Content area
Full text
How Party Activism Survives: Uruguay’s Frente Amplio. By Bentancur Verónica Pérez., Rodríguez Rafael Piñeiro., and Rosenblatt Fernando. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2020. 216 p. $99.99 cloth.
How Party Activism Survives: Uruguay’s Frente Amplio, by Verónica Pérez Bentancur, Rafael Piñeiro Rodríguez, and Fernando Rosenblatt, is a superb book and a must-read for scholars interested in parties and democracy. Its virtues are many. The writing is concise and plain. The authors pose a clear, important question: Why has grassroots activism persisted in the Frente Amplio (FA), unlike in so many other parties? They provide a plausible, interesting answer: that formal rules established at the FA’s founding led party activists to reproduce themselves over decades. The book is well organized: the authors effectively introduce the question, argument, and methods; provide necessary context regarding Uruguayan politics and the FA in government; thoroughly describe their dependent variable; elaborate the multiple levels of their argument; and, finally, place the FA in comparative perspective. Throughout, they make superb use of qualitative methods; indeed, the book is a shining example of transparent, rigorous qualitative research.
The labor-based FA (est. 1971) is the most electorally potent force in Uruguay. Since the country’s 1984 transition from military dictatorship to democracy, it has achieved and maintained remarkable electoral success, holding the presidency from 2005 until 2020 and a plurality or majority of seats in the legislative lower house from 2000 to the present. What makes the FA unique, however, is the persistence of its activists. Many successful parties depend on activists in their early years, but after the initial period of party development, party activism usually dwindles. Elites wrest control from the base; volunteer labor gives way to paid work, social action to electoralism. Clientelistic...