This brief volume is yet one more indication of the burgeoning interest among Latin Americans in empirical social science research. Though written by a candidate for the licentiate in sociology at the National University in Bogotá, it is more nearly political science than sociology. This, too, is a departure from the not very distant past.
Approximately a third of Anita Weiss’ book is taken up with a fairly standard interpretation of Colombian political development based on secondary sources and does not purport to contribute anything new. The remainder of the work, and its more important part, has three principal objectives: 1) to depict trends in Colombian voting participation, by means of charts and graphs; 2) to do the same for partisan voting patterns; and 3) to attempt some correlations of these political phenomena with such socioeconomic data as rates of urbanization. The period covered comprises the years 1935 through 1966. Comparisons are made among departments and among communities of varying sizes and growth rates.
The author stipulates at the outset that her study is meant to be essentially descriptive. Interpretation and explanation are kept to a minimum. Few of the conclusions will surprise the student of Colombian politics. For example, she finds that electoral participation under the National Front has shown a tendency to decline, whereas in pre-1953 elections it manifested a reverse tendency. Also, the Liberal party and the ANAPO of former dictator Gustavo Rojas Pinilla have drawn much of their strength from the cities, whereas the Conservatives and Alfonso Lopez Michelsen’s former MRL have been relatively more successful in the smaller towns and rural areas. Perhaps most interesting, the author found little correlation between indices of modernization and levels of electoral participation, leading her to suggest that because of the particular traditionalist nature of the bipolar Colombian party system, the process of modernization seems not to have had very direct effects on it.
The book might have been more valuable if the author had made more attempt to explain the meaning of her data, and if she had placed less weight on the section dealing with political background, which in any case is not very effectively linked to the rest of the book. Also an occasional calculation (for example, some in the table on p. 80) appears questionable. And the generalization that those Colombian departments with higher levels of la violencia tended to be Conservative departments (p. 95) is made almost gratuitously and is based on very thin evidence.
Nonetheless, this volume is to be welcomed, first of all for having presented in tabular and graphic form certain data which are sometimes difficult or inconvenient to obtain otherwise, and for having confirmed or questioned statistically various generalizations often made about Colombian politics. Most important for the long run, the book is one more indication that Colombians are beginning to examine empirically the nature of their own politics.
