The Crisis of Labor Politics in Latin America: Parties and Labor Movements during the Transition to Neoliberalism

Following the onset of mass politics in early twentieth-century Latin America, party systems were distinguished by different patterns of labor incorporation. In some countries, political competition was realigned by the emergence of a mass-based, labor-mobilizing populist or leftist party. In other countries, party systems remained under the control of traditional oligarchic parties or elite personalities who provided little impetus for labor mobilization. Countries with labor-mobilizing party systems were more deeply embedded in the state-led model of capitalist development known as import substitution industrialization in the middle of the twentieth century, and they suffered severe economic trauma when this development model collapsed in the debt crisis of the 1980s. Economic austerity and free-market reforms undermined the social foundations of these party systems, which experienced sharp declines in trade-union density and widespread electoral volatility during the waning decades of the twentieth century.