Until recently, there were very few scholarly studies of Latin American political parties in print. Such studies as are now available, as Professor Wayland-Smith notes at the outset of this book, have usually stressed the historical development of the party in question and have concentrated on partisan activities at the national level.
In two of his early chapters Wayland-Smith does outline both the rise of the Christian Democratic Party (PDC) in Chile, and its doctrinal foundations. But the author’s intention has not been to give us a complete or nation-wide portrait of the PDC. Instead, he has focused on the nature and role of the party in three communes of the city of Santiago. In addition, while he has made extensive use of party documents and similar sources, much of his analysis is based on a written questionnaire submitted to samples of PDC members in the several communes, as well as on personal interviews and apparently extensive observation of party meetings and similar activities. Both the study’s concentration on the local level, and the extent and nature of its empirical data, are relative innovations in the study of Latin American political parties.
The author’s central purpose is to examine the similarities and differences in the way in which Christian Democratic ideology is interpreted and applied by the party organization in three communes of varying environment and social composition. Wayland-Smith concludes that, although “an overarching purposive core” unites both the individual members of the PDC and the three communal parties he has studied, the general goals and symbols of the party are viewed somewhat differently. The primary distinction is that in the lower-class commune and among lower class party members the emphasis is on tangible benefits to the community. Middle-class members, on the other hand, are more “ideological;” they tend to be attracted to the party by its broad national goals. In addition, males, the better educated, and the younger members of the party tend to be more ideological than do the opposite categories.
Bonuses for the reader include a breakdown of the social composition of the PDC in the three communes (pointing up the PDC as a coalition between the middle class and the relatively better-educated and more prosperous elements of the lower class), as well as a good bibliography and the author’s questionnaire printed as an appendix. Weaknesses include an inconvenient and at times confusing system of pagination, and the inescapable circumstance that most of the material was gathered during early 1966, at a time when Chile’s Christian Democrats were near their peak in strength and optimism. A more important fault may be the author’s failure to point out the possible corporatist implications of the PDC’s stress on the creation of mass organizations at the grass-roots level (cf. James Petras, Politics and Social Forces in Chilean Development).
Wayland-Smith is careful to point up the limitations of his data, based as they are on only three of Chile’s nearly 300 communes and on not wholly scientific samples of party membership. The study is also limited in other ways. There are virtually no comparative referents to other political systems or to other Chilean parties. And, as noted, the book does little to place the PDC within the context of national political events.
But the argument is consistent and cogent. This is a solid and in some ways innovative case study of the relationship between ideology, incentives, and organization in a major Latin American political party. As such it makes a real contribution to the literature.
