The Many and the Few: Political Participation in Republican Buenos Aires (review)

This book aims to shed light on universal questions regarding the construction and exercise of political power, on the relationship between the many and the few (the elite and the people), through the exploration of the particular world of the city of Buenos Aires in the 1860s and 1870s. The text focuses on the many (rather than the few) and the avenues they ventured upon when they chose to participate in the public realm. Sábato studied two of these avenues that are the twin pillars of the book: participation in elections, and the world of newspapers and demonstrations that constructed the public sphere—that Habermasian space of mediation between civil society and the state.

The book is divided into three parts. Part 1 offers a landscape of the city, its streets and buildings, its population (with its peculiar mixing of natives and immigrants), a short overview of its political history, as well as a first introduction to two key pieces of the culture of mobilization in Buenos Aires: associations (mutual aids, by trade, and by nationality); and the press. Part 2 is devoted to elections. The analysis takes off from a point that is common knowledge: few people voted even though at the time all Argentine males over 17 years old could if they wanted to. Discarding antiquated notions that the people were kept out of the polls by the privileged few who restricted the right to vote to themselves through force and fraud, Sábato turns upside-down old questions regarding elections. Instead of asking why the people did not attend the polls, she asks why some men voted, and instead of dismissing the relevance of elections because they were fraudulent and often violent, she assesses their role in the political and institutional system of the time.

Sábato addresses these issues by focusing on the two main protagonists of these events, the electorate and the electoral machines. The analysis of the former leads to the latter, as after exploring from different angles the characteristics of the voting population and analyzing the election days, she concludes that those who cast their votes were mostly railway workers, peons from the customhouse, sailors who worked for the port authority, and cart drivers, while men of social position did not attend the polls. Attention, therefore, needs to be turned to the nature of the elections and how these groups of men were led to participate. Here the picture becomes less than flattering as, far from being the exercise of free individual citizens in command of their political rights, voting was a collective event, with groups of men recruited and organized beforehand by local political machines. Voting, the author concludes, was the game played by the political parties and as such, "[i]t had little to do with the rest of the society and, therefore, fell between the political and the social realms" (p. 113). However, it was not an insignificant game since it provided a relatively peaceful and increasingly accepted way of electing representatives.

Most residents of Buenos Aires preferred other ways of political participation, and these forms are the subject of part 3. With delightful detail, Sábato reconstructs the world of the mobilizations that provided the presence of "the people" in the streets. These were channeled through or organized by countless associations of different kinds that flourished in Buenos Aires during these decades of "associative fervor," aided by the outburst of newspapers and pamphlets during these years. And while the existence of these associations has been researched in the past, in the hands of Sábato they acquire entirely new meaning. The demonstrations, she argues, originated entirely in the institutions of civil society, they exhibited similar patterns of organization, and they were formed by large numbers of residents of different nationalities...