Revolution from Below: Cleavage Displacement and the Collapse of Elite Politics in Bolivia

• Published date: 01 June 2019
• DOI: 10.1177/0032329219845944
• Date: 01 June 2019
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/0032329219845944

Politics & Society

2019, Vol. 47(2) 205 –250

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DOI: 10.1177/0032329219845944

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Article

Revolution from Below:

Cleavage Displacement

and the Collapse of Elite

Politics in Bolivia

Jean-Paul Faguet

London School of Economics and Political Science

Abstract

For fifty years, Bolivia’s political party system was a surprisingly robust component

of an otherwise fragile democracy, withstanding coups, hyperinflation, guerrilla

insurgencies, and economic chaos. Why did it suddenly collapse around 2002? This

article offers a theoretical lens combining cleavage theory with Schattschneider’s

concept of competitive dimensions for an empirical analysis of the structural and

ideological characteristics of Bolivia’s party system from 1952 to 2010. Politics

shifted from a conventional left-right axis of competition, unsuited to Bolivian

society, to an ethnic/rural–cosmopolitan/urban axis closely aligned with its major

social cleavage. That shift fatally undermined elite parties and facilitated the rise

of structurally and ideologically distinct organizations, as well as a new indigenous

political class, that transformed the country’s politics. Decentralization and

political liberalization were the triggers that politicized Bolivia’s latent cleavage,

sparking revolution from below. The article suggests a folk theorem of identitarian

cleavage and outlines a mechanism linking deep social cleavage to sudden political

change.

Keywords

cleavage theory, political parties, elite politics, decentralization, Latin America

Corresponding Author:

Jean-Paul Faguet, Departments of International Development and Government, London School of

Economics and Political Science, Houghton Street, London WC2A 2AE, UK.

Email: j.p.faguet@lse.ac.uk

845944PASXXX10.1177/0032329219845944Politics & SocietyFaguet

research-article2019

206 Politics & Society 47(2)

Why do entire political party systems suddenly collapse? As traditional electoral coali-

tions fall apart in stable democracies such as the United Kingdom and the United

States and establishment parties bleed votes all over Europe, while new parties and

movements mushroom to the left and right, the question demands to be answered. And

not just in developed countries—in countries as diverse as Brazil, India, Peru, and

Venezuela party systems are under severe stress. In many, entire systems have already

given way, and their inheritors now appear poised to repeat the experience.

The collapse of individual parties is more common and more often analyzed.

Prominent examples include Whig parties in the United Kingdom and United States,

the Italian Socialist Party, and the Argentine Radical Party. But it is the collapse of

entire political party systems that concerns us here. That is a larger, more complex

issue posing far greater dangers for affected societies, and it is accordingly more dif-

ficult to analyze.

When a political party system collapses, not only a large number of organizations

disappear but an established axis of competition, political discourse, and ideological

space previously understood to encompass a society’s most pressing needs disappears

as well. This condition is distinct from a country’s parties disappearing and being

replaced by new parties espousing positions along the same axis of competition, for

example, left/pro-worker versus right/pro-capital. Although certainly dramatic, such a

change would not meet the strict definition of system collapse I employ. If, by con-

trast, all a country’s parties collapsed and its axis of competition shifted from, say, left

versus right to green/pro-environment versus brown/pro-growth1 or, equivalently, if

the meanings of left and right changed substantially,2 then my criteria for system col-

lapse would be satisfied.

One of the most dramatic and complete examples of political system collapse in

recent decades is Bolivia. According to received wisdom, Bolivia is the archetypal

example of political instability, with supposedly, and famously, more coups d’état than

its 193 years of independence.3 Much less well known is that during the second half of

the twentieth century its political party system was remarkably robust, withstanding a

series of shocks unknown in most countries. A partial list includes hyperinflation and

economic chaos, repeated coups, civil strife, international price collapses, guerrilla

insurgency, and striking levels of social change. Through all these crises, any one of

which might have felled a less robust party system, the same parties—indeed the same

individuals—returned again and again to take up the reins of power.4

Then in 2002, when Bolivian politics appeared to outsiders to have become “bor-

ing” and predictable, a series of demonstrations against a proposed gas pipeline to

Chile morphed into a popular uprising in El Alto and La Paz that not only destroyed

the government of President Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada and sank his ruling coalition

but overturned the political party system. Fernando Molina refers to a “revolutionary

period” that took the country to the brink of civil war before the establishment was

finally defeated.5

The scale and speed of the political system’s collapse were extraordinary. Of the

three establishment governing parties, two—the ADN and MIR—were by 2005 unable

to field candidates, and the third—the MNR—gained just 6 percent of the vote. By

Faguet 207

2009 MDR, too, had disappeared from the ballot. They were replaced by new parties

that were creatures of Bolivia’s rural, poor, ethnically diverse countryside.6

How can we explain such revolutionary change in a nation’s politics? Understanding

this case is important, and not just for its own sake. Bolivia opens an analytical win-

dow on how and why party systems collapse more generally, which can, in turn, help

explain the ideological and organizational characteristics of the realigned systems

that follow. Why Bolivia? Because its politics were never as institutionalized, nor

were its parties as strong, as in the more developed countries of Latin America,

let alone in North America and Europe. And yet it suffered many of the same eco-

nomic shocks, technological disruptions, and social changes as far richer, more

developed countries. As a result, the disintegration of its politics began earlier and

proceeded faster than elsewhere. In an important sense, Bolivia is at the leading edge

of a wave of change currently affecting countries across Latin America, Europe, and

indeed the entire globe. Hence understanding what happened there offers interesting

insights into how political disintegration and recomposition are likely to operate fur-

ther afield.

This article dissects the development of Bolivia’s political party system from the

1952–53 National Revolution through its collapse and reconstitution in a very differ-

ent form. Empirically, I combine the Bolivian Electoral Atlas7—a wonderful resource

that updates and significantly corrects previously available electoral data, disaggre-

gated to the municipal level—with interviews of key political leaders over two decades

(see App. 3). To this I add survey data from Latinobarómetro and an extensive Bolivian

bibliography. I use that evidence to analyze the collapse and reformulation of Bolivia’s

politics through a theoretical lens that combines cleavage theory with Schattschneider’s

concept of competitive dimensions in politics. The result is a theoretical mechanism

connecting enduring social cleavages to the characteristics of party systems that can

explain sudden and decisive political change.

I argue that in Bolivia’s incompletely institutionalized democracy,8 the national

political party system was not organized around the major cleavage that characterizes

society. It reflected, rather, a subordinate cleavage relevant for a minority of the popu-

lation, which was imposed from above by political elites who rode the 1952–53 revo-

lution to power and was maintained by their descendants. Elites in effect tried to

rewrite the identities of rural Bolivians away from their indigenous roots and render

them workers. In the context of a low-income country with partial democratic incor-

poration, that cleavage became “frozen,” sustained by a fiscal architecture and elec-

toral laws that supported elite dominance of Bolivia’s politics.

Institutional reforms triggered sweeping change. Decentralization had the unin-

tended effect of revealing the underlying regional and ethnic conflicts that actually

cleave Bolivian society. Electoral reforms broke the oligopoly that upheld the artificial

cleavage. Repeated subnational elections revealed both the misalignment and a new

generation of leaders, who emerged from the grass roots of society. Traditional parties,

moreover, failed to decentralize themselves internally to accommodate the twin chal-

lenges of new political actors and surging citizen participation. And so Bolivia’s par-

ties and left-right party system collapsed under the weight of their own irrelevance and