Argentine Democracy: The Politics of Institutional Weakness

10. Demanding Accountable Government: Citizens, Politicians, and the Perils of Representative Democracy in Argentina

10 Demanding Accountable Government: Citizens, Politicians, and the Perils of Representative Democracy in Argentina Enrique Peruzzotti The link between Argentine politicians and their constituents has seriously eroded, as witnessed by the events of December 2001. Mass mobilizations took place in major urban metropolitan areas, reflecting a withdrawal of social trust in political elites. In this dramatic political moment , the wave of angry public protests against politicians swept aside the most challenging task of the democratization process: the consolidation of strong representative institutions. The following pages trace the genealogy of this crisis of representation. I argue that the 2001–2 crisis of representation is not an isolated or circumstantial event, or just the product of failed socioeconomic policies. Rather, it is the latest stage in the conflict between civil and political society over what constitutes representative government and can be traced back to the 1983 transition to democracy. A new kind of relationship between citizens and politicians distinguishes contemporary (post-1983) Argentine democracy from previous democratic experiences. Perhaps the most striking novelty of the past twenty years has been the emergence of a more sophisticated and demanding citizenry that is determined to redefine preexisting ideals of democratic A previous version of this chapter was presented for the conference ‘‘Rethinking Dual Transitions: Argentine Politics in the 1990s in Comparative Perspective,’’ March 20–22, 2003, Harvard University. The author is grateful for the valuable comments from those who participated in the meeting. I also wish to thank Steve Levitsky and Vicky Murillo whose sharp remarks helped improve the earlier draft. 230 Argentine Democracy representation, to create a civic concern for governmental accountability. The dramatic experience of state terrorism under military dictatorship from 1976 to 1983 gave rise to the human rights movement. This actor played a crucial educational role in Argentine society. The movement’s rights-oriented politics and discourse and its systematic condemnation of the horrors of state terrorism brought about a much-needed public concern for civil rights and the rule of law. Society’s new awareness of public officials’ violations of the law resulted in the rise of politics aimed at increasing government accountability. Throughout the 1990s, the politics of ‘‘social accountability’’ triggered unprecedented civic and media-based protests and exposés of illegal governmental behavior. Carlos Menem’s administration’s disregard of demands for greater accountability fed public anger and frustration against his government. The emergence of an electoral coalition in the 1999 presidential elections organized around a call for honest government unleashed great hopes in the middle-class electorate. Unfortunately, those hopes proved short-lived, when a major corruption scandal shocked the administration . The Senate scandal extinguished popular expectations for institutional and political reform and convinced many middle-class Argentines that the problem of corruption was not limited to a particular administration , but extended to political leaders as a whole. In 2001–2, public anger and frustration triggered a shift from accountability politics toward forms of protest that often rejected representative institutions altogether. The first part of this chapter analyzes the cultural and political innovation that took place between 1983 and 2000, and how it redefined the links between citizens and the political system. The second part focuses on the development of the crisis of representation that shook the stability of Argentina’s democratic system in December 2001. POLITICAL INNOVATION AND THE REDEFINITION OF REPRESENTATION: THE EMERGENCE OF A CIVIC CRY FOR ACCOUNTABLE GOVERNMENT Redefining Representation To understand the current crisis of representation, it is necessary to examine cultural innovation during democratization, and how this altered established populist notions of democratic representation. The most distinctive phenomenon of the current democratic period is the emergence of a political culture that stands in clear rupture with the ‘‘authorization’’ view of Demanding Accountable Government 231 representation of the populist democratic tradition and its replacement by an ‘‘accountability’’ model of representation (Pitkin 1972, 38). Historically in Argentina, populism’s model of authorization has shaped democratic representation. The two most significant democratizing movements in twentieth-century Argentina—Yrigoyenism and Peronism —shared a highly majoritarian understanding of democracy, to the detriment of constitutional safeguards or ‘‘horizontal’’ forms of accountability . In this view of the representative contract, elections granted the populist leader the right to act as the people’s trustee. Elections were understood to be the decisive moment of the representative contract; they were momentous decisional acts that foreclosed any further challenge or deliberation (Peruzzotti...