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

Sabato has written a groundbreaking study of the public sphere in republican Buenos Aires in the 1860s and 1870s. Her book is a strongly revisionist account of the relationship between elites and common people during a period when the role of the "many" has tended to be viewed as severely limited in the realm of politics. Sabato's methodology is traditional—based on archival sources regarding voting behavior, newspaper accounts, editorials, and so forth. The innovative aspect of the book is not in the technique of analysis but in the questions that Sabato asks and the subtle intelligence that she brings to bear on the relationship between these novel questions and her traditional sources. Instead of asking why people who could vote failed to do so, she asks why people bothered to vote at all and under what conditions. By inverting this traditional question, the role of the many is imbued with fresh agency. This pattern of approaching old questions from a new angle recurs throughout the book.

According to Sabato, the masses entered politics in two main ways—through elections, in which the number of voters, though not necessarily the number of eligible voters, was limited (universal male suffrage was the law of the land from 1853 onward); and through the associative impulse of civil society (ethnic, trade, and mutual aid societies). Tellingly, according to Sabato, both voting and associative action were collective in nature. Voters went to the polls in groups, often armed for battle against the opposing party, and associations were comprised of diverse groups willing to engage in public demonstrations or take part in collective festivities. The outstanding feature of Buenos Aires during the 1860s and 1870s was its robust public sphere.

According to Sabato, associative activity was the realm in which the many made their strongest mark on the few. Residents of Buenos Aires were joiners. Clubs and associations of all types flourished in the decades covered by her study, nurtured by the press and by the burgeoning flow of immigrants to the city. These associations were vehicles for public opinion, the display of which, Sabato argues, was generally marked by a discursive commitment to the "unity" of the "people" and a moderate tone that avoided direct challenges to the dominant political order. Associations organized relatively tranquil public demonstrations led by charismatic public speakers stressing the common interests of the group and society a large.

The cumulative force of Sabato's argument is meant to convince that through elections, the press, and associative activity, the many and the few conducted negotiations regarding politics and the formation of the nation-state. From the standpoint of an interdisciplinary approach to political history, several aspects of the argument could benefit from a stronger connection to political science and economics. Whereas Sabato's narrative technique and archival acumen are testaments to her skill as a political historian, her treatment of elections and the rationale behind political behavior appear to have no connection to current practice in political science. Sabato likens elections to a "game" but makes no mention of the rich literature in game theory about why people vote. She makes many references to institutions as the "rules of the game," but no mention of North or his followers is to be found.¹ To the extent that a theory of the "public sphere" emerges in her book, it is the influential but unclear formulation proffered by Habermas.² In this regard, the value of this excellent book will be diluted for those working in disciplines in which clear, falsifiable hypotheses are the norm. Sabato builds her case piece by piece, eschewing explicit hypotheses, winning the historian's assent with the powerful accretion of fact and interpretation on display. Much more will have to be done, however, to make the book's arguments about the mechanisms of...