The systematic investigation of societal “elites” promises to enrich scholarly knowledge about several classic themes in Latin American history: social mobility, group conflict, relationships between the leaders and the led. Pioneer works on Argentina by Darío Canton and José Luis de Imaz have already made distinguished contributions to this growing field. As a result, one starts this book with understandably high hopes—and meets with painful disappointment.
Professor Fernández seeks to analyze the backgrounds, careers, and attitudes of Argentina’s national political elite during the administrations of Arturo Frondizi (1958-62) and Arturo Illia (1963-66). To explore recruitment patterns, he presents collective biographical data on the “executive,” “gubernatorial,” and “legislative” sectors under the two presidents. To examine elite attitudes, particularly the presence of nationalism, Fernández relies upon a questionnaire administered in 1966. Throughout the whole discussion, he purports to assess the elite’s potential for promoting “democracy” and “modernization.”
Some readers might detect an excessively ethnocentric bias in Fernández’ framework. Others might wonder how any book on politics in post-Peronist Argentina could virtually ignore labor unions and the armed forces. But aside from problems of conceptualization and data-gathering, always difficult in studies of this kind, it is the execution of this work which leaves so much to be desired. Four introductory chapters, which take up more than half the text, mainly provide a superficial and sometimes erroneous summary of Argentine political development. The treatment of “elite recruitment” depends upon six basic tables about professional experience, regional representation, education, age, occupation, and previous political careers. The data have considerable intrinsic interest, although Fernández merely lists composite characteristics of the executive, gubernatorial, and legislative groups. He never once cross-tabulates the variables (for instance, he does not relate the social backgrounds of Senators and Deputies to political party, but lumps them all together in the “legislative sector”). Consequently his comparisons between the Frondizi and Illia regimes are flimsy, and he gives up an excellent opportunity to identify modal leadership types. He does not test any hypothesis by statistical association. He does not make rigorous comparisons between the elite and the national population, a failure which prompts him to conclude that the competition of political leadership—about half university-educated, two-thirds in professional or business occupations (pp. 67, 70-71, 73-77)—provided a “relatively proportionate representation” (p. 108) for Argentine society at large!
The chapter on attitudes is equally unimpressive. Here Fernández offers five tables, simply fisting collective responses and neglecting to measure the statistical “significance” or reliability of the findings for his grand total of 68 politicians. To this reviewer’s untrained eye, most questions in the survey look ambiguous, one-sided, or downright heavy-handed (sample propositions, with choice of “always,” “in emergency only,” “never,” “no opinion”: “Violent means should be used to overthrow governments,” “Labor unions should play an important role in the political life of the country” [Table VIII, p. 94]). In many cases the reply can only reflect the phrasing of the question. Unfortunately Fernández does not categorize his respondents by party, age, or any other variable, so he cannot explore or explain possible ideological differences within the elite. It seems doubtful that a general consensus on such a vague survey really demonstrates the existence of “cohesive nationalism” among the country’s leading officeholders (p. 103).
A weak book has grown out of a sound idea on an important subject. We still need a careful study of the recent Argentine political elite.
