Artículo



Dados n. 18 Rio de Janeiro 1978

Autoritarismo e Decadência Política: Um Estudo de Caso

Salinas, Julio Abufalia

Resumen

This paper analyzes the causes for the emergence, in recent years, of authoritarian patterns of political rule in Uruguay. The author proposes that one of the keys to understanding the collapse of Uruguay's liberal-pluralistic model is to be found in the breakdown of the network of alliances between urban and rural sectors, and that signs of this breakdown were present in the political changes of the 1950s. During that period, the mobilization of rural sectors, and the concurrent stagnation of the "industrialistic economic model", brought major changes in the type of political participation which had prevailed in the country over the preceding decades. An obvious discontinuity was thus created between the State's operational bases and social demands for political representation. To gain a fuller understanding of these political changes, the author focusses on the definitional power of the conllict-anticipating mechanisms implemented by the country's ruling political elites. The weight of these mechanisms began to be felt in Uruguay in 1930, with the State's active participation in absorbing the labor force and applying voting legislation which assumed the joint participation of traditional political groups in the exercise of power. Systematic distribution of public power and expansion of the state bureaucracy were the tools devised for coping with social conflict in Uruguay's political process. The political power activated devices geared at assimilating discontinuities as they emerged. However, these devices, while satisfactory at first, eventually altered the profile of the Uruguayan State and the nature of its links with civil society. ln the end, they created a bottleneck in the system and brought about an institutional crisis.

Texto completo

Autoritarismo e Decadência Política: Um Estudo de Caso