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Union Election Data as a Political Indicator

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2022

Edward C. Epstein
Edward C. Epstein*
Affiliation:
University of Utah
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In recent years, a considerable effort has been made in political science to facilitate cross-national research of a truly comparative nature. One common strategy is to assemble statistical data from as many nations as possible that then can serve as quantitative indicators for a variety of political, social, and economic phenomena. The use of quantitative operationalizations allows for statistical testing of appropriate hypotheses. While the goals of such data collection are most certainly praiseworthy, a variety of questions can and ought to be raised about the quality of much of the data made so readily available to today's researchers. My purpose here is to illustrate the risks involved in the unwary use of one such “quantitative indicator”—trade union electoral statistics. What is true for the election data is also true in varying degrees for other types of statistical information from Latin America.

Type
Research Reports and Notes
Information
Latin American Research Review , Volume 11 , Issue 2 , 1976 , pp. 160 - 167
Copyright
Copyright © 1976 by the University of Texas Press

Footnotes

*

The author would like to thank the University of Utah Research Fund for providing financial support for the preparation of this article.

References

Notes

1. Several of the most widely known collections of such “indicators” are Charles Taylor and Michael Hudson, World Handbook of Political and Social Indicators (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972); Arthur Banks, Cross-Polity Time-Series Data (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1971); and Arthur Banks and Robert Textor, A Cross-Polity Survey (Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press, 1963). A first edition of the Taylor and Hudson work by Bruce Russett, et al., appeared in 1964.

2. For a partial listing on the unions of three Latin American countries, see Kenneth Erickson, Patrick Peppe, and Hobart Spalding, “Research on the Urban Working Class and Organized Labor in Argentina, Brazil, and Chile: What is Left to be Done?” LARR 9, no. 2 (Summer 1974):115-42.

3. The Central Única de Trabajadores was the principal Chilean trade union confederation between 1953 and 1973. The opposition Christian Democrats suggested that the small increase in their minority share of the vote in the 1972 elections indicated workers' dissatisfaction with the Popular Unity government.

4. The victory of aprista slates in all haciendas except one (where a Marxist ticket won) showed the total failure of the Velasco military regime to discredit its bitter enemy among the sugar workers. Members of the APRA party had been feuding with the Peruvian military since 1931.

5. The SITRAC and SITRAM stand for Sindicato de Trabajadores de Concord and Sindicato de Trabajadores de Materfer, respectively, the two large FIAT plants in Córdoba. The militant union leadership that came to power in 1970 was to play a major role one year later in the so-called viborazo where thousands of disgruntled workers and students seized temporary control of the city of Córdoba, thereby helping to oust the Levingston military government from national power.

6. See my “Politicization and Income Redistribution in Argentina: The Case of the Peronist Worker,” Economic Development and Cultural Change 23, no. 4 (July 1975): 622-29.

7. For use of the term “power contender,” see Charles Anderson, Political and Economic Change in Latin America (Princeton: Van Nostrand, 1967), p. 90.

8. Gilbert Merkx presents a provocative account of the recent role of Argentine labor in 1975 in “Argentina: Peronism and Power,” Monthly Review 27, no. 8 (January 1976): 38-51.

9. Some of the same information on the political orientation of individual unions, although much less systematically presented than in DIL, can be found in recent labor histories like Santiago Senén González, El sindicalismo después de Perón (Buenos Aires: Galerna, 1971); Santiago Senén González, Breve historia del sindicalismo argentino (Buenos Aires: Alzamor, 1975); Roberto Carri, Sindicatos y poder en la Argentina (Buenos Aires: Sudestada, 1967); and Ruben Rotondaro, Realidad y cambio en el sindicalismo (Buenos Aires: Pleamar, 1971).

10. Nucleamentos sindicales (Buenos Aires: Ediciones DIL, 1972), pp. 17-23.

11. A detailed account of the internal CGT divisions in the 1957-72 period will be offered in another article.

12. See DIL, Informes 64 (May 1965): 29; 65 (June 1965): 35; and 73 (March 1966): 27.

13. Juan Carlos Torre, El proceso político interno de los sindicatos en Argentina (Buenos Aires: Documento de Trabajo 89, Centro de Investigaciones Sociales, Instituto Torcuato Di Tella, 1974), pp. 28-30.

14. Torre, El proceso, p. 13. Torre here is excluding cases of overt government intervention in the electoral process.