Paper short abstract:

Between 1928 and 1932 future Mexican President Cárdenas governed Michoacán, “a general rehearsal” of his Presidency's main traits. This paper will discuss to what extent the main cardenista policies regionally implemented can be considered as characteristic of a “populist government”?

Paper long abstract:

Between 1928 and 1932 future Mexican President Cárdenas governed the State of Michoacán. By 1928 he was very close and loyal to former President and "Gran Jefe" -the man behind the presidency- Calles, who was a progressive revolutionary statesman, but was not considered to be a representative of "the socialism of the Mexican Revolution". Nevertheless, between 1920 and 1928, Cárdenas had been in close contact: with Francisco Múgica and with Adalberto Tejeda, both radical governors of Michoacán and Veracruz in the twenties, and with the problematic of the Mexican oil, owned by very powerful foreign companies and with their Mexican workers.

From the moment he took office in Michoacán until the last day of his governorship, in crucial spheres such as the agrarian, the educational, the organizational, the religious, etc., Cárdenas developed a social policy and a relationship between society and State that surprised more than one. On one hand his government was more "to the left" than the sonorense governments that Obregón and Calles had represented between 1920 and 1928. But on the other hand his government also proved to be different from those of his "leftist" homologues and friends, Múgica and Tejeda, mainly in the sense that conciliation became one of its main features.

The particular traits of Cradenás' government in Michoacán were new in the country's post-revolutionary politics. This paper will discuss to what extent can this government, with no doubt a regional rehearsal of his future Presidency, be considered as characteristic of a "populist government"?

Paper short abstract:

Cardenas's mass politics was not an aim in itself. It was a strategy for achieving socio-economic empowerment and political sovereignty. For realizing that Cardenas worked out an "institutionalized" populist and clientele program, which throws new light on the study of both populism and clientelism.

Paper long abstract:

Cardenas's mass politics was not an aim in itself. It was a political strategy for achieving other goals: social empowerment, economic modernization and political sovereignty; all under strict conditions of social peace, rule of law and democracy. The last thing President Cardenas wanted was to use force. This is the reason why he insisted on organizing the masses rigidly, even contrary to the syndicalist instincts of the workers and other sectors bound up in his new founded PRM (Partido de la Revolución Mexicana).

Despite the array of unmediated "clientele-like" relations Cardenas established with statesmen, politicians, military officers, intellectuals, writers, academics, lawyers, local leaders, priests and Christian rebels, explained by him as a necessity in a country of so many conflicting interests, Cardenas was a staunch advocate of political institutionalization. For him this was a sine qua non condition for acquiring legitimacy for his radical agrarianism, and his policies of oil industry nationalization, indigenism, advanced socialist education, and labor and party political corporatism.

In this sense, we suggest redefining or extending the concepts of populism and clientelism as "institutionalized populism" and "institutionalized clientelism", which accurately describe the Mexican case during Cardenas's era and after. This type of populism could be taken as a starting point for a study of other political styles of power accumulations on behalf of peaceful radical reform projects in both Latin America countries and other developing countries.

Paper short abstract:

Legitimized by the developmental compromise of the new regime, the social policies of the Fourth Republic (1958-1999) put a distributive system in place managed by party networks. Local implementations of the welfare state in Caracas’ barrios are hereby analyzed before de debt crisis (1982).

Paper long abstract:

The Venezuelan « magical state » (Coronil, 1997) took a social turn with the advent of the Fourth Republic in 1958: the elite of the new democratic regime legitimated its takeover by distributive social policies toward new urban poor (Gonzalez, Lacruz 2008).

"Populist", the organization of social plans was linked to charismatic national leaders starting with Wolfang Larrazabal and his Plan de emergencia para los barrios in 1958; "clientelistic", the distribution of public materials was managed by militants of Punto Fijistas leading parties (AD and COPEI).

This paper aims to question, on the base of first hand sources, complementarities and blurred boundaries between state populism and local clientelism during the first two decades of the Venezuelan Fourth Republic. Electoral races then appeared preceded, and dominated, by clientelistic competition between the two ruling parties.

The understanding of populism as a constant and quite managed state of societal and political emergency (Hermet, 2001) helps here to analyze the central part of partisan networks in the management of social public policies. AD and COPEI were, therefore, the real "institutions" of social and developmental policies in the Caribbean petro-state.

This paper will be based on the analysis of fieldwork data collected in Caracas' slums (the barrios) and in ministerial archives. Thus, social policies of the Punto Fijo's regime are studied comparing governmental discourse and national legal framework with local practices in help-seeking urban communities of Caracas.

Paper short abstract:

This paper deals with collective efficacy of channels'types of social demand articulation between poor urban communities and public local bureaucatic agencies.

Paper long abstract:

This paper deals with the issue of the relationship between social capital and "weak ties" in the poor communities' context. I suggest that weak ties (Granovetter, 1973) can be defined as connections between the poor community and the institutional actors as local public agencies, politicians and altruistic NGOs (Non Governmental Organizations). These connections (weak ties) relating the community with the public local agencies may be of two kinds: the first one is the connection made by the civic associations coming from the community. In this case, it is clear that there is a stock of social capital being used; the second one, are the connections (weak ties) articulated by "rent-seeking" leaderships or politicians, through patron-client ties, looking for winning, for example, elections. In this case we think that there is no social capital in action, but individual social capital that is being used for providing collective goods or public benefits to poor communities. In this sense, our hypothesis confronts the main stream assumption of social capital literature saying that patronage is always an amoral social arrangement at the service of the patron (Putnam, R., Nanetti, R. and Nanetti, L., 1993). On the contrary to this assumption we found that patronage may be seen as an alternative path to social capital for poor communities getting efficient results from larger society.

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Paper short abstract:

The paper discusses whether clientelistic practices are resulting from Neoliberal transformations experienced by the Chilean Socialist Party. It suggests that changes on its political culture are linked to Neoliberal transformations in Chilean society, particularly the deepened of clientelism.

Paper long abstract:

The Chilean Socialist Party (PSCh) is defined as complex institution characterising by its capacity to adapt to its contexts (Panebianco, 1988). PSCh political culture (Elkins, 1993) is characterized by the presence of internal factions headed by strong leaders Within factions, it is found clientelistic power relations between members and leaders. as a consequence of highly individualised power relations, mixed with authoritarian practices .Clientelism is described as the exclusive distribution of private goods (selective incentives) between members and leaders in order to assure leaders positions. Resulting from Neoliberalism the collective incentives are replaced by selective incentives between leaders and members with internal electoral purpose. Therefore, the individual link between leaders and members replaced collective linkages among party members. During the "Consertacion de Partidos por la Democracia" administration (1990-2010) clientelism took shape through the distribution of positions within the state bureaucratic apparatus. This paper wants to discuss whether practices are the result of Neoliberal transformations in political practices within the party.