From the title of this book, one might have expected a systematic exploration of the ways in which clientelism has operated in Colombian politics, with appropriate illustrative material based on case studies. This volume, however, provides nothing of the sort.
The book does two quite different, and more-or-less unconnected, things. Three introductory chapters and part of the conclusion provide a summary of, and commentary on, salient points from the literature on clientelism in politics, both in general and with specific application to Colombia. Sandwiched between the two commentaries on clientelism at the beginning and end of the book are nine chapters, making up two-thirds of the volume, that provide a summary of the chief political trends in successive Colombian presidential administrations, from the beginning of the National Front (1958) through the election of Ernesto Samper Pizano in 1994. In these descriptive chapters on the presidential administrations, clientelism enters very little into the discussion. Indeed, it totally disappears until it becomes a theme discussed by leading Colombian politicians in the late 1970s, and therefore is mentioned as part of the author’s political narrative.
The body of the work, the descriptive chapters on the politics of the presidential administrations, represents a continuation of Martz’s earlier narrative treatment of Colombian politics from ca. 1945 to 1960 (Colombia: A Contemporary Political Survey, 1962). In the book currently under review, however, he uses a different format. For each presidential administration he first discusses the political situation at the time, the administration’s salient policies, and its approaches to social and political control; he then discusses electoral politics leading up to the next administration. The result is a quite competent, but also conventional, summary political history, focusing on the national government, national party leaders, and party factions at the national level, with virtually no attention to the departmental or local levels, where clientelism is most palpable. These chapters then do not do much to advance the discussion of clientelism in Colombian politics. They do serve, nonetheless, as a capable introductory survey of Colombian politics at the national level, from 1958 through 1994. I myself found it useful in this respect.
The briefer discussions of clientelism at the beginning and the end of the book derive heavily both from Colombian political scientists (particularly Francisco Leal Buitrago) and their North American counterparts. The central thesis holds that chains of party-based clientelist relations, from the national to the local level, have been superseded by the emergence of a national state, which now serves as the chief dispenser of patronage. The governments of the National Front, beginning with that of Alberto Lieras Camargo (1958-62), progressively isolated economic policy from partisan influences by concentrating policymaking in the hands of técnicos in the executive branch and limiting the role of congress in making economic decisions. Consequently, government largesse was increasingly distributed directly by the central government rather than through the two traditional parties. Party patronage was further weakened by the fact that the National Front required a biparty “consensus over major national issues,” effectively weakening the party linkages “from national to regional and local levels” (p. 310). Further (and here I am recasting the argument somewhat in my own terms), the National Front, by mandating fixed shares of government positions for the two traditional parties, had the intended effect of reducing the intensity of party allegiances but the unintended effect of increasing factional intraparty competition for party shares. The result was a general alienation from partisan politics, reflected in massive abstention from elections. Consequently, allegiance is now primarily to individual presidential candidates, rather than to parties, as likely sources of patronage.
This argument, more complex and nuanced than I have been able to state it above, is an important way of understanding political change in Colombia over the past 50 years. In this volume, however, it is simply asserted, with some reference to the conclusions of local studies by other scholars but without providing illustrations or substantive documentation of political behavior at the national or local levels. Given the purported theme of this volume, one would have thought such documentation would have been the principal task of the body of the book.
