Revolutionizing Repertoires ─ The Rise of Populist Mobilization in Peru

Politicians and political parties are for the most part limited by habit?they recycle tried-and-true strategies, draw on models from the past, and mimic others in the present. But there are rare moments when political practitioners break with routine and try something new. Jansen’s case study sets out to examine what happens when the repertoire available to political actors is revolutionized. Fully 15 years before the coming to power in Argentina of Juan Peron, the case of Peru in 1931 demonstrates the effectiveness of a Latin American style of populist mobilization. Over the course of seven months of intense campaigning, the two prominent candidates, Victor Raul Haya de la Torre and Luis M. Sanchez Cerro, shook off established routine to develop novel political practices. Both candidates sought to mobilize previously marginalized groups of urban and rural workers and both developed similar strategies and tactics. In order to incorporate previously excluded supporters, they relied on grassroots organizing, staged unprecedentedly large and contentious mass rallies, and each charismatic candidate developed his own brand of populist rhetoric that stressed the common plight and moral virtues of ordinary Peruvians. These practices were radically new, but they eventually became routinized and transformed the political repertoire available to Latin American politicians. To understand this transformation, Jansen draws on American pragmatism, focusing his analysis on situated political innovation. This requires an approach that moves beyond conventional assumptions that follow from a politician’s social position, material interests, identity, or ideological orientation. Pragmatism instead focuses on habit, perception, experiential learning, situated action, and?crucially?creativity. What other approaches are forced to hand off to the residual category, ?contingency,” pragmatism can explain with micro-level patterns in the immediate context of action. Revolutionizing Repertoires provides a new approach for explaining repertoire change and demonstrates the utility of pragmatist perspectives for historical research on politics.

Robert S. Jansen is assistant professor of sociology at the University of Michigan.