Mass Party Formation and Incorporation: Land, Civil Society, and Party in Post-Revolutionary Mexico

• In Event: 301 - Minority Fellowship Program (MFP) Research Session. Issues in Stratification: Health, Politics, Work, and Aging in Domestic and Global Context

Abstract

How do mass political parties emerge? A Weberian approach has seen the emergence of mass parties as an after effect of the rise of the modern bureaucratic apparatus and the advent of universal suffrage. Classic Marxists as well as Pluralist political scientists have seen parties as reflections of pre-existing social divisions. These approaches fail to explain variation in successful or unsuccessful mass party emergence in cases with similar state structure and electoral arrangements, and similar popular sectors available for mobilization. I examine why the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) in Mexico was able to incorporate the peasantry in some regions but not others after the revolutionary upheaval of the early 20th century. I develop a synthesis between Barrington Moore and Antonio Gramsci, to argue that successful mass party formation depends on the destruction of ‘precapitalist’ forms of agrarian structures. The relative erosion of traditional peasant villages in certain regions of Mexico, enabled the presence and construction of a civil societal realm of agrarian unions subsumed under the party, while the relative permanence of traditional villages in other regions enabled alliances between the party and the peasantry but prevented incorporation, and hence mass party emergence, in the period studied (1929-1946).

Author

• Edwin F. Ackerman, University of California-Berkeley