The Irruption of Peronism and the Lasting Resignification of the Argentine Party System in the 1940s

• In Event: Critical Junctures and Party Systems: Argentina and the Formation of Peronism

Abstract

Political parties usually define themselves in relation to one another, within a party system. Whether through programs, sets of values, ideologies, or political styles, “what a party stands for” is always relational. The very unexpected irruption of Peronism as a project and then a mass party in Argentina in the mid-1940s profoundly upset a party system whose political forces had been in existence for basically half a century and which could be (roughly) ordered ideologically along a left-right spectrum. The sudden and massive rise of Peronism produced, at the level of the party system, basically two major transformations which are still operative today: it re-signified in a dynamic and unplanned way what the various existing political parties (or forces) stood for, and it created a rather original two-dimensional political space. While the party system had admittedly been far from stable between the mid-1890s and the mid-1940s, Peronism nonetheless profoundly resignified what the UCR, the Socialists and, in a different way, the fragmented conservatives (and to a lesser extent the Communists) stood for. Examining party discourse in a relational way (as well as the way the specific parties were depicted by quite politically varied sources), the paper demonstrates how in “critical junctures” conjuncture becomes structure.

Author

• Pierre Ostiguy, ICP, Universidad Católica de Chile