Electoral Aspects of Peronism, 1946-1954

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Electoral Aspects of Peronism, 1946-1954 Author(s): Walter Little Source: Journal of Interamerican Studies and World Affairs, Vol. 15, No. 3 (Aug., 1973), pp. 267

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WALTER LITTLE Department of Political Theory and Institutions University of Liverpool Liverpool, United Kingdom

ELECTORAL ASPECTS OFPERONISM, 1946-1954

Although it is of importance for any understanding of the Peronist regime as a whole, little is known in detail about the social character of the popular support upon which the regime was based. This state of affairs is not as paradoxical as it might at first seem. In part it is a reflection of the fact that the continued political importance of the Peronist movement has meant that until recently the debate over Peronism has been polemical in nature and that opportunities for dispassionate analysis have been correspondingly restricted. For example, to apologists for Peronism, the popular support that it enjoyed is evidence merely that it represented a profound revolution in social and economic priorities which was fully understood and appreciated by the people themselves. To its detractors it is evidence of little more than the manipulation of the ignorant, corruption of the venal, and coercion of the educated. To both groups it has been a premise for further argument rather than an object worthy of study in its own right. AUTHOR'S NOTE: The author is presently Research Fellow in the Department of Politics of Glasgow University. This essay forms part of a wider enquiry into the popular politics of the Peronist era in Argentine history between 1943 and 1955. The research upon which it has been based was made possible through the courtesy of Dr. Dupuy, Sr. Iturregui, and Sr. Frechou of the Juzgado Nacional of Buenos Aires. From October 1973, the Author will have the affiliation listed above. Journal of Interamerican Studies and World Affairs, Vol. 15 No. 3, August 1973 ? 1973 Sage Publications, Inc.

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[268] JOURNAL OF INTERAMERICAN STUDIES AND WORLD AFFAIRS

The lack of a detailed understanding of the support base of Peronism is also a reflection of the fact that such dispassionate analysis as does exist has not been comprehensive. In general the themes of Peron himself, of the labor unions, and of global socioeconomic developments with their associated notions of charisma, mobilization, and modernization are most often encountered. These studies have been useful for descriptive analysis of the ways in which popular support functioned within the Peronist system of government and, to a lesser extent, for the development of models for the relationship between Peronism and social and economic modernization. Nevertheless, they have been inadequate as a means of understanding the structural characteristic of Peronist sentiment at the level of the people at large.

This task may be approached more fruitfully through electoral analysis, which has several descriptive advantages over other modes of enquiry. In the first place the emphasis upon the electorate as a whole means that it comes closest of all data sources to the notion of the "people at large." Second, it allows serial analysis from one election to the next to be made and thus gives some idea of the general evolution of popular attitudes towards the regime. Finally, it enables the regional intensity of sentiment to be measured, and thus provides a factual basis for ecological comparison. In particular, it allows correlation to be made between objective social and economic data and subjective political behavior (voting), and thus offers a more precise understanding of the relationship that Peronist sentiment bore to the then-prevailing pattern of social stratification.

Although their possible value as a source of information has been widely recognized, it has generally been forgotten that national elections also played their part in the evolution of Peronism as a political system. This neglect reflects the fact that they have always been regarded as the mere windowdressing of already established political facts rather than as an autonomous category of action. There is much truth in this view since the authoritarian nature of the Peronist regime always meant that


Little / ELECTORAL ASPECTS OF PERONISM, 1946-1954 [269]

opposition was stifled and that national elections never played a fully sovereign role. However, the disinterest in the electoral process that its wholesale acceptance has fostered has been unfortunate. In the first place, for all those who shared in the activities of neither state, party, nor unions, voting represented maximum involvement with the Peronist system. It is, therefore, of some interest to study the process of electoral mobilization since it involved precisely that social periphery that is unrepresented in more aggregated sources of information. Furthermore, it is clear that electoral success was central to the legitimation process. Both Peronist governments spent a great deal of time and energy on the problems posed by elections, and it is reasonable to assume that some understanding of why this fact should have been the case will also cast light upon Peronist politics in general.

The two aspects of national elections outlined above-as information source and as specific activity-are discussed below under four principal headings. The first consists of an outline of the problems encountered and the methods used in analyzing electoral data. The second describes the support base of Peronism as it was reflected in the pattern of the popular vote between 1946 and 1954 and examines its relationship to prevailing patterns of social stratification. The third discusses the relationship between national elections and the Peronist regime, while the final section summarizes the views previously arrived at.

Problems and Methods of Analysis

Throughout this essay two main spatial levels have been borne in mind: that of Argentina as a whole and that of the federal capital in particular. At the level of the country as a whole, analysis has been based upon data drawn from either the national or departmental levels. These respectively represent the highest and lowest levels of administrative and electoral aggregation within Argentina. Although the intermediate level



of the province is the most frequently encountered unit in regional political analysis, it is a clumsy unit of measurement and has not been used in this paper. National and departmental levels have been used instead since they allow a degree of real generalization and differentiation. Although the national territories were either fully provincialized or at least enfranchized just prior to the 1951 election, the absence of data for 1946 and 1948 had prevented them from being considered in the general discussion of voting patterns between 1946 and 1954.

With regard to the federal capital, there are also problems in selecting an adequate measuring rod. The equivalent of the department in the federal capital is the circunscription (cir- cunscripcion). Owing to the density of population, however, the circunscription lacks the discriminatory power of the department. For this reason the smaller and ecologically much more homogeneous ward (circuito) has been used as the basis for analysis. I

The data upon which the essay has been based were drawn from the results of the four national elections that took place between 1946 and 1954. No local or partial elections have been used. The national elections were those of February 1946, December 1948, November 1951, and April 1954. Some problems of comparability arose owing to the fact that these elections were not for identical offices and that complete returns were not always available. The 1946 and 1951 elections were across-the-board congressional and presidential elections and are therefore strictly comparable. The 1948 election was for delegates to the Constitutional Convention of 1949 and may be regarded as approximately "congressional" in character. The 1954 elections were for congressional office in some jurisdic- tions and for national vice-president. However, although the election results for 1948 and 1954 are not strictly comparable with those for 1946 and 1951, the fortunate sequence in which they were held has meant that a highly consistent pattern does emerge.

Finally, the information drawn from these national elections may be regarded as fairly reliable. Of course, there was a good



deal of government-inspired electoral orchestration, but this manipulation was largely preelectoral in character. Indeed, it was almost universally recognized at the time that electoral fraud in the more traditional, polling day sense was rare. The massive popularity of the Peronist regime and the manipulation of electoral norms prior to the election meant that traditional methods of determining the outcome had become largely redundant. This fact is of great importance because preelectoral manipulation by the government can be accurately assessed and, if necessary, discounted. In this way a quantified yet accurate picture may be obtained.

The Support Base of Peronism

The national pattern of Peronist and non-Peronist voting is illustrated by Table 1. If this pattern of relative and absolute expansion in the Peronist vote is expressed graphically, it becomes clear that it fell into three distinct stages. As Figure I illustrates, between 1946 and 1948, a modest absolute growth was registered in the Peronist vote along with a noticeable decline in the share of the non-Peronist vote. Between 1948 anid 195 1, a startling growth in the absolute and relative levels of the Peronist vote was recorded. Finally, between 1951 aind 1954,

TABLE 1 PERONIST AND NON-PERONIST VOTING 1946-1954a

Male Votes Female Votes Total Votes Noni- Noni- Noni-

Years Perontist Peroniist Peroniist Peroniist Peroniist Peronist

1946 1,488 1,280 - - 1,488 1,280 1948 1,728 867 - - 1,728 867 1951 2,304 1,411 2,442 1,315 4,745 2,726 1954 2,407 1,648 2,571 1,298 4,978 2,766

a. Figtures are to the nearest 000. No specific sources are givenl for the statistical material presented in this essay since the data has been aggregated in mlost cases fromi maniy sources. The main sources used are Canitoni (1968), La Naci6n (1946-1954), La Prensa (1946-1954), Republica Argenitina (1954, 1952, 1951a, 1951b, 1951c, 1948, 1946a, 1946b).



Millions of Votes

5

Total Peronist 4 Votes

Female Peronist Total Non- Votes Peronist Votes

Male Peronist '00 2 Votes -- Male Non-Peronist Votes

21 /9= Female Non-Peronist Votes

1946 1948 1951 1954

Figure 1: PERONIST AND NON-PERONIST VOTING, 1946-1954

there occurred only slight absolute growth and a relative decline in the rate of growth of the Peronist vote. The picture that thus emerges is one of early consolidation, followed by rapid expansion followed by yet further consolidation. This growth pattern of the Peronist vote was accompanied throughout by the relative displacement of other political groupings.

When the popular vote for 1946 is examined at departmental level,2 it is clear that there were large regional variations in the intensity of Peronist sentiment. For example the Peronists carried most of the departments of Jujuy, Salta, Tucuman, Catamarca, San Luis, and Santiago del Estero as well as much of southern Santa Fe, Entre Rios and Mendoza, northwestern Buenos Aires, and the urban periphery of the federal capital. Within the federal capital itself a similar pattern obtained with strong support for Peronism being concentrated largely towards the periphery of the city in areas such as La Boca, Nueva Pompeya, Velez Sairsfield and San Bernardo. Opposition to Peronism was correspondingly concentrated in south Buenos Aires, La Rioja, Cordoba, northern Santa Fe, Mendoza, and



Corrientes, and in the case of the federal capital, in districts such as Belgrano, Barrio Norte, and Flores. Thus at both the national and federal levels the Peronists tended to occupy the geographic periphery, and the opposition the more central areas.

It is also clear from a consideration of later departmental results that although the general pattern of 1946 did endure, the Peronist vote also underwent considerable expansion over time. Thus by 1948 the opposition parties that had carried 158 of the 378 departments and circunscriptions in 1946 were able to hold on to only 14 of them. As might be expected, this erosion of support reflected the initial distribution of opposition strength, being most marked in Mendoza and La Rioja and least evident in parts of Cordoba and the Province of Buenos Aires.3 By 1954 this pattern had become thoroughly consoli- dated,4 the Peronists gaining less than 50 percent of the popular vote in only 17 departments (one in Cordoba, six in the federal capital, and ten in the Province of Buenos Aires). In 67 departments (mostly in the Province of Buenos Aires, Cordoba, and Santa Fe) they gained between 50 percent and 60 percent of the vote, in 72 others between 60 percent and 67 percent (mostly in Cordoba, Entre Rfos, Corrientes, and the Province of Buenos Aires) while in the remaining 222 departments (mostly in the western and northwestern provinces) they gained more than 67 percent.

The overall Peronist vote responded to two related yet distinct tendencies. On the one hand, as its evolution between 1946 and 1951 indicates, it was capable of an astounding degree of expansion. At the same time, however, as the leveling of its rate of expansion between 1951 and 1954 indicates, its ability to expand its support base was finite. This position reflected both its dependence for support upon precisely those popular strata that had not previously taken part in national elections (and which, despite their great numerical importance, were nevertheless not wholly dominant within Argentine society), and the assurance of virtually total opposition from all other strata. This dual tendency towards structural limitation and


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short-term expansion in the Peronist vote is discussed in the remainder of this section and in the section dealing with the relationships between the Peronist vote and the working class, and the electoral process and the Peronist governments, respectively.

With regard to the country at large beyond Greater Buenos Aires and the large cities of the interior, the variations over time in the Peronist vote may be attributed to the fact that the returns for 1946 were in many respects atypical of the period as a whole. In particular, the fact that many areas in the interior were won by the opposition in 1946 may be attributed to residual political loyalties since the opposition parties were those that had previously controlled these areas. Moreover, only after the Peronists had gained power were they able to fully deploy the resources of the state in order to penetrate the countryside at large. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the opposition was unable to retain its hold over these areas precisely because it had never adequately represented their interests.

Although it is true that Peronism made most headway in previously conservative-dominated, highly rural areas charac- terized by great social inequalities, the geographic variation in Peronist sentiment is not susceptible to simple explanation (for confirmation of this impression, see Smith, 1972). In particular, the hard core areas of opposition in the Province of Buenos Aires and Cordoba are difficult to account for simply in terms of socioeconomic structure. It would seem in these cases that popular response was determined by overriding local loyalties that were able to withstand Peronist pressure. In particular the homogeneity of local opposition elites (in areas whose relative wealth had permitted the emergence of a privileged but also a numerous and-initer pares-egalitarian elite) contrasts strongly with the disintegration that occurred elsewhere. These excep- tions apart, however, it is important to emphasize that the overwhelming majority of rural departments were solidly Peronist in sympathy and that support for Peronism was by no means restricted to urban areas.


Little / ELECTORAL ASPECTS OF PERONISM, 1946-1954 (275]

In the case of the urban areas, however, regional variation in the intensity of electoral support for Peronism may be attributed primarily to the influence of the prevailing pattern of social stratification. For example the federal capital offers striking evidence of the extent to which Peronism was strongest in the most solidly proletarian areas and weakest in the most middle and upper class areas. In the case of the federal capital, rather more discrimination than is usual is possible since the city electoral registers may be used as a data source for the 1951 and 1954 elections. This discrimination has allowed the use of the ecological method of comparing voting behavior with social structure. The electoral registers give the occupation of the voter according to the way in which he classified himself at the time of registration. This point is especially important since it means that the data reflect the social values and self-image of the voter rather than administrative convenience. Six wards were selected on a semirandom basis across the city as a whole so that they reflected the spectrum of voting behavior. The percentage of the Peronist vote in these wards ranged from around 30 percent to more than 75 percent.5 The social structure of the wards was derived from a sevenfold, occupation-based, class division. The seven socioeconomic categories were independent upper class (large landowners and the like), independent middle class (largely liberal professions), students, commercial middle class (mostly retailers), dependent middle class (mostly public and commercial employees), skilled and semiskilled workers, and unskilled workers. Ranking correlations between the voting patterns and social structures of these wards were then calculated.6 These correlations are set forth in Table 2.

These correlations are, for the most part, strikingly high; and although ecological correlation is not causal measurement, it seems clear that the relationship between the Peronist vote and the prevailing pattern of social stratification was even more marked than has commonly been supposed.7 It has always been recognized that Peronism was most strongly supported by the least privileged, but this examination would go further in



TABLE 2 SOCIAL STRUCTURE AND PERONIST VOTING, FEDERAL CAPITAL,

1951, 1954, MALE

Social Categories 1951 1954 Independent upper class -0.69 -0.69 Independent middle class -0.90 -1.00 Students -0.82 -0.82 Commercial middle class +0.83 +0.97 Dependent middle class -0.42 -0.38 Skilled and semiskilled workers +0.55 +0.55 Unskilled workers +0.94 +0.94

suggesting that at least in large urban areas, there was a close and virtually invariate relationship between position on the social ladder and political attitude towards Peronism, and that the popular support base of Peronism was restricted almost entirely to the working class.8 This view is further endorsed by the pattern of growth in the Peronist vote which mobilized latent, working-class support between 1946 and 1951, but which then leveled off as it was unable to penetrate beyond into the middle strata.

National Elections and the Peronist Regime

Despite its finite nature, however, the expansion of the Peronist support base is of some interest since it contributed to the growing authoritarianism of Peronism; to the development of its populistic doctrine; and ultimately, to its survival as a political movement after its failure as a government. In particular, since it was largely the result of the policies of the regime itself, it cast light upon the kinds of political calculations then prevalent. Government policy contributed to the growth of the Peronist vote in two main areas: the growth in electoral participation and the manipulation of electoral norms.

The enormous growth in the number of people exercising their right to vote in the Peronist period has already been examined. This growth reflected two developments: the growth



in the number of legally enfranchized people and the growth of interest in voting. Both were reflections of conscious policy on the part of the Peronists who were well aware that they would bring in support from the popular strata and other marginal groups that had not previously participated in elections.

The expansion of the electorate in this period was, in particular, a reflection of the enfranchisement of women by the Peronists. This action was of great advantage to them since women were more strongly oriented in support of Peronism than were men. For example, in 1954 the Peronist percentage of the male vote averaged 60.69, that of the female vote 65.23. The importance of this kind of difference is shown by the fact that in the federal capital in 1954 the female votq tipped the balance in favor of the Peronists in no less than 42 wards, some 20 percent of the total.

The expansion of the electorate was also geographic in nature. In 1951 the ex-territories of Chaco and La Pampa were provincialized and enfranchised while the other national territories (Formosa, Misiones, Neuquen, Rio Negro, Chubut, Santa Cruz, and Tierra del Fuego) were given the right to vote in presidential elections. In the 1951 election the Peronist vote in these newly enfranchised areas equaled 73 percent compared with some 69 percent for the rest of the country. The Peronist calculation that such enfranchisement would be to their advantage was thus fully vindicated.

Finally the expansion of the electorate was a reflection of the increasing polarization of the electorate and of the higher turn-out on polling day which it engendered.9 The polarization of the electoral struggle between the Peronists and the Radicals led to the virtual elimination of third parties (from 13.5 percent of the vote in 1946 to 3.33 percent in 1954) and was of additional advantage to the Peronists since not all of their opponents could bring themselves to support the Radicals. At the same time it served to rally loyalists to the Peronist cause and thus achieved the double aim of neutralizing some of the most conscious elements of the opposition and arousing the interest of those of its supporters who would not have otherwise bothered to vote.



In addition to encouraging the growth of the gross electorate and of electoral participation, the Peronist governments also mobilized any groups that they felt would support them through the manipulation of electoral norms. For example, the enfranchisement of the noncommissioned officers of the armed forces (Ley 13,250) in September 1948 was calculated to be of electoral advantage. The most notable case of manipulation of this sort was the extension of the franchise to police officials and employees by Ley 14,292, shortly before the 1954 elections. This move was patently electoralist in intent. In 1954, for example, ward 129 of the federal capital-the location of the federal police headquarters-returned an abnormally strong Peronist vote, and the electoral register shows that police employees were registered at their place of work rather than at their homes and had thus packed the electoral district. A similar situation obtained in ward 133-the location of the central post office.

The Peronists also orchestrated elections through the alter- ation of election procedures. A classic illustration of this fact was the introduction of direct popular election for the office of president (Decree 17,765 of September 1951) just prior to the 1951 election. The aggregation of the presidential electoral district to cover the country as a whole allowed the Peronists to compensate for their weak areas through their overall majority. The same decree also abolished the old system of the incomplete list whereby minority parties were guaranteed one third of the offices to be filled. This system of minority representation was replaced by a winner-take-all system for election to Congress. Moreover, the election of national deputies was established on the basis of circunscriptions whose limits were to be defined by the government. This power allowed for gerrymandering on a staggering scale. The clearest example of the kind of gerrymandering that occurred in 1951 and 1954 is that of the federal capital.1 0 Figure 2 illustrates the grotesque extent to which the circunscriptions were reorganized in order to maintain control over the city.

Finally the Peronist governments used their administrative



Figure 2: THE GERRYMANDERING OF CIRCUNSCRIPTIONS IN THE FEDERAL CAPITAL, 1946-1954

power to influence the interpretation of electoral norms and procedures. This was a particular source of grievance to the Radicals. Complaining of the conduct of the 1954 election, they cited the suddenness with which the elections were called, the government monopoly over the means of electoral propa- ganda, the use of official pressure on citizens, and irregularities in the electoral act as evidence of the kind of defraudation practiced by the Peronists. This sort of governmental mal- practice was hardly new in Argentina, but it is clear that under Peronism it reached unprecedented proportions.

The impact of the policies pursued by the Peronist regime was considerable. The policies served to increase the Peronist



percentage of the popular vote and further legitimated Peronism in their own eyes and in those of their supporters. The policies also helped demoralize the opposition and give the Peronist movement a reputation for invulnerability at the polls. Above all, they enabled the Peronists to reach out to a variety of sectors that did not participate in the routine Peronist system and thus lay the basis for their widespread electoral appeal that has subsequently proved so important.

Summary

It is apparent in the first place that, contrary to much opinion, popular support for the Peronist regime was not generally in decline during its latter years. It is true that the pattern of the Peronist vote would seem to indicate that the high point of Peronist popularity was reached around 1948-1949 and that a relative decline set in thereafter. There has been some tendency to impute disillusionment with the economic performance of the Peronist regime to this decline in the growth of the Peronist vote. At the level of the country as a whole, this impression is somewhat misleading since the growth of the Peronist vote was limited by the size of the electorate, and the relative decline was largely the result of the exhaustion of supplies of new recruits to the electoral system. In the case of the federal capital where the decline was especially marked, however, it is possible that there was growing popular disillusionment with the Peronist regime. It is interesting to note that Peronist sentiment developed quickly in the federal capital but also declined quickly, in contrast to the provincial pattern of slower development and greater endurance. This difference may be attributed to the fact that opposition parties remained strongest in the federal capital and that something also remained of its tradition of skeptical, consumer politics.

It is also clear that the elements of coercion and corruption in the popular support enjoyed by Peronism have been exaggerated. It is true-as the decline in Peronist voting strength


Little / ELECTORAL ASPECTS OF PERONISM, 1946-1954 [2811

since 1955 shows-that they were always present and that the Peronists were more than ready to stoop to underhanded means in order to ensure a majority. Nevertheless it is probable that even without the manipulation of electoral norms by the government, the Peronists would have retained their popular majority. Indeed, it would seem that they dominated Argentine politics between 1946 and 1954 to an even greater extent than has commonly been supposed. Moreover, the survival of Peronism as the electorally most powerful movement in Argentine politics would seem to indicate that most support was as freely given as it was fervently held.

Furthermore, it would seem that the electoral process played a special part in the political integration of the popular strata during the Peronist era. Until 1946 the Peronist coalition had been a functional alliance between Peron as secretary of labor, certain political party rumps, and the labor unions. After 1946 the unions continued to be the most effective representatives of the people, but they were no longer the only channel through which the regime could be endorsed. In particular, popular participation in national elections encouraged the polarization of old attitudes and, rather more importantly, the politicization of new groups. The distinction between the roles played by the labor unions and by national elections is an important one. Voting in national elections was the only mode of participation open to those groups among the lower echelons of Argentine society whose integration into the Peronist system was beyond the competence of the labor unions. These groups comprised all those who had been defrauded and disenfranchised, or simply subpolitical in attitude prior to the Peronist era: women, the rural poor, the population of the national territories, and the nonunionized urban lumpenproletariat. There is little advantage in speculating about the role that Evita Peron might have played in the female preference for Peronism or about the charismatic appeal of Peron for the urban lumpen. The preference for Peronism can be accounted for more simply in terms of the fact that previous party loyalties among the lumpenproletariat were low and that any regime that had enfranchised and mobilized



them in the way that the Peronists did would probably have received their support.

Finally, it is clear that although Peronism received support from a variety of different elite groups it was almost exclusively dependent for its popular support upon the urban and rural working classes. However, although the working class has always been the largest single body of opinion in Argentina, it has never constituted a clear majority of the electorate. This limitation has been clearly demonstrated since 1955, for Peronism has repeatedly shown itself powerful enough to provoke military intervention yet insufficiently powerful to do anything to protect itself. Indeed, until recently its massive hold over the hearts and minds of the Argentine working class has helped to limit its appeal to other groups in the electorate whose support might have given them a majority. Clearly, then, if its popular character has been the fundamental source of Peronist strength and a reference point for Peronist policy, it has also been a source of structural weakness and strategic ambiguity.

NOTES

1. In 1954 the circunscriptions of the federal capital varied in size from 30,278 to 258,038 electors. At the same time the wards ranged in size from around 2,500 to approximately 30,000.

2. For maps giving the countrywide pattern of Peronist voting at departmental and circunscription levels, see Little (1971: 153, 154, 157-160). For the data on which these were based, see the series of electoral statistics deposited at the Center for Latin American Studies, Cambridge.

3. Some idea of the intensity of this change can be conveyed by citing representative increases in the percentages of the popular vote gained by the Peronists which allowed them to carry departments previously held by the opposition. Thus, in the department of Gral. Lamadrid (Province of Buenos Aires) the Peronist percentage increased from 47 to 62 percent, in Rio Cuarto (Cordoba) from 47 to 55 percent, in Santa Rosa (Mendoza) from 43 to 81 percent, and in Gral. Lavalle (La Rioja) from 43 to 89 percent.

4. By 1954 the popular enthusiasm for the Peronist cause had lost a good deal of its effervescenice anid for that reasoni the results for this year constitute a particularly good index of the overall patterni of the Peronist vote in the period 1946 to 1954.



5. The six wards analysed were numbers 10, 11 14. 15, 68, and 204. 6. Using Spearman's Coefficient

p=l sEFd~2)

n3 - 1

It need hardly be emphasized that occupational stratification is being used here simply as an indirect measure of social stratification.

7. Within the federal capital it might at first seem that the category of commercial middle class is an exception to this rule. When it is appreciated, however, that this group comprised small shopkeepers rather than a national bourgeoisie of domestic industrialists, then the positive correlation becomes understandable in terms of economic advantage and social pressure from its clients and patrons.

8. This view is somewhat at variance with that of Smith (1972: 58) who declares that his finding "thoroughly obliterates all fanciful hopes for a simple one factor socioeconomic explanation of the Peronist vote. El Lider did not draw support merely from urban areas, working class districts, counties with lots of young voters, internal migrants or unemployed men. Whatever else the Peronist Movement might have been, it was socially complex." His finding consists of uniformly low correlations between a variety of socioeconomic variables and the Peronist vote in 1946, despite his use of multiple regression analysis. This state of affairs, however, may reflect the fact that the level of data input (published results of the 1946 census) was insufficiently differentiated to detect significant relationships. The data used in this essay were derived from unaggregated electoral registers and from unpublished tables of the 1947 Census which give more information than those published. This difference in specificity of data-along with the fact that four elections were used to compute the Peronist vote rather than just one-accounts for the differences between the correlations presented here and those of Smith.

9. In 1936 the turn-out of voters was 73.44 percent, in 1937 76.16 percent, in 1946 83.30 percent, in 1948 74.20 percent, in 1951 87.95 percent, and in 1954 86.00 percent.

10. The number of circunscriptions in the federal capital varied from 20 in 1946 to 28 in 1951 to 14 in 1954. Had the original division been maintained, the Peronists would have lost 6 circunscriptions in 1954 (5, 6. 7, 11, 19, and 20) and would have come close to losing 4 more (9, 10. 13, 14). Thanks to the gerrymandering, they held all of them.

REFERENCES

CANTON, D. (1968) "Materiales para el estudio de la sociologia politica en la Argentina." 2 vols. Buenos Aires: Instituto Torcuato Di Tella.

LITTLE, W. (1971) "Political integration in Peronist Argentina. Ph.D. dissertation. Cambridge University.

La Nacion (1946-1954) Buenos Aires.



La Prensa (1946-1954) Buenos Aires. Republica Argentina (1954, 1951c, 1948, 1946b). "Actas." Buenos Aires: Juzgado

Nacional. - (1952) "Resefia electoral estad'stico-graifico, 1946-52." Buenos Aires: Minis-

terio de Asuntos Politicos. -- (195la) "Confirmacion electoral de la voluntad justicialista del pueblo

Argentino." Buenos Aires: Ministerio del Interior. - (195 1b) "Graficos electorales, 1946-51." Buenos Aires.

--- (1946a) "Las fuerzas armadas restituyen el imperio de la soberania popular. Las elecciones generales de 1946." Vol. II. Buenos Aires: Ministerio del Interior, Subsecretaria de Informaciones.

SMITH, P. H. (1972) "The social base of Peronism." Hispanic Amer. Hist. Rev. 52 (February): 55-73.

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Issue Table of ContentsJournal of Inter-American Studies and World Affairs, Vol. 15, No. 3 (Aug., 1973), pp. 265-392Front Matter [pp. 265-374]Electoral Aspects of Peronism, 1946-1954 [pp. 267-284]The Concept of the Caribbean in the Latin American Policy of the United States [pp. 285-307]Obstacles to Labor Absorption in a Developing Economy: Colombia, a Case in Point [pp. 309-333]Errata: Venezuela's Land Reform: Progess and Change [p. 333]The Merchant Elite and the Development of Brazil: The Case of Bahia during the Empire [pp. 335-353]The Political Role of the Dominican Armed Forces: A Note on the 1963 Overthrow of Juan Bosch and on the 1965 Dominican "Revolution" [pp. 355-361]Review EssayReview: Regional Image and Social Change in Northeast Brazil [pp. 363-373]Review: Dissecting the Peruvian Military [pp. 375-382]

Book ReviewReview: untitled [pp. 383-385]

Books Received [pp. 386-392]Back Matter

Documents

Electoral Aspects of Peronism, 1946-1954