able to use it,” but that democratic or Christian Democratic respect for political participation and civil liberties should also inform our policy, see Frederick C. Turner, Catholicism and Political Development in Latin America (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1971). pp. 253–54.

26. See Peter H. Smith, “Political Legitimacy in Spanish America,” in Richard Graham and Peter H. Smith, eds., New Approaches to Latin American History (Austin, Tex.: University of Texas Press, 1974). In a detailed study of the Argentine case, Smith points to the crucial relationship of legitimacy and leadership, defining crises of legitimacy as occurring “when sizable portions of the politically relevant population challenge or deny the normative validity of claims to authority made by existing leadership.” Smith, Argentina and the Failure of Democracy: Conflict among Political Elites, 1904–1955 (Madison, Wis.: University of Wisconsin Press, 1974), p. 89.

27. David E. Apter, The Politics of Modernization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965), p. 16.

28. This approach is congruent with Peter G. Stillman's recent interpretation of legitimacy as “the compatibility of the results of governmental output with the value patterns of the relevant systems,” seeing legitimacy as a continuum rather than an on-off proposition and finding the “relevant systems” to include international, societal, group, and individual components. Stillman, “The Concept of Legitimacy,” Polity 7, no. 1 (Fall 1974): 42–43.

29. As an example, Shively writes: “The percentage of votes for the Democrats in a county may be an individual-level variable measured at the aggregate level, if we relate it to percentage of manual workers in order to find out how manual workers vote Democratic. But it may also be a community-level variable, if we relate the percentage of the vote Democratic in districts to Congressmen's voting records in the house. The distinction lies in our intent in using the variable.” Shively, “ ‘Ecological’ Inference: The Use of Aggregate Data to Study Individuals,” American Political Science Review 63, no. 4 (December 1969): 1184.

30. The best account of shifts in the distribution of personal income in this period is Economic Commission for Latin America, Economic Development and Income Distribution in Argentina (New York: United Nations, 1969). From 1946 to 1965, the inequality of income distribution declined somewhat, with rentiers losing their place at the top of the income structure and with industrial workers gaining at the expense of other groups.

31. See chapter 17, “Inflation and Stagnation: Economic Policy After 1950,” in Aldo Ferrer, The Argentine Economy, trans. Marjory M. Urquidi (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1967).

32. Ted Robert Gurr, Why Men Rebel (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1970), especially chapter 2, “Relative Deprivation and the Impetus to Violence.”

33. Arthur P. Whitaker and David C. Jordan, Nationalism in Contemporary Latin America (New York: The Free Press, 1966), pp. 6, 75.

34. Leonard W. Doob, Patriotism and Nationalism: Their Qsychological Foundations (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1964), p. 15.

35. J. A. Schumpeter, The Theory of Economic Development, trans. R. Opie (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1934).

36. Everett E. Hagen, On the Theory of Social Change: How Economic Growth Begins (Homewood, Ill.: The Dorsey Press, 1962).

37. Lucian W. Pye, “Advances and Frustrations in Comparative Politics,” in Riggs, ed., International Studies, pp. 101–2.

38. For a comparative and critical appraisal of Germani's work, the shift in his viewpoint, and its implications for other social science theorizing, see Eldon Kenworthy, “The Function of the Little-Known Case in Theory Formation or What Peronism Wasn't,” Comparative Politics 6, no. 1 (October 1973), especially pp. 30–32. The Latin American holdings of the major United States data banks are outlined in William G. Tyler, ed., Data Banks and Archives for Social Science Research on Latin America (Gainesville, Fla.: Consortium of Latin American Studies Programs, 1975).

39. The data from these surveys is available through the Roper Public Opinion Research Center. Among the reports published by the Research and Reference Service of the United States Information Agency, see especially A Note on the Impact of Vice-President Nixon's Trip on Public Opinion in Three Latin American Cities, Report No. 15 (June 1958); Recent Trends in Latin American Opinion Toward the United States and the Soviet Union, Report No. 16 (October 1958); The Economic and Political Climate of Opinion in Latin America and Attitudes toward the Alliance for Progress: Results of a Public Opinion Survey in Seven Countries, R-110–63 (R) (June 1963); and Latin American Attitudes toward the Alliance for Progress and the Role of Private Investment, R–206—65 (December 1965). On the impact of Project Camelot, see Irving Louis Horowitz, ed., The Rise and Fall of Project Camelot: Studies in the Relationship between Social Science and Practical Politics (Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1967).

40. Jeane Kirkpatrick, Leader and Vanguard in Mass Society: A Study of Peronist Argentina (Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1971), pp. 221–22.

41. David Nasatir, “Higher Education and the Perception of Power: The Case of Argentina,” Social Science Quarterly 49, no. 2 (September 1968): 329–30.

42. Quoted in Jonathan Kandell, “Perón's 2d Presidency Just Didn't Work Out: It May Be That Argentine Conflict Runs Too Deep for Consensus,” New York Times, 7 July 1974.

43. See David C. Jordan, “Authoritarianism and Anarchy in Argentina, ”Current History 68, no. 401 (January 1975); and the sources and commentary in Charles A. Russell, James F. Schenkel, and James A. Miller, “Urban Guerrillas in Argentina: A Select Bibliography,” LARR 9, no. 3 (Fall 1974). On a continuing basis, the factional struggles have been well dealt with in Latin America (London). For a comprehensive, balanced summary of the shifts in Peronism, see Alberto Ciria, “Peronism Yesterday and Today,” Latin American Perspectives 1, no. 3 (Fall 1974). To appreciate the underlying ideological conflict within Peronism, contrast, on the right, Carlos A. Fernández Pardo and Alfredo López Rita, Socialismo nacional: La marcha del poder peronista (Buenos Aires: Editorial Relevo, 1973), with, on the left, the writings of John William Cooke, such as La lucha por la liberación nacional (Buenos Aires: Granica, 1971), and Apuntes para la militancia: Peronismo critico (Buenos Aires: Schapire, 1972).

44. On the basis of five questions, Zeitlin rated 142 workers as favorable to the revolution, 24 as “indecisive” toward it, and 36 as hostile. In 1962, some workers forthrightly told him that Castro had betrayed the revolution to the Communists, that Russians ran the country, or that they personally wanted to get out of Cuba. Maurice Zeitlin, Revolutionary Politics and the Cuban Working Class (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1967). pp. 31, 34, 44.

45. Anti-Semitism has long been strong in the country, rising with Nazi influence in the 1930s and being especially pronounced at certain times, such as the Onganía coup of 1966. While the Battle of Britain was continuing in 1941, Rabbi J. X. Cohen reported on the dramatic growth of anti-Semitism in Argentina, including (a) an attempt to keep all Jewish students out of medical school, (b) a violent battle to prevent this, and (c) the near sterilization under an X-ray machine of a Jewish intern who refused to be intimidated. Despite Argentina's need for skilled immigrants, a public official told Cohen, “We do not desire persons in our country who would come because the international situation sends them to Argentina for accidental reasons,” a highly slanted remark in the context of the times. See J. X. Cohen, Jewish Life in South America: A Survey Study for the American Jewish Congress (New York: Bloch Publishing Company, 1941), especially pp. 51–53, 108.

46. In this connection, I am particularly grateful to Roberto Cortés Conde and Guillermo O'Donnell.

47. An estanciero said of Perón, “He remains a good leader because he is very astute; he touches those points on which he knows he is going to be supported. He uses democracy in a demagogic manner.” Respondent 3053, question 3a.

48. Peter H. Smith, “The Social Base of Peronism,” Hispanic American Historical Review 52, no. 1 (February 1972): 58. Also, see Eldon G. Kenworthy, “The Formation of the Peronist Coalition” (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1970), especially pp. 230–32.

49. Respondent 2077, question 3a. Similarly, a 1968 study of middle-school students in Tokyo named John F. Kennedy as the most respected political leader. Japanese democracy, instituted under the American occupation following World War II, gained legitimacy without relying upon a heroic Japanese figure, so that, as Joseph A. Massey writes, “For the great majority of Japanese youngsters, political heroes either do not exist or are foreign leaders.” Massey, “The Missing Leader: Japanese Youths' View of Political Authority,” American Political Science Review 69, no. 1 (March 1975): 48.

50. Respondent 2097, question la.

51. Respondent 3092, question la.

52. Respondent 6041, question 10a.

53. Respondent 6034, questions 6, 10a.

54. Respondent 6071, question 17.

55. Respondent 6044, question 25a.

56. Respondent 5281, question 44.

57. Respondent 6059, question 4a.

58. Respondent 6058, question 44.

59. Respondent 6064, question 44.

60. Alejandro Portes, “Sociology and the Use of Secondary Data,” in Robert S. Byars and Joseph L. Love, eds., Quantitative Social Science Research on Latin America (Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1973), p. 213.

61. Luncheon conversation with Everett Martin, New York City, 14 January 1975.