The Industry of Change | profile

An interesting classic is the fictitious obsession that left-wing intellectuals practice every time they try to find arguments that confirm their opinions regarding vulnerable groups and voting for statements that are considered right-wing. In short, they would be descriptions of an error. The poor should vote for them or for their friendly candidates who would be the good guys, but due to issues of unsettled or deceived conscience, they would end up voting for their own destroyers. The job of these enlightened intellectuals would be to report the problem and help solve it. However, only one condition is necessary for this entire framework to be possible, and that is the possibility of being able to make this diagnosis on the condition that they do not confirm the information. If they saw the available data, they would realize that in reality the poor do not vote as they believe, but that this exercise seems so disappointing that it is better not to do it, thus guaranteeing the survival of the false consciousness, but within them.

Elections can be compared to support the idea of ​​this question. The election that brought Lula da Silva back to the presidency of Brazil highlighted areas for him that differed markedly from those of Jair Bolsonaro, particularly from the center of the country to the eastern region, where income levels are lower than those with the most votes for his rival. The election that brought López Obrador to the presidency in Mexico in 2018 revealed a similar territorial voting logic, since its strongest areas were those with the lowest socioeconomic levels, such as the south of the country or some parts of the north, while the PAN, one of its rivals, performed better in communities with higher-income households throughout the center of the country. Argentina has just gone through a new electoral process that has once again shown that the low-income segments of the population, still in the majority, continue to prefer Peronist options, while Milei’s party has, as a result, become an almost exact replica of what Together for Change looked like in 2015 and 2017.

For a significant portion of the analysis, numerical data appears to be things of anecdotal relevance or just a passing entertainment on election night. The historiographical literature also does not take part in this regard. A very relevant and high-profile production has produced content related to electoral processes, in which there are numerous descriptions of debates about the way of voting (secret or public), criteria for the inclusion or exclusion of citizens, the increase or limitation of participation, the role of political parties, ideological influences, public events and the increasing complexity of unions or popular mobilizations, the definitions of lists and leadership and even electoral campaigns, all of which are at the same time left in a very marginal or non-existent place. the analysis of the results. This decompensation of effort, where something is left over and the other is completely missing, has had an impact and some of its consequences are still felt today. Historian Paula Alonso is an interesting exception (and not the only one), but it turns out to be a less common case.

At some point in its history, Argentine sociology became dominated by numerical questions under the influence of Gino Germani and his long list of outstanding students. His promotion was possible because he questioned the so-called “Argentine essayism,” which, in his opinion, analyzed social reality and electoral processes on the basis of non-scientific criteria. Alejandro Blanco has written extensively about both his rise and his marginalization, and it is likely that the discipline has not yet recovered from the latter. In a bookstore you can buy something on the topic of “electoral history” with the guarantee of its scarcity, and if something similar exists, with the probable invalidity of the tables or values. Instead, they are online buying and selling sites where, if you know how to search, you can find old analyzes in forgotten books and find tables or graphs that show something similar to quantitative analysis. Mora y Araujo’s The Peronist Vote (1981) or Darío Cantón’s Elections and Political Parties in Argentina (1973) are only loose examples of an almost abandoned editorial effort. Their replacement is the publishing industry of the supposed right-wing electorate or what can otherwise be described as the return of essayism.

The consequences of the spread of these dominant modes of description are interesting. It is not only about the conviction of the analysts, but also about the influence of these analysts on those who manage the electoral processes, since together they guarantee an interesting result, which consists in ensuring absolute ignorance of the reasons for their victory or defeat. Today, election experts are supposedly the designers of campaigns, whose relationship to data is even more marginal than that of historians. Congresses in their field reveal success stories without being able to prove that everything that happened is thanks to them, although they ensure their influence. In many cases, private research has replaced study questions with public dissemination questions. It is not about finding the answer to a social problem, but about finding the attractive topic so that the result can be published in some mass media. Politics revolves around all of this and consumes it daily.

The obsession with the so-called “culture war” is based on assumptions with similar characteristics, since voting would not be a numerical problem influenced by socio-demographic conditions, but rather a sequence of possible individual considerations. For Agustín Laje, it is necessary to get into the head of each individual to bring about a change that has yet to be established. For his rivals who write that the poor vote right, this would already be achieved. The September results in Buenos Aires province proved some right; those from October to others. What unites both diagnoses is the distance from the attempt at a comparative analysis of the elections, which guarantees their respective continuity in leading reference roles.

All of this forgets an old sociological concern for the continued existence of society. Anyone who looks at the world in this way assumes that there is an imminent chance of its mutation, as if the social order and its complexity had no stable structure and its components were sequential victims, subject to the malign influences of political communication. Election results tend to be fairly similar from one election to the next, even when this does not appear to be the case, and basic social behaviors change less after elections than assumed, and culture, an old concern of Parsons and others, continues to play a role in unifying parts that should not be ignored. The change, whatever would take place, is rather a semantics of change, a description in the form of entertainment and wonder that never lets us see what at least similarly follows a not-so-distant moment. But that might not justify so many jobs, it’s better to leave it aside. Likewise, this is a change, a fiction industry that claims to help change something that always remains the same.

*Sociologist.