A New Kind of Vanguard: Cuban−North Korean Discourse on Revolutionary Strategy for the Global South in the 1960s

During the 1960s, the Cuban government attempted to play a leadership role within the Latin American Left. In the process Cuban leaders departed from Marxist−Leninist orthodoxy, garnering harsh criticism from their Soviet and Chinese allies. Yet Cuba found a steadfast supporter of its controversial positions in North Korea. This support can in large part be explained by the parallels between Cuban and North Korean ideas about revolution in the developing nations of the Global South. Most significantly, both parties embraced a radical reconceptualisation of the role of the Marxist−Leninist vanguard party. This new doctrine appealed primarily to younger Latin American militants frustrated with the established leftist parties and party politics in general. The Cuban/North Korean theory of the party had a tangible influence in Colombia, Peru, Brazil, Puerto Rico, El Salvador, Mexico, Bolivia and Nicaragua, as revolutionary groups in these societies took up arms in the 1960s and 1970s.

Agents of Representation: The Organic Connection between Society and Leftist Parties in Bolivia and Uruguay

Parties are central agents of democratic representation. The literature assumes that this function is an automatic consequence of social structure and/or a product of incentives derived from electoral competition. However, representation is contingent upon the organizational structure of parties. The connection between a party and an organized constituency is not limited to electoral strategy; it includes an organic connection through permanent formal or informal linkages that bind party programmatic positions to social groups’ preferences, regardless of the electoral returns. This article analyzes how the Movimiento al Socialismo (Movement toward Socialism, MAS) in Bolivia and the Frente Amplio (Broad Front, FA) in Uruguay developed two different forms of relationship with social organizations that result from the interplay of historical factors traceable to the parties’ formative phases and party organizational attributes. Party organizational features that grant voice to grassroots activists serve as crucial mechanisms for bottom-up incorporation of societal interests and demands.

The Lebanese Civil War 1975–90

This article argues that the Lebanese Civil War (1975–90) was in essence a terror of state directed by mercantile economic and political elites (the comprador class) controlling the Lebanese state and society against the middle and poorer classes (the working class). The aim of this terror or organized violence was to subdue the subordinate classes, which in the late 1960s and early 1970s rebelled against the confessional system that operated for the benefit of the comprador class. The rebellion was expressed by members of the working-class joining cross-confessional nationalist and leftist parties. Hence, violence was aimed at reestablishing the confessional order as a means to restore a hegemonic system that served the interests of the comprador class at a time when this class was rehabilitating its economic role by resurrecting the financial system, which had received a severe blow in the late 1960s. It effected this rehabilitation through the Taif Agreement signed between Lebanese parliamentarians in 1989, under the auspices of Syria, Saudi Arabia, and the United States, to favor the new mercantile elite led by Rafiq Hariri.

Political Parties and Electoral Competition

Chapter 5 considers the effect of political mobilization efforts by political parties on the political activity of Latin America’s poorest citizens. Political parties play critical roles in mobilizing citizens in democracies, but we do not understand very well the conditions under which parties will focus their efforts on low-income individuals. This book’s framework emphasizes the organizational capacity and the electoral incentives parties have for mobilizing the poor to better understand who participates and in what kinds of activities. This chapter shows that where parties have greater organizational capacity and stronger linkages to groups in society, and where they face stiff electoral competition, poor people are more politically active, and we see more equal levels of political participation overall. The chapter also shows that dominant parties that win elections by wide margins tend to ignore the poorest citizens, even if they are leftist parties with strong rhetoric around poverty and inclusion.

Inclusion and Exclusion during the Left Turn

Chapter 6 takes a closer look at the impact of Latin America’s left turn on the political activism of poor people, and on political equality more generally. This chapter shows a surprising pattern: while the election of leftist governments did spark more political activity across the board, it did not produce more equal patterns of political participation. On the contrary, political participation is most stratified by wealth where radical-left parties or candidates govern. This chapter argues that the ideology of ruling parties matters less than expected for a number of reasons. First, due to their electoral and institutional dominance and weak organizational structure, ruling leftist parties in places like Bolivia, Ecuador, and Venezuela had neither the capacity nor the incentives to mobilize poor citizens outside of election. This is in contrast to European contexts where leftist parties face stiff electoral competition and have strong linkages to groups in society. Second, most research based on advanced democracies assumes that poor people are core constituents of leftist parties. In Latin America, in contrast, poor people are just as likely to hold right-of-center views as left-of-center views.

‘Sacrifical lambs’ or candidate mimicking? Gender-based nomination strategies in elections

This paper explores an alternative mechanism for understanding the drivers of the nomination of women for elective office in single-member electoral systems. Previous research has generally examined two sources of gender-based politics: party ideology, with leftist parties being more female-friendly than rightist parties, and the strategic nomination of candidates depending on whether the party is expected to win or lose in the district, with women more likely to be used as ‘sacrificial lambs’ in hopeless contests. We argue that the nomination of male and female candidates across districts reflects an interdependence of party strategies – in particular, the actions of the main opposition party. We hypothesise that when the trailing party is not committed to gender equality, its equilibrium strategy in a given district is the nomination of a candidate of the same gender as that of the front-running party. Secondary data from 1,017 single-member Australian districts and more than 2,000 candidates from 2001–2019 confirm our hypothesis.

Left Behind: Labor Unions and Redistributive Policy under the Brazilian Workers’ Party

How do leftist governments negotiate the trade-off between courting union support and maintaining the business sector’s trust? Scholars have argued that leftist parties will remain accountable to their labor base when powerful unions have strong ties to centralized leftist parties. However, I argue that strong party-union ties and party leadership centralization may, in fact, insulate leftist presidents against redistributive pressures from below. When party-union ties allow labor leaders to develop careers as professional politicians, these leaders become more responsive to the party’s goals than to their union base. Further, a centralized party organization can exclude unions and leftist factions from the design of redistributive policies. To test my argument, I use a case study of Brazil under the administration of the Worker’s Party (PT).

Conclusion

The final chapter reviews the key findings of the book, and reflects on the future direction of digital campaigning. The main conclusions are threefold: (1) Developments in digital campaigning follow a similar pattern across countries. A four-stage cycle of experimentation, standardization, community building, and individual voter mobilization is clearly evident across the book’s four case studies. (2) The pace of that development and countries’ current positions differ according to regime-level characteristics and levels of national technological advancement. Notably, parties and individual candidates can also play a significant role in shaping that process. In particular, mainstream leftist parties and some of the more prominent minor parties serve as key catalysts for change. (3) The “mainstreaming” of digital technology is fostering the growth of a new type of campaign operative—the apolitico—and a new condition of hypernormality in which power is centralized organizationally and systemically to an unprecedented degree.

The long goodbye: the relationship between lleftist parties and the Italian General Confederation of Labour (CGIL) after the end of the Italian Communist Party (PCI) (1992-2017)

This article explores the effects of the growth of the “cartel parties” within the Italian system and the new relations between the unions and leftist parties, going beyond the models and experiences of the twentieth century. One of the consequences concerns the stronger interdependence of the parties and the state, and their need for more public resources. Another aspect relates to the relationship of the party with society and other socially representative organisations and stakeholders. In the case of Italy, the Democratic Party, set up in 2007, embodies the weak-minded party version, progressively dismantling the relationship with the trade union movement and, in particular, with the CGIL. The Italian situation confirms that underlying these evolutions there are not only external factors, such as globalisation and changes in the work world, but also internal factors, such as the logic of actions, drawn up and put aggressively into practice by the “cartel parties".

Parties to an alliance: Ideology and the domestic politics of international institutionalization

While much research has been done on the domestic determinants of alliance institutionalization, there has been a neglect of the effect of domestic politics, by which we mean contestation between political actors in the same country. We hypothesize that the ideology of the parties governing countries negotiating the terms of security relationships will affect their preferences over the degree and kind of institutionalization seen in alliances. Drawing on previous literature, we argue that rightist parties are more sensitive to sovereignty costs and will therefore insist on maintaining more control over policy than their leftist counterparts. They can assert control either by imposing hierarchical forms of institutionalization when they are a stronger party to an alliance or by avoiding institutionalization altogether if they are the weaker party in an alliance. In contrast, we expect leftist parties to be less sensitive to sovereignty costs and generally favorable to more voice-driven, egalitarian institutions that have institutionalized mechanisms for consensus-building, regardless of their country’s relative power position. Combining the ATOP dataset on alliance design with the Parties Manifesto Project, we find broad support for our hypotheses. Our findings indicate that scholars should pay more attention to the internal ideological contestation within countries, making room for domestic political factors that go beyond regime type.