Abstract
The Bolivian party Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS) grew from a core of rural syndicalist and coca-leaf grower cooperatives into the dominant political party of the past decade. The MAS’s ascent to power began in the mid-1990s, expanding territorially and integrating new social actors under its leader and the country’s current president Evo Morales. The MAS has won three presidential elections in a row beginning in 2005. Santiago Anria, a political scientist, charts the development and tenure in power of the MAS in When Movements Become Parties: The Bolivian MAS in Comparative Perspective, focusing his attention on a question that will be of interest to political sociologists at large: the relationship between the party’s social movement origins and its subsequent electoral professionalization.
Anria couches his argument as a challenge to the central theoretical insight of Robert Michels’s foundational sociology of political parties. The expectation derived from Michels is of an “iron law of oligarchy,” which will inevitably result in the gradual decrease in power of social movement elements in the internal decision-making process of the party and corresponding elite entrenchment. Parties, the assumption is, will become gradually detached from their social base as they become specialized organizations led by a bureaucratized caste of political elites.
Anria argues, however, that the MAS has found ways to counteract the trend toward top-down control precisely due to the party’s social movement origins. With recourse to an impressive number of interviews (over 170) of party elites and social movement leaders, the author contends that the grassroots social base wields significant influence over the selection of candidates for elective office and in the policy-making sphere (p. 4). The party developed a bottom-up pattern of organization since it began. Emerging from a rural social movement with a long tradition of participatory politics, it promoted internal grassroots participation as a founding organizational characteristic. Adopting a loose bureaucratic structure facilitated the existence of opposition among allied groups to check power from within (p. 17). In this sense, Anria wishes to highlight how the organizational attributes of parties have an effect on internal power distributions and are conditioned by characteristics emerging in the early stages of development of the organization (p. 33).
While staying true to the overall argument set forth in the introduction of the book, the empirically oriented chapters offer a more nuanced picture of the MAS as a “hybrid party” that contains a party elite but retains organic connections to a social movement base in certain regions. Anria argues convincingly that hierarchical decision-making by the party’s leadership is less likely to take place in areas where autonomous social movement organizations aligned with the party are cohesive, have mechanisms to arrive at decisions, and can agree on candidate selection. This power distribution is commonly seen in Bolivia’s rural west, where districts are generally more homogeneous and have strong organizations monopolizing the political space. On the other hand, in places where civil society is strong but has multiple party alignments and/or cannot agree on a candidate, top-down decision-making is more likely. This is a pattern observed in socially heterogeneous environments (large cities in the west). Along the same lines, in contexts where civil society is strong but has aligned with other parties, the MAS leadership concentrates power in a small party elite, strategically selecting candidates that will help to build alliances (p. 104). Indeed, as Anria contends, there has been a strong resistance against institutionalizing the relations between the party’s grassroots social bases and the MAS because movement leaders think that formalizing these linkages might lead it to operate like a conventional political party (p. 135).
In the policy sphere, Anria argues that the grass roots’ checks on hierarchy and concentrated authority occur at two different yet related levels. Social movements working with the MAS have “creative capacities”—the ability to steer policy in their desired direction—and “constraining capacities”—the ability to block or modify government policies. While some ministries are “sealed” and offer little room for social movement actors to meaningfully shape an agenda, others are more susceptible to the influence of such groups. Ministries whose policies affect clearly defined constituencies, particularly associations rooted in production or economic activity (as opposed to more identity-oriented indigenous movements), are more in tune with social movement activity. These types of associations have had a significant influence on (and direct participation in) decision-making in key matters of agrarian and mining policy (p. 149).
In a comparative chapter, Anria places the MAS alongside counterparts in Brazil (PT) and Uruguay (FA). The PT and FA have a similar origin in social movements. As they developed into parties, the Brazilian party followed the Michelsian trajectory, while the FA did not. The key factor explaining this outcome is the relative strength of autonomous social mobilization of organizations aligned with but not controlled by the FA (already a fractionalized set of organizations).
The comparison between the MAS and these parties does a great deal to advance Anria’s case, but it also points to an understudied element in the book: the social structure underlying civil societal autonomy. Under what circumstances does autonomous mobilization emerge and remain such? Given the centrality of this factor in the overall story presented here it seems important to provide a sense of what is generating or allowing for the reproduction of what could be called “aligned autonomy.” For example, returning to the Bolivian case, the author suggests that district-level demographic homogeneity might facilitate strong autonomous grassroots organizations—how so? And what does that imply about the possibilities of stunting the “iron law” of oligarchy in heterogeneous contexts?
In this sense, it is also important to question whether the relationship between the MAS and the grass roots is better characterized as one of tension rather than cooperation. As the book itself shows, the party leadership does seem generally poised to take the Michelsian route, but—as the book also shows—this is met with successful resistance in some areas. So the story might not be one of the party finding ways to counteract trends toward elite entrenchment but of social movements finding ways to prevent diluting. Some of these questions are admittedly beyond the scope of this generally excellent book and point to future avenues of inquiry that would be of particular interest for sociology.