Abstract
An account of the first 10 years of government of a leftist party in Uruguay—the Frente Amplio—focusing on a mode of designing public policies that prioritized participation by civil society organizations suggests that this strategy distinguishes it from the preceding traditional party administrations and challenges the “liberal-democratic” label assigned to it by some of the high-profile specialized literature.
Este análisis de los primeros diez años de gobierno de un partido de izquierda—el Frente Amplio—en Uruguay, hace foco en una modalidad de construcción de las políticas públicas que incorporó de manera jerarquizada la participación de la sociedad civil. Se argumenta que representa una estrategia alternativa a la desarrollada por los gobiernos de centro-derecha que le precedieron, que no encaja bien en la categoría “liberal democrática” en la que la sitúa parte de la literatura especializada.
In the late 1990s, a historical cycle in which center-right parties predominated, implementing public policies mostly associated with the neoliberal paradigm, ended in Latin America. Electoral victories of left and center-left parties in several countries in the region beginning in the next decade strengthened the view that a “left turn” was under way (Cleary, 2006; Panizza, 2005). Uruguay was not immune to this regional trend. In 2005 a leftist political party, the Frente Amplio, came to power. It was formed in 1971 as a coalition of parties and sectors stemming from the unification of the workers’ movement five years earlier. Its immediate goal was to remedy the political crisis then afflicting the country, which would lead to the onset of a long dictatorship two years later, but also to promote structural reforms in the state, the economy, and the society. Nearly half a century later and through a long process of resistance and consolidation, the inclusion of progressive sectors, the broadening of social alliances, and the moderation of its programmatic proposals, it ultimately brought Tabaré Vázquez to the presidency. His administration and that of José “Pepe” Mujica five years later enjoyed widespread electoral support from the population, giving the Frente Amplio an absolute majority in the legislature during its first two terms in office that allowed it to govern effectively. 1
In this essay we focus our analysis on the political strategies deployed by Frente Amplio governments to support transformations of public policy. Our objective is to describe the nature and scope of the participatory formats advanced, contrast them with the procedural records of the preceding center-right “traditional” party governments (Colorado and Nacional), and compare the results of this experience with high-profile interpretations in the specialized literature on the modus operandi of leftist administrations in Latin America. We concentrate not primarily on the specifics of the Frente Amplio’s policies 2 but on the how. More precisely, we address the creation and operation of institutional settings for public policy design that include the active participation of civil society organizations.
Left Parties and Participation in Policy Making in Latin America
The Uruguayan case is of interest because in a good number of classifying essays, the Frente Amplio administration has been placed in the category of institutionalist progressive, moderate left or center-left, reformist, and social-democratic, as opposed to revolutionary, populist, or contestatory (Castañeda, 2006; Lanzaro, 2006; Levitsky and Roberts, 2011; Petkoff, 2005; Weyland, Madrid, and Hunter, 2010). This distinction has been disputed by several writers, who consider it a simplification that does not adequately reflect the diversity of historical and political expressions of progressive experiences in the region (Beasley-Murray, Cameron, and Hershberg, 2010; Cameron, 2009; Ciccariello-Maher, 2013; Ellner, 2011), but it continues to be cited in much of the academic literature on the topic.
Among the features that distinguish the two lefts are the roles assigned to representative government and participation. For example, Levitsky and Roberts (2011: 25) argue that the differences among leftist governments are related to three basic positions on democracy: the liberal democratic, corresponding to systems of institutionalized pluralism, checks and balances, full respect for electoral proceedings, civil liberties, and rights of the opposition, in which popular mobilization is largely restricted to the electoral arena; the plebiscitary, characterized by appealing directly to popular majorities to circumvent or alter institutional rules; and the radical democratic (examples of which are scarce in Latin America beyond the municipal level), 3 which combines institutionalized pluralism with the creation of new channels for popular participation and the mobilization of relatively autonomous groups. Goldfrank (2011) details the characteristics of this radical stance: breadth of the participatory base, openness to all members of the population, transparency, and deliberation.
These references categorize the Frente Amplio governments as liberal democratic. In various instances the multiple opportunities they fostered for the development of participatory policy making are acknowledged, but they are identified as traditional expressions of societal corporatism and therefore compatible with this categorization (Goldfrank, 2011). This characterization of the Frente Amplio administrations warrants discussion. In fact, the left in government has fully respected the constitutional rules in effect, operated in the framework of a highly institutionalized pluralist and competitive partisan system, and adopted a reformist strategy (Lanzaro, 2011). Policy making during the Frente Amplio decade, in contrast, followed guidelines much less orthodox than this, especially with regard to the mainstreaming of participation. “Corporatism” is understood as a system of representation of organized interests to which the state concedes the monopoly on representation and the lines of authority in sectoral interests in exchange for certain controls on the election of its leaders and the coordination of demands and support. In this model, to the degree that multiple power groups exist in a setting of “mutual understanding,” the state must intervene to promote commitments to more stable and institutionalized interests and at the same time obtain some concessions for the public good (Schmitter, 1974; 1985). It is hard to fit most of the widespread practices of participatory democracy of the Uruguayan left governments into this rubric.
Various left and center-left governments in Latin America have overcome liberal democracy’s traditional dichotomy between politics and civil society by creating spaces where the social groups not only pressure their decision makers but also are an effective part of the decision-making process (De Costa, 2016; Disney and Williams, 2014; Ellner, 2016; Hernández Baqueiro, 2016). Uruguay’s was one of these, challenging the very popular dichotomous classifications of leftist governments and therefore warranting a critical review. 4
The Politico-Social Crafting of Public Policy
Developing public policy through broad participation was not only a matter of political strategy for the Frente Amplio governments but also the hallmark of its conception of democracy. On the day Tabaré Vázquez took office in his first term, he told the General Assembly, “We will govern for society, and that entails strengthening, widening, extending democracy and citizen participation in the exercise of this national government, which must belong to all Uruguayans.” 5 To substantiate our argument, we will examine four instances of policy making—one each in the areas of education, labor, social security, and health care—that were characterized by the centrality conferred on autonomous civil society organizations. 6
The Education Policy Debate and the New Education Law
The Uruguayan education system had just been reformed between 1995 and 2000, during the center-right administration of President Julio María Sanguinetti (Colorado Party). This reform had had a marked technocratic stamp and a vertical structure, lacking openings for consultation with civil society. As a result, it was controversial and its prospects doubtful. When the Frente Amplio came to power, the Vázquez administration launched a broadly participatory process to develop standards for the sector with two parts: a policy debate and national conference and the drafting of a bill for discussion and eventual passage by the legislature (Bentancur, 2008a).
The policy debate, held throughout 2006, was conducted by a 22-member committee (including 4 prominent members of various political parties) and consisted of territorial assemblies and sectoral meetings in which some 20,000 people participated. By design, the education authorities played a minimal role in guiding the debate and determining its agenda. The two most controversial aspects the committee had to resolve were the relationship between the conference and the subsequent legislation and the representation assigned to the various organizations in the event. With regard to the first, it determined that the conference would be resolution-based and the resolutions would serve as recommendations to the education authorities and the executive and legislative branches. The representatives of the opposition criticized this approach as being a threat to the conference’s decision-making power and withdrew from the committee, while teachers’ unions objected to the nonbinding nature of the conference’s resolutions. With regard to the composition of the national conference, it was established that approximately 75 percent of the participants would come from the territorial assemblies and the rest from the organizations that had presented documents in the debate (CODE, 2007: 7). No representation was assigned to the political parties, since they could make their voices heard in the legislature during the discussion of the bill. As a result, teachers and students made up 78 percent of the delegates, and their predominance was reflected in the conference’s resolutions (Bentancur and Mancebo, 2010). The final conference declaration concisely reaffirmed the underlying principles of the Uruguayan education system, declared education an inalienable human right demanding its consideration as state policy, and called for increased funding to be determined in relation to the gross domestic product. At the request of the teachers’ unions, it included autonomous co-governance of the education system, assuming the exclusion of political party representatives.
Although the preparations for the drafting of the general education bill promised an expansion of its social base of support at the cost of reducing political support, what was sent by the executive to the Assembly was vulnerable on this point. First, despite having conferred significant legitimacy on union perspectives throughout the debate, the executive distanced itself from the conference resolutions and developed an eclectic proposal that only partially reflected the principles expressed in them. It granted the teachers’ groups representation but only a minority voice in educational management, a concession that was ultimately insufficient to satisfy the demands of their more mobilized sectors. Second, the fact that the project was not anchored in a broad partisan political consensus caused the opposition to reject it and even generated rifts within the government’s own party (Bentancur, 2008b). Eventually the law (No. 18.437) was passed after only brief debate with only the government legislators’ votes. It remains in force today, although the political opposition has often expressed its will to modify it when it has achieved the necessary legislative majority. The format for participation in the educational sphere was institutionalized by the law itself, which calls for a national education conference with an advisory and consultative role during the first year of each new administration.
Labor Regulation Through Wage Councils
As far back as 1943, wage councils—a form of societal corporatism for regulating the labor market—were introduced by legislation in Uruguay. The mission of these tripartite bodies (made up of representatives of government, business, and workers) was to set minimum wages by work category and line of activity, but in practice the negotiations dealt with all aspects of labor relations. Their convocation was sporadic, and as of 1992, during the neoliberal administration of the Nacional Party, they were replaced by agreements between employers and workers in each company—an alternative that negatively affected the evolution of wages and income distribution.
Once the Frente Amplio came to power nationally, the wage councils were reinstated as a way of promoting collective bargaining and a more equitable distribution of wealth. Their jurisdiction was expanded to include public administration, rural labor, and domestic service, hitherto excluded from this bargaining mechanism, and a tripartite high council was created and charged with categorizing activity sectors and proposing modifications to the wage council law (Senatore, 2010). The innovations were incorporated into the collective bargaining laws of 2009 (Nos. 18.508 and 18.566), according to which convening wage councils was no longer subject to the will of each administration but mandatory at the request of any of the parties. The continuity of this institutional instrument for participation was thus ensured. The system of wage councils operated through rounds of negotiation of wage agreements that usually remained in effect for two or three years. Resolutions could be approved by simple majority or, if no agreement was reached, decreed by the executive. During the period studied, the five rounds that were held showed 85–90 percent of the resolutions in each round adopted by consensus (Carracedo and Senatore, 2016).
For the umbrella workers’ organization, the councils have been a tool for increasing membership and organizing capacity. For their part, the businesspeople who in earlier times prioritized bargaining by company have agreed to this new procedure, partly by pragmatically accepting the executive’s directives but also by taking advantage of the opportunity provided to introduce their own agendas and concerns. Lastly, the government exercised some leadership through the proposal of guidelines that established maximums and minimums for wage adjustments. In this way it managed to align improvements in the status of workers with macroeconomic objectives such as inflation control and maintaining the competitiveness of national production. The wage councils fostered an increase in real wages by 52 percent between 2005 and 2014, improving especially the lowest wages by way of special increases (Carracedo and Senatore, 2016). One can only conclude that the results of labor policy in the decade—with the wage councils as a principal tool—were clearly beneficial to the working class.
Despite the benefits obtained through the wage councils and those resulting from the extensive labor legislation between 2005 and 2015, unions did not relinquish their autonomy vis-à-vis the leftist government, developing a strategy of “critical support” of its efforts. For their part, legislators of the opposition political parties did not vote for the collective bargaining law that imposed mandatory convening of the councils, reaffirming their stance in favor of a one-on-one negotiation between capital and labor and only a residual role for the state. Likewise, they have been very critical of some of the executive’s positions in the wage negotiations and particularly in the drafting of the new labor legislation, which they claim is not equidistant between capital and labor but biased toward the latter.
The National Dialogues on Social Security
The Uruguayan social security system has been directed since 1967 by a specialized state agency, the Social Security Bank, made up of four members elected by political powers and (since 1982) three elected by active workers, retirees, and contributing companies. The system governed by this institution underwent a structural reform in 1995 during the Colorado Party administration. Until then, the pension system had been based on a financial “sharing” regime, with the money contributed by workers, employers, and the state going into a fund from which benefits were financed in proportion to contributions made (Busquets, 2002). Reform of this regime basically resulted from an agreement between the Colorado and Nacional Parties without the participation of the Frente Amplio or of social organizations. Essentially, a mixed public-private pension system was introduced that combined the traditional public sharing component of distribution with a pillar of individual capitalization managed by public or private insurance companies called social security fund administrators. It also raised the retirement age for workers.
When the Frente Amplio came into office 10 years later, this system had been endorsed by the individual decisions of thousands of citizens who had voluntarily joined its private component. Setting aside the possibility of repealing it in the short term, the new administration designed a politico-societal strategy for modifying some of its more controversial aspects. The first step was to create a sectoral social security commission made up of five ministries and other government and private entities active in the field. In 2007, with the goal of generating inputs for future reforms that were sustained by broad support, the government convened a national dialogue on social security. The plenary session of this dialogue included broad participation by government authorities, institutions linked to social security, organized workers, retirees and pensioners, representatives of legislative commissions, the Supreme Court of Justice, civil society organizations, and academics. The political parties were also invited, but the Nacional participated very little and the Colorado not at all. During the sessions, 46 institutions and 133 individuals made their voices heard. Later, executive committees were set up and charged with negotiating agreements to introduce changes to the system. Both the plenary and the committees made their decisions by consensus. The principal accords achieved paved the way for two bills drafted by the executive in consultation with workers’ representatives, businesspeople, and retirees. Both were approved by consensus in the legislature in October 2008. The first (No. 18.395) reduced the requirements for obtaining retirement benefits, moderating some of the more detrimental effects of the 1995 reform, and the second (No. 18.399) modified the system of unemployment insurance.
Between 2011 and 2012, during José Mujica’s administration, a second phase of the dialogue took place. It was organized into two committees tasked with studying reforms to the public and private components of the retirement regime inaugurated in 1995. More than 40 institutions participated in the plenary sessions. In turn, the committees met during 2012 and 2013 with participation from representatives of social actors (retirees, businesspeople, and workers), the government (the sectoral social security commission), and all the political parties represented in the Assembly (Busquets and Schenck, 2012). The agenda of one committee was to revise the traditional component of the Uruguayan pension system. The broad agreements it produced were incorporated into a law on the partial-retirement regime (No. 19.160) and one on reconciling retirement and work (No. 19.006) that were approved by legislators of all the parties (Busquets and Schenck, 2016). The agenda of the other committee included the income system and the issue that provoked the greatest debate, the procedures allowing holders of private insurance to switch to the public subsystem. This prompted the executive to draft a bill—subsequently passed with only Frente Amplio votes—that decided the matter (No. 19.162). This was the first outcome of the dialogue sessions that did not receive unanimous support in the legislature. All told, the regulatory outcomes of the two national dialogues on social security reflected the gradualist strategy adopted by the Frente Amplio in this sector. As a result of this stance, the structural characteristics of the social security regime launched in the 1990s were not altered, but changes were introduced in some of its most controversial aspects with the support of the most important political and social actors.
The Design and Implementation of Health Care Reform
Public health care policy in Uruguay was historically known for its high levels of coverage but also for the extensive stratification of the benefits afforded by the system in terms of socioeconomic, occupational, and geographical variables. Per person health care expenditure increased considerably between 1987 and 1998, a trend largely attributable to inefficient management that threatened the system’s financial viability. By 2005 the public and private sectors each served almost half of the country’s inhabitants, but the distribution of resources was clearly inequitable to the benefit of the latter (Setaro, 2016). Although the traditional parties had attempted to make the system more rational through the creation in 1987 of the State Health Care Services Administration, they lacked sufficient political capacity to launch a major reform that would respond to the system’s shortcomings. Their most serious attempt was an experiment in vertical reform, without any type of participation, between 1995 and 1997 that in addition did not receive the party support necessary to achieve approval (Fuentes, 2010). Consequently—and in contrast to the situation with other policies examined here—rather than a fundamental stake in existing policy the first Frente Amplio administration inherited systemic problems awaiting resolution. Accordingly, the government led by Tabaré Vázquez achieved structural reform in this area that was implemented by the second Frente Amplio administration, led by José Mujica. Participation was a distinctive feature not only of the shaping of health care reform but also of the institutional methods employed in its design and implementation.
Health care reform was negotiated in the Advisory Council for Change, 7 an entity created by the executive for the purpose. This body included a wide range of organizations: guilds of medical professionals, public and private health care workers’ unions, private medical care institutions, the health departments of the Universidad de la República, consumer associations, the Congress of Departmental Mayors, and the Ministry of Public Health Ministry. The political parties were excluded. Its operational dynamics was marked by the Health Ministry’s desire to create accords by reconciling the perspectives and interests of the various actors (Rodríguez Araújo, 2011). It was aware that some proposals favored actors with potential veto power (medical associations, private institutions) and avoided controversial subjects (Fuentes, 2010). The various actors were able to agree on basic guidelines for the reform, which was to consist of a set of laws including the National Budget Act of 2005–2010 (No. 17.930), the law creating the National Health Fund (No. 18.131), one dealing with the decentralization of the State Health Care Services Administration (No. 18.1610), and one establishing the National Integrated Health System and National Health Insurance (No. 18.211). These laws garnered the votes of Frente Amplio legislators, but the traditional opposition parties challenged the centralization of the institutional framework that would lead to a new health care system, the assignment of governance to the Health Ministry, and the higher tax burden on the citizenry.
The new plan introduced important changes, several of which increased the opportunities for input from civil society. The National Health Fund, the main strategic component of the governance of the sector, provided benefits out of the contributions it received from workers, businesses, and the state. It was the system’s sole payer, transferring variable “health fees” to the institutions providing services according to the health risk of each user. This financing model was designed not just to preserve the economic viability of the sector but also to increase the state’s ability to direct and regulate the system. The fund was governed by the National Board of Health, a body separate from the Health Ministry that, among other things, arranged management commitments with the lending institutions and monitored their compliance. The board was hybrid, state-societal, in nature, composed of four government representatives and three from civil society representing the user organizations, sector workers, and service providers. Local, municipal, and departmental advisory councils were also created.
Civil society representatives were included in the leadership of the Health Care Services Administration, which oversaw the provision of health benefits directly by the state. It was governed by a five-member board, three of them designated by the executive and approved by the Senate and two representing workers and users. The guild representing medical professionals has criticized their omission from this leadership body (Rodríguez Araújo, 2011). Honorary advisory councils at the national and the departmental level are envisioned to expand the participation of users and workers and advise this governing board.
Lastly, opportunities for participation were also extended to the private companies providing health care, obliging them to promote the participation of users and workers through advisory councils.
Patterns of Participation
These experiences had varying formats (Table 1). Some were designed to study specific reforms; in others preexisting institutions were given new life (the wage councils) or institutional continuity was achieved after innovations (the education conference) (Variable 1). Ad hoc participation in the areas of social security and health care had a different type of continuity through representation in the entities charged with the implementation of policy rather than through dialogue and negotiation (Variable 8). In almost all cases the participatory practices implied a degree of novelty for the sector, especially considering that formerly the only institutional space was the wage councils, which had been discontinued under the traditional parties’ governments of the 1990s. These reforms and practices thus signified an important breakthrough in the period under study (Variable 2).
Comparative Analysis of the Four Instances of Participation
Assessing the roles that the government assumed in these instances is of particular interest. In some cases, such as the education debate and conference, the government operated basically as an organizer, while in others the executive also influenced the agenda. It actively participated in the progress of the wage councils, endeavoring to steer the groups’ resolutions in terms of two occasionally conflicting objectives: improving wage levels and working conditions and achieving certain macroeconomic objectives. In contrast, the participation of government representatives in the discussions on health reform was primarily aimed at facilitating consensus and building positive-sum games for multiple social actors without having to abandon its own preferences. In the case of social security, the government basically played a coordinating role, although not without offering proposals and initiatives. In short, the functions performed by the government were adapted to the particularities of each policy sector (Variable 3).
These projects were mostly focused on organized civil society. Political parties were included only in the social security dialogues, although they were also allowed to participate in the preparatory (but not the decision-making) phase of the education conference. Political calculations lay behind the decision to include political parties in one event or another, but even so it was an important strategic gamble in that it involved various kinds of coordination between the social and political arenas for policy making and between components of participatory and representative democracy. Including the opposition parties tended to broaden the base of legitimacy of the accords and facilitate the subsequent legislative proceedings but also to limit the depth of the changes (Variables 4, 6, and 7). The degree of the opposition parties’ commitment to the outcomes of these deliberations was related to the radicalism of the reforms. This was to be expected in dealing with measures that repealed, modified, or innovated on policies advanced by these very parties. Thus they opposed fundamental components of the new education law and the organization of the health care system and the prescriptive nature of the wage councils as a means of collective bargaining, but they generally agreed with adjustments that did not undermine the structural components of the social security reform they had introduced in the previous decade (Variable 9).
At no time was the invitation to participate in these deliberations a mere formality. On the contrary, they all led to legislation (Variable 7). While the results did not all enjoy the same degree of legitimacy, in general the political processes provided considerable social support for most of the reforms, with the notable exception of the education conference and the subsequent law (Variable 5). Finally, participation extended to the management and implementation of the system through existing bodies or new ones that were tied to the traditional neo-corporate model, with precedents in the Uruguayan system, complementing the more novel deliberative spaces (Variable 8). 8
Policy Formulation by the Uruguayan Left
Frente Amplio administrations have displayed a governance style that combines aspects of the party democracy of the past—facilitated by the fact that they enjoyed majorities in the legislature—–with old and new modes of participation in the policy process. These modes of incorporation and coordination of interests functioned not as alternatives but as complements to the traditional pattern of liberal pluralism and partisan protagonism with a citizen base. The means of blending the social-democratic component with the representative-democratic component were neither uniform nor linear, and neither were the outcomes, but they did avoid the “simulation pacts” that Peters (2004) anticipated in warning about the risks of civil society’s involvement’s being limited to legitimizing the objectives and strategic lines of whatever government was in power. As we have demonstrated above, the Uruguayan case during Frente Amplio administrations went well beyond merely symbolic participation.
The participatory experiments discussed in this article were characterized by a dedication to universality: rather than being limited to groupings close to the government, they drew from organized civil society as a whole. This did not, however, prevent the government from establishing informal alliances with certain organizations within this sphere that were largely representative of the popular sectors and stood for progressive change. This participatory strategy contrasted with those carried out by the traditional parties in previous years, which were firmly set in the functioning of formal government institutions, in brokering partisan interests and including negotiations vis-à-vis particular sectors of the economy and society. This is not a question of a merely strategic differentiation but rather one of the expressions of different—although not necessarily antithetical—concepts of democracy.
Without detracting from the positive aspects of this form of policy making, we should point out some limitations. First, although the policy areas touched on by the participatory model were many and significant, they imply some selectivity in the array of state interventions. Inclusive frameworks were mainly applied to welfare policies—as in the four cases described— but not to other very sensitive ones such as macroeconomic or taxation policy, where the traditional strategy, with exclusive prominence of the authorities and professional expertise of high-level public administrators, continued to prevail. Two distinct scenarios of policy making were thus established: one more horizontal and deliberative and the other more vertical and technocratic. In addition, it was difficult to coordinate the decisions that society actors agreed upon with those required in the politico-institutional sphere. On several occasions the Frente Amplio had to choose between making commitments with civil society actors and reaching political agreements with opposition politicians. The preferred strategy, bolstered by its majority in the legislature, was the former. Thus the opportunities for legitimation of certain reforms were broadened, although their survival in the future will depend on an ongoing favorable correlation of forces between political parties. Lastly, there was a question about whether putting together policies that rest on convening extremely well-organized stakeholders rather than average citizens is always the best way to gear policies to the public interest, especially in the weaker and more dispersed sectors, which tend to lack institutional and organizational voices to represent their interests (Franco Chuaire and Scartascini, 2014; Friberg-Fernros and Karlsson, 2014).
In terms of the Latin American panorama, the Frente Amplio experience does not fit well into any of the above-mentioned guidelines proposed by Levitsky and Roberts (2011) and complemented by Goldfrank (2011). It does not coincide with the liberal democratic model because of the importance given to participation in public decision making, and even when the variants of societal corporatism are included the experience discussed in this article displays several nonconforming features. 9 In the first place, the number of sectoral arenas and the array of actors convened go far beyond the customary patterns of corporatism. This is evident in the inclusion of users of health care services and, most notable, of individual citizens in the education debate, making the presence of the civic-social sector significant. In the second place, the government did not limit itself to facilitating exchange among organizations and obtaining reliable commitments from them but also set its own agenda and priorities, which it promoted with different emphases in each case. In the third place, the government was much more transparent in its procedures and outcomes than the usual corporatist practices in that it opened the process to a larger group of organizations and promoted the visibility of the proceedings through the broadcasting of the negotiations and the resolutions adopted. Lastly, the outcomes in the various participatory arenas were translated into legislative proposals that went beyond merely combining the interests of the participating corporate actors.
But while the Uruguayan experience does not correspond to liberal democracy or the more orthodox neo-corporate templates, neither does it constitute a model of radical democracy. For the most part, it did not follow a pure framework of deliberative democracy in the Habermasian sense, given that the key social players were intermediate organizations and did not represent all citizens and that the logic of interests was preponderant. If the archetype of radical democracy is the municipal practice of participatory budgets, it is clear that this model of unrestricted peer participation in the form of assemblies does not correspond to that carried out by the Frente Amplio at the national level. 10
And certainly the Uruguayan case cannot be likened to the variants classified as plebiscitary or as populist. Not even the opposition parties (with the exception of some individual leaders) have accused the Frente Amplio of populism. However, they have criticized several of its policies or strategies that they consider related to those that characterize populist governments, among them the use of its majority to pass laws not negotiated with the other parties, the important role granted to social organizations and especially to unions in developing public policies, the increase in public spending, the expansion and continuation of social programs intended for persons in situations of poverty in the form of noncontributory benefits, and, particularly in reference to José Mujica’s administration, his style of governing, method of communication, and personal leadership (not always partisan), which liken him to populist leaders in nonsubstantive respects. Furthermore, the opposition has questioned several Frente Amplio policies because of the suspicion of cronyism, among them the management of the state’s health care services, subsidies to workers’ cooperatives at recovered companies, and Mujica’s housing plan for the popular sectors. Despite these critiques, the opposition parties in Uruguay did not practice unfair opposition to the government or establish a political line of confrontation, at least during the first two Frente Amplio terms (2005–2015). As of its third consecutive administration, installed in 2015, the opposition discourse began to harden and to focus on accusations of corruption and poor management of public resources that are being processed through investigative commissions and criminal justice charges. Increasingly, its claims seem to line up with the conservative offensive recorded against the other progressive governments in the Southern Cone (Argentina and Brazil) now replaced by center-right or right-wing parties. While not questioning the legitimacy of the national government, they have cast doubt on the current institutional framework, with the upcoming 2019 national elections as the target for resolving these conflicts. 11
Having ruled out the idea that the Uruguayan experience can be accurately categorized as a traditional liberal democracy or as a radical or populist model, we must conclude that it is a hybrid that exhibits historically established traits of the Uruguayan political system but also the pioneering stamp of the party that attained national power. The formats chosen speak as much to its desire for change as to its concern that proposed reforms enjoy relatively broad support in the population as a whole, beyond the social base of the Frente Amplio, and are sustainable over time. They also express the delicate balances that exist at the core of the governing coalition between sectors favoring more radical transformations and decidedly more incrementalist positions. It is therefore not surprising that the participatory paradigm has made little headway with influential sectors, especially in managing the macroeconomic variables, as mentioned above.
With its continuities and disruptions, its achievements and limitations, the experience of the governing Uruguayan left demonstrates the existence of an unusual national project of linkage between representative and participatory democracy that is not adequately reflected in the widely accepted classifications. This is not a call for the development of ostensibly more precise alternative taxonomies, nor does it put this national case forward as a model to be imitated in other latitudes. On the contrary, it is a more modest effort to substantiate the need for in-depth studies that take adequate note of the institutional precedents in the political cultures and the historical ups and downs of each country in approaching an appropriate understanding of the different types of leftist governments in the region.
Supplemental Material
DS_10.1177_0094582X18807488 – Supplemental material for The Governing Left in Uruguay (2005–2015): A Participatory Democratic Experiment
Supplemental material, DS_10.1177_0094582X18807488 for The Governing Left in Uruguay (2005–2015): A Participatory Democratic Experiment by Nicolás Bentancur and José Miguel Busquets in Latin American Perspectives
Footnotes
Notes
Nicolás Bentancur and José Miguel Busquets are both members of the faculty at the Instituto de Ciencia Política of the Universidad de la República in Montevideo. Victoria J. Furio is a translator living in New York City.
References
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