14 - ELECTORAL REFORM AND STABILITY IN URUGUAY (Nam)

ELECTORAL REFORM AND STABILITY IN URUGUAY

Jeffrey Cason

Jeffrey Cason is associate professor of political science and dean of international programs at Middlebury College in Vermont. He is coau-thor (with Christopher Barrett) of Overseas Research: A Practical Guide

(1997), coeditor (with Michael Carter and Frederic Zimmerman) of

Development at a Crossroads: Paths to Sustainability After the Neoliberal Revolution (1998), and coeditor (with Sunder Ramaswamy) of Democ-racy and Development: New Perspectives on an Old Debate (2003). This essay originally appeared in the April 2000 issue of the Journal of Democracy.

In November 1999, Uruguay held its fourth consecutive national elec-tions since the demise of its military regime in 1985. In so doing, Uruguayans reaffirmed their strong commitment to democratic political rules, while at the same time adjusting to a set of constitutional reforms that profoundly altered the electoral system. One of the more important reforms instituted a runoff election if no presidential candidate receives an absolute majority in the first round. As expected, a runoff was neces-sary, and the election was won by Jorge Batlle of the Colorado Party, who had finished second in the first round. Because of the new constitu-tional rules, Batlle ran in alliance in the runoff with his traditional political rivals to defeat a surprisingly strong challenge from Tabaré Vázquez, the candidate of a leftist coalition. These new electoral rules were seen as a herald of further change to come, but as Uruguayans remind outsiders, change occurs only gradually in this nation of 3.2 million.

The 1999 elections also showed that Uruguay is much less “risk-prone” than it was even a few years ago. Juan Linz and Alfred Stepan argued in 1996 that Uruguay, though a consolidated democracy, re-mained risk-prone for a variety of reasons, including economic stagnation and an electoral system that combined with party fragmenta-tion and presidentialism to create “legislative impasse and short-lived

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policy coalitions.”1 Fortunately, however, the constitutional reforms that were approved in late 1996 and inaugurated with the 1999 elec-tions have removed a substantial amount of this risk, both by making the electoral process more straightforward and by providing incentives for the Left to move to the center. Indeed, even if the Left had won this election, it is highly unlikely that democracy would have been threat-ened. Thus Uruguay remains quite exceptional, in political terms, in Latin America: It is a consolidated and robust democracy in a region prone to instability.

The “Switzerland of Latin America”

Before its authoritarian interlude from 1973 to 1985, Uruguay was perhaps the most stable democracy in Latin America. After a turbulent nineteenth century, a military truce was concluded at the beginning of the twentieth century between the two main political parties, the Partido Colorado and the Partido Nacional (also known as the Blanco party).2 Soon thereafter, Uruguay developed a welfare state—the first in Latin America—under the leadership of Colorado politician José Batlle y Ordó~nez (a great-uncle of the winner of the 1999 election) that led to the country being dubbed the “Switzerland of Latin America.” As Charles Guy Gillespie notes, however, this label was not really fitting: “With respect to the rights accorded women, labor, and other groups, as well as the provision of welfare benefits and state intervention in the process of economic growth, Uruguay was far ahead of [Switzerland].”3 Uruguay’s income distribution was remarkably equal in the Latin American con-text, and political democracy was entrenched early in the century. Apart from a brief period of authoritarian rule in the 1930s, Uruguay seemed to have a democratic vocation; it is still the Latin American country that has lived longest under democratic regimes.4

Uruguayan democracy was buttressed by strong parties. Both the Colorado and Blanco parties were formed in the mid-nineteenth cen-tury, and each has distinct characteristics. The Colorados are generally more urban, anticlerical, and progressive, whereas the Blancos are more rural and traditional. The Colorados have dominated politics since in-dependence, ruling uninterruptedly for the first half of the twentieth century, losing control (for two terms) to the Blancos only in the 1958 elections.

By the time the Blancos assumed power, however, there was a grow-ing crisis in the Uruguayan economy. The Colorado Party’s welfare state rested on an import-substitution industrialization strategy that was quickly exhausted, given Uruguay’s small domestic market. Growth began to stagnate in the 1950s; by the 1960s, there was increasing political conflict, reflecting both ailing economy and the general po-litical ferment in Latin America after the Cuban revolution.

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This growing political and economic crisis in Uruguay was accom-panied by the rise of the political Left. Although various leftist parties were formed early in the twentieth century, it was only in the 1960s that the Left became a more important player in politics. The Left was repre-sented both by legal political parties and (from the mid-1960s on) by an urban guerrilla movement, the Tupamaros. By the late 1960s, the Tupamaros were staging increasingly bold and popular strikes on tar-gets of the traditional political establishment, in turn provoking increased military repression. The ensuing spiral of political violence ended only after the task of defeating the guerrillas was put in the hands of the military (it had been in the hands of the police until 1971). By the end of 1972, the Tupamaros were defeated militarily.

Amidst this increasing political violence from both left and right, Uruguay continued to hold elections, though it was no longer just the two traditional political parties who had strong popular support. At the beginning of the 1970s, the Left became a significant electoral force with the founding of the Frente Amplio (Broad Front, or FA) under the leadership of retired general Liber Seregni. The FA garnered just over 18 percent of the national vote in the 1971 elections, and for the first time the traditional parties saw their combined portion of the vote drop below 90 percent.

This was also the last election that Uruguay would hold for 13 years. In one of Uruguay’s political ironies, it was only after the Tupamaros had been defeated that the military decided to carry out a coup in June 1973.5 There was some initial confusion as to the direction the coup would take,6 but it quickly became obvious that the military were there to stay, even though they did not overthrow the president in office at the time, Juan María Bordaberry. Although Bordaberry remained the nominal head of the executive branch until he was forced out by the military in 1976, for all intents and purposes the military had been calling the shots ever since they dissolved Congress in June 1973.

Nonetheless, the military did feel some need to legitimate their rule, and they held a plebiscite on a new constitution in 1980, confident that they would win. Unlike Pinochet in Chile that same year, however, the Uruguayan generals lost. Thus began a transition to democracy that was consummated in 1984 with the so-called Naval Club Pact, which led to new elections (with some politicians, including Seregni, Blanco Party leader Wilson Ferreira, and Colorado politician Jorge Batlle, prohib-ited from participating) and the return to civilian rule.

Electoral Systems, Old and New

When democracy was reestablished, Uruguay returned to the elec-toral system that had been in force before the coup, which was, to say the least, unique. The most remarkable aspect of this system, referred to

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as the Double Simultaneous Vote (DSV) system, was that individual political parties were permitted to run multiple presidential candidates in the general election. The individual candidate who received the larg-est number of votes in the party that received more votes than any other party was declared the winner of the presidential election. Thus in 1971, for example, Colorado candidate Bordaberry, with only 22.8 percent of the vote, defeated Blanco candidate Wilson Ferreira, who received 26.4 percent, because the Colorados as a whole outpolled the Blancos by 41 to 40.2 percent.

In effect, this system combined the primary and the general elec-tions. It also meant, however, that voters could inadvertently contribute, through their vote for a rival candidate in the same party, to the election of a candidate that they would never have voted for directly. An obvi-ous consequence of this system was that there was a great deal of ideological heterogeneity within the traditional political parties, since there was no incentive for them to define a particular profile.

This system worked relatively efficiently while Uruguay was still basically a two-party system, but it began to break down as the Left gathered strength, particularly after the return to civilian rule in 1984. The emergence of a three-party system meant that the winner of any particular presidential election would have a relatively small percent-age of the total vote. For example, the winning candidate won only 28.3 percent of the vote in 1984 (Julio María Sanguinetti of the Colorado Party), 22.5 percent in 1989 (Luis Alberto Lacalle of the Blanco Party), and 24.5 percent in 1994 (once again, Julio María Sanguinetti).7 These relatively thin mandates called into question the legitimacy of the even-tual presidential winner.

Parliamentary elections—always held on the same day as the presi-dential contest—were also extraordinarily complicated under the old electoral rules. Voters had to cast a ballot for the same party in both the presidential and legislative contests, and legislative seats were allo-cated on the basis of strict proportional representation (PR). The legislative elections employed a DSV system as well, with each party presenting multiple (closed) lists, both for the Senate and the Chamber of Deputies. Voters simultaneously selected a party and the list of one of the party factions when voting, and each faction received seats in accordance with its share of the vote in the party. Thus, for example, if the Blanco Party, based on its share of the vote, was entitled to 30 seats in the Chamber of Deputies, and its Herrerista faction had received 40 percent of the Blanco vote, then the Herreristas would be entitled to 12 seats in the Chamber. The other 18 seats would go to other factions in the Blanco Party.

Compared to the number of lists for the Chamber of Deputies, the number of Senate lists was small, since the Senate was (and still is) elected on the basis of a single national constituency. For the Chamber

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of Deputies, the constituencies are the 19 individual departments, so each party had (and still has) multiple lists in each department. In addi-tion, different lists could enter into electoral alliances with one another, accumulating votes among them. For example, if it took 20,000 votes to reach the threshold for representation in the Chamber of Deputies, three different lists that managed to get 7,000 votes each could combine to obtain a seat in the Chamber. The leaders of these lists would come to an agreement before the election regarding who would fill the seat, offer-ing deals ranging from the resignation of the initial officeholder midway through the term in favor of one of the other lists to specific agreements on distribution of state-sector jobs.

Needless to say, this system produced immense fragmentation. In 1994, for example, in an electorate of just over two million voters, the three main parties had 641 lists nationwide for the Chamber of Deputies and 79 different lists in Montevideo alone.8 Most analysts saw the sys-tem as enormously complex and confusing for voters, and the proliferation of lists reinforced clientelistic practices, particularly out-side Montevideo.

Despite these problems, however, until 1994 most politicians in the traditional parties were satisfied with the status quo. As Juan J. Linz and Alfred Stepan pointed out, “The only groups that can change this sys-tem are the Parliament and the party leaders, yet it is precisely these groups that have been the ‘winners’ with the system.”9 The system, they argued, could be changed only if there was a perception of crisis, and indeed, such a perception of crisis followed the 1994 elections. These elections had almost been won by the Left, alarming traditional party leaders, who feared not so much that the system was not working but rather that it might in fact work to the detriment of the traditional par-ties. This led Colorado and Blanco party leaders to propose a constitutional reform to head off a victory by the Left in 1999.

The reform, approved by a narrow margin in a December 1996 refer-endum, made five basic changes to the electoral system: 1) In April of each presidential election year, parties would have primaries on the same day to select a single presidential candidate for each party. 2) These presidential candidates would then face one another in a first round of voting in October of that year. (Parliamentary elections would be held on the same day as the first round of presidential elections.) 3) If no candidate won an absolute majority in that election, the top two finishers would face each other in a runoff the following month. 4) Municipal elections, which had traditionally been held on the same date as the national elections, would be held in May of the year follow-ing the presidential election. 5) In parliamentary elections, the DSV was preserved, but parties could no longer accumulate votes among differ-ent lists.10 Parties could still run multiple lists for legislative posts, but the different lists could no longer give their votes to other lists. This

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last change had the effect of reducing the total number of lists for the Chamber of Deputies in the 1999 election to 425 nationally, and 33 in Montevideo.11

These constitutional changes proved quite contentious for a number of reasons. First, the traditional parties had become accustomed to ma-nipulating the complex electoral system to downplay their internal divisions; under the new system, these divisions would have sharper electoral consequences. Second, the Left viewed the changes as a way to keep it from winning the presidency, since it was clear that it was gaining on the traditional parties. There was a widespread assumption that the Left would probably gain a plurality of the vote in a single-round election in 1999 and that introducing a second round would allow the traditional parties to unite against it in the runoff. Neverthe-less, some on the Left supported the reform, since many of the changes—like requiring each party to choose a single presidential can-didate—might work to the Left’s advantage. In addition, requiring that the eventual president win a runoff election would provide the winner with greater popular legitimacy, which is especially important when the president’s party is unlikely to have an absolute majority in parlia-ment. Finally, separating municipal from national elections meant that parties would have to compete with one another at the local level shortly after the national elections, which could make electoral alliances more difficult to forge.

The 1999 Campaign

Because of the changes outlined above, political parties faced a new and untested environment in 1999, and they did not necessarily know how to confront it. In addition, the new electoral rules came into play at a moment when the electorate seemed neatly divided into thirds among the three main parties. The 1994 election had been extremely tight; the Table on page 161 shows the evolution of the vote for the main parties since the 1971 election and indicates the general parity among the three main political forces. Because of Uruguay’s strict PR system—and the fact that voters had to cast a party-line vote for Congress and the president—parliamentary representation closely tracked the presiden-tial vote. This parity increased uncertainty, since no party could count on making it to the second round in November.

The new electoral system challenged the traditional parties and the Left in different ways. For the traditional parties, the main difficulty was that for the first time they would now have to present a single candidate in the presidential election. Presenting multiple presidential candidates had allowed them to play down internal party divisions, and the general election had sorted out which particular force within each party was strongest.

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This new set of rules hurt the Blanco party most of all. It went through a particularly bloody primary campaign that culminated in the selec-tion of former president Luis Alberto Lacalle (1990–95) as its standard bearer. During the primary campaign, Lacalle’s chief opponent, Juan Andrés Ramírez, accused him of corruption during his period in office. After Ramírez lost the primary, he disappeared from politics until just before the first round of the presidential election, sending a signal to other Blanco voters that he did not regard the presidential candidate they had nominated as worthy of their support. Under the previous rules, this problem would not have arisen: There would have been no primary, and both Lacalle and Ramírez would have focused on getting out their own voters for the general election. In the end, this defection proved disastrous for the Blancos.

The Colorados dealt with the new circumstances much more effec-tively, as the two main challengers in the primary decided to unite behind the winner, Jorge Batlle, who was now running in his fifth presi-dential campaign. Batlle’s vice-presidential running mate was Luis Hierro, who represented the wing of the Colorado party led by outgoing president Julio María Sanguinetti (who was constitutionally prohibited from running for reelection).

The problem for the Left was different. The FA had presented a single presidential ticket ever since its founding in 1971, so this was not a novelty. Yet the fact that the constitution now called for a primary election meant that internal fissures within the party could come to the surface. Senator Danilo Astori decided to challenge the front-runner, former Montevideo mayor Tabaré Vázquez, who had been the presiden-tial candidate of the renamed Encuentro Progresista–Frente Amplio (EP-FA) in the 1994 elections. Though Astori was soundly defeated in the primary, receiving less than 20 percent of the vote, the mere fact of his challenge (and the lingering dispute between “radicals” and “mod-erates”) gave the traditional parties ammunition to use in the general election campaign.

After the candidates were chosen, the parties settled on their general election strategies. The incumbent Colorados mostly kept silent about what they would do; they represented continuismo, that is, a continua-tion of the relatively conservative economic policies of the past decade, which were attacked as “neoliberal” by Colorado opponents. The Blancos, who had been junior partners in the Colorado-led governing coalition for the last five years and had held several cabinet posts, at-tempted to distance themselves from the government, largely because of the economic recession that Uruguay was suffering during 1999. In the first nine months of the year, GDP declined by 2.5 percent. Industry was hit particularly hard, and unemployment (in the August–October period) increased from 10 percent in 1998 to 11.6 percent in 1999. This recession was largely due to the economic turmoil and the devaluation

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TABLE—URUGUAYAN ELECTION RESULTS, 1979–99*
PARTY	1971	1984	1989	1994	1999†
Colorado Party	40.9	41.2	30.3	32.5	32.8
Blanco Party	40.2	35.0	38.9	31.4	22.3
Frente Amplio	18.3	21.3	21.2	30.8	40.1

* Totals given in percentages.

† First-round results, which determined parliamentary representation.

in Brazil, Uruguay’s largest market. Finally, the EP-FA adopted an “it’s the economy, stupid” strategy. Its advertisements and rhetoric empha-sized the economic crisis, and essentially asked: “Do you want five more years of the same old policies? If you don’t, vote for the EP-FA.” The first round of elections took place on October 31. As all the opinion polls had indicated, the EP-FA came in first, with 40.1 percent of the valid votes cast.12 The Colorados followed with 32.8 percent, and the Blancos turned in a disastrous performance, their worst in the twen-tieth century, finishing with only 22.3 percent. Nuevo Espacio (New Space), a small social-democratic party, received 4.6 percent, and the

Unión Cívica got the remaining 0.2 percent.

The EP-FA’s vote totals exceeded expectations, but the Colorados beat polling estimates as well. The biggest losers in the election were the Blancos, who saw their party torn apart by the nasty primary battle and are arguably the most difficult party to pin down ideologically. While the EP-FA clearly occupies the left and center-left, and the Colo-rado Party, the right and center-right, the Blancos are much more dispersed along the ideological spectrum. When it held the presidency in 1990–95, the party generally carried out a conservative economic policy, but it is not united behind such an ideology. It has not only rural but also nationalist roots, and it is not easily pigeon-holed. Important figures in its past could appropriately be described as “progressive na-tionalists,” notably the late Wilson Ferreira, who was one of the most forceful opponents of military rule and was consequently barred from the 1984 presidential election by the military. The new constitutional rules imposing a single presidential candidate made the Blanco party’s life more difficult, and some of its votes drained off to the Colorado party (particularly in Montevideo) and to the EP-FA (particularly in the provinces, though to some extent in the capital as well).

One of the major effects of the constitutional reform was to move the EP-FA towards the center, since to win, it could no longer rely on its core supporters. Even before the first round, the EP-FA was moving toward the center, attempting to demonstrate moderation by promising to pay the foreign debt and not to devalue the currency and by making unmistakable noises about the need to govern in a coalition. Moving toward the center was not an easy task, given the splits within the party and some of its previously stated positions.

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Indeed, in both the first and second rounds of the election the tradi-tional parties kept pointing to these previous positions, which proved to be the Left’s Achilles’ heel. The traditional parties emphasized con-tradictory statements on the part of the Left, and accused it of harboring “intolerant,” “Marxist,” and “undemocratic” tendencies. Batlle, for ex-ample, charged that the EP-FA was trying “to disguise the philosophy behind its economic program,” asking rhetorically: “Have they changed? Have they changed because they understood that their ideas were wrong?

. . . As far as I’m concerned, they haven’t changed.”13 While it was true that the Left suffered from some internal inconsistencies with respect to its economic plan, there was little reason to question its commitment to democracy. Although during the 1960s the leftist Tupamaro guerrillas had denounced “formal” democracy and had taken up arms against it, the Left had also suffered the most from the military dictatorship from 1973 to 1985, and it had joined with the Colorado party in 1984 to ensure a stable transition to democracy.14 Nevertheless, these charges were an effective campaign tactic, and a certain Cold War rhetoric per-meated the campaign.

The Second Round

As the second electoral round unfolded, the traditional parties, as expected, joined forces to prevent an EP-FA victory. Shortly after the first round was over, the Blancos announced that they were “convok-ing” their voters to vote for the Colorado candidate, Batlle. The Nuevo Espacio left its voters “free” to choose whichever candidate they pre-ferred, but leading party figures (including presidential candidate Rafael Michelini) said that they would vote for Vázquez. After the first round, some observers claimed that Uruguay was on the verge of a new two-party system, though it is too early to arrive at such a conclusion. Clearly, however, the electoral map had changed.

One of the oddities of the second-round campaign was that, unlike in the first round, political campaigning was largely carried out via televi-sion and radio; there were few large political rallies, although these had long been a staple of Uruguayan politics. On the part of the Left, this appears to have been the result of a strategy of avoiding “incidents” that could be used to paint them as “intolerant” or “violent.” Batlle’s campaign, on the other hand, feared that it would be quite difficult to hold political rallies that would join the forces of the Colorados and Blancos, given their historical rivalry. The Batlle campaign played down the candidate’s party affiliation, calling for a “unity” campaign that would bring the country together. Both candidates campaigned heavily in the provinces, where the majority of undecided voters lived (only 18 percent of voters in Montevideo had voted for a candidate other than the two finalists, while in the interior 32 percent had done so), and spent

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their time giving local press conferences and meeting with local politi-cal leaders.

The EP-FA’s goal was to gain the support of local Blanco leaders who were unhappy with the general trend of their party. EP-FA strate-gists hoped to exploit three weaknesses. First, they thought that many Blanco voters would find it difficult to support Batlle, a traditional rival. Second, they knew that some Blanco leaders were unhappy with the conservative economic policy advocated by the national party lead-ership. (The Lacalle government had carried out orthodox economic policies during its time in power in the first half of the 1990s, undercut-ting those Blancos who preferred a more redistributionist economic policy.) Finally, the EP-FA hoped to exploit the fact that Blancos might find it difficult to vote for the Colorados, whom they would be oppos-ing six months later, and the EP-FA held out the possibility of electoral alliances with “progressive” Blanco leaders in these elections.

In the end, however, these efforts reaped few dividends; the second round, instead of focusing on Uruguay’s current economic performance (which would have benefited the opposition), focused on tax policy. The Colorados took the offensive, accusing the EP-FA of intending to raise taxes, largely because of the EP-FA’s platform plank calling for a broad-based income tax. Although the EP-FA claimed that this new tax would replace or reduce other taxes (a more narrow “salary tax” and a high—14 to 23 percent—value-added tax), the Colorado attack was effective, and the EP-FA was forced onto the defensive.

In response, the EP-FA accused the Colorados of having no policy to deal with the economic crisis and suggested, in the last few days of the campaign, that the Colorado economic program concealed a “fiscal shock” that would result in increased taxes. EP-FA spokesmen argued that the policies that the Colorados had agreed to adopt as part of their agreement with the Blancos would lead to substantially higher state spending and thus created a need for higher taxes as well. The Colorados denied this, of course, and the EP-FA attack had little effect on undecided voters.

Indeed, it appears that the Left erred in being too specific about its proposed policies, and the Colorados were able to take advantage of this. The subtleties of tax policy do not come across well in a sound-bite election campaign, and it did not help that the Left sent contradictory signals on the exact content of its proposed tax reform. Its general mes-sage—a tax reform that would not increase taxes but would make the wealthier pay more—was lost in discussions of technical details that only confused the electorate, particularly the undecided voters who would determine the outcome. The Colorados were quite aware that many of these undecided voters were less educated, identified them-selves as being on the center or right politically, and were likely to be susceptible to appeals meant to convince them that their taxes would increase if the EP-FA came to power.15

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Batlle’s platform, unlike that of his opponents, was usefully vague. The general message was “No new taxes.” Batlle also devoted a large portion of his speeches and television appearances to discussing the need to keep up with technological changes in the world economy, to increase Uruguay’s exports, and to decrease foreign trade barriers in the upcoming World Trade Organization negotiations. These positions were not at all controversial, and Battle’s strategy was to stay on this mes-sage. By and large, he was quite successful.

The dynamics of the second round were profoundly different from those of the first. In the first round, with competition not only among multiple parties but (given Uruguay’s electoral system) among factions within parties, there was a great deal of electoral “noise,” as the various factions within each party focused on increasing their share of the vote. As a consequence, there was little need to focus on policy proposals. The second round, on the other hand, made this necessary, and the Colorados were much better prepared for a one-on-one confrontation. Interestingly, however, there was never a debate between the two candi-dates, despite attempts to schedule one. The Colorados saw their media strategy working quite well without one, and decided not to risk it.

The Colorados won the second round handily, 54 percent to 46 per-cent. This was a somewhat surprising result, since most of the pre-election polls had shown the candidates as more evenly matched, with the most lopsided poll showing Batlle leading Vázquez 47 to 44 percent. Most of the polls placed the candidates in a statistical dead heat, though there was a discernible trend in favor of Batlle in the waning moments of the campaign. After the election, however, it became clear that most of the voters who had declared themselves undecided or unwilling to answer were in fact planning to vote in favor of Batlle, as the pollsters pointed out after the results were in.16 This was not surprising, given that most of these voters were Blanco supporters intending to vote for their historical rivals the Colorados—something they might not be will-ing to admit to pollsters.

It is also evident that one reason why the EP-FA did not substantially boost its vote in the second round (it increased its total by just a bit over 100,000 votes, or less than 5 percent of the total) was that it had already “cannibalized” a great deal of support from the Blancos in the first round. In other words, many of the Blanco voters likely to consider voting for the Left had already done so in October. Conservative Blanco voters were almost certain to vote for Batlle, especially after the their national leadership decided to support his candidacy officially.

It thus became clear that party discipline and loyalty still matter in Uruguay, much more than they do in most other Latin American coun-tries. The Blanco leadership told their voters to vote for Batlle, and it appears that at least 80 percent of them did.17 There had been talk of a possible “rebellion” on the part of Blanco voters leading them to refuse

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to vote for Colorados,18 but by and large, these voters toed the line. If the party leadership had not recommended that they vote for the Colo-rado candidate, some Blancos might have cast blank ballots, thus helping the Vázquez candidacy. In the end, however, fewer than 2 percent of voters cast blank ballots.

A Strong Commitment to Democracy

Despite the Right’s warnings that a triumph by the Left would lead Uruguay down the Cuban road, democracy is quite safe in Uruguay. The country continues to demonstrate the highest level of commitment to democratic institutions in Latin America: Eighty-six percent of its citi-zens favor democracy over any other system (in other Latin American countries, this ranges from 75 percent in Argentina to 41 percent in Ecuador), and 64 percent of its citizens are satisfied with democracy (elsewhere in the region, this figure ranges from 45 percent in Mexico to 16 percent in Paraguay).19 There is no sign that this support is declining.

The commitment of Uruguayans to democracy is demonstrated by the solid identification of most voters of all political persuasions with political parties. Voters show an almost fetishistic addiction to polls and electoral speculations. Indeed, it is hard to find a Uruguayan who is not interested in talking about politics at election time. Most will give a rather sophisticated rendering of the possible outcomes and the strength of different factions within each political party, and they will be able to recite the number of votes that are needed to capture a seat in the Cham-ber of Deputies.

Furthermore, the 1999 elections show that Uruguay’s institutional reforms have made it less “risk-prone” in three ways. First, the introduc-tion of a second round in the presidential vote has forced the Left to move toward the center. It is true, of course, that, in order to govern, the Left would have had to move toward the center anyway, even under the old system. International factors and practical considerations would have imposed moderation in any case. The new system, however, has forced the Left to emphasize its moderation as a necessary part of its electoral strategy. This has made the Left appear less threatening, which, in turn, has increased its popular support.

Second, by reducing the number of parliamentary lists, the new elec-toral rules have created an incentive for parties—particularly the two major parties—to unify. It is no longer possible for factions to survive politically with support from a tiny slice of the electorate, as it was when different lists could combine their votes to achieve parliamentary representation. Factionalism has not been eliminated, of course, but it has been reduced.

Finally, the institutional reforms will make governance easier, since the new electoral rules require coalitions for electoral success. In the

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past, the Colorado and Blanco parties have collaborated to a greater or lesser degree in government, but often this has been an unsteady alli-ance. With the new electoral rules, the two traditional parties will work together more closely. An important psychological barrier to their co-operation has fallen, with Blanco voters for the first time having crossed party lines to vote for a Colorado candidate in the second round. As all three major parties learn from their experience with the new electoral rules, Uruguay is likely to see its three-party system take on many char-acteristics of a two-party system as it divides into two major blocs. This promises to provide greater stability and more coherent governance under the leadership of either the Left or the Right.

NOTES

I would like to thank Eric Davis, Marcelo Pereira, and Marcelo Rossal for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this article.

1. Juan J. Linz and Alfred Stepan, Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation: Southern Europe, South America, and Post-Communist Europe

(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 164.

2. See Gerardo Caetano and José Rilla, Historia Contemporánea del Uruguay: De la Colonia al Mercosur (Montevideo: Editorial Fin de Siglo, 1994), ch. 4.

3. Charles Guy Gillespie, Negotiating Democracy: Politicians and Generals in Uruguay (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 19.

4. Luis Eduardo González, Political Structures and Democracy in Uruguay

(Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1991), 4.

5. See Luis Costa Bonino, La Crisis del Sistema Político Uruguayo: Partidos Políticos y Democracia Hasta 1973 (Montevideo: Fundación de Cultura Universitaria, 1995), 241–60.

6. See Charles Guy Gillespie, Negotiating Democracy, 42–45.

7. Gerardo Caetano and José Rilla, Historia Contemporánea del Uruguay, 335– 36 and “Así Fueron las Elecciones en 1994,” La República (Montevideo), 1 November 1999, 11.

8. Felipe Monestier, “Partidos Por Dentro: La Fraccionalización de los Partidos Políticos en el Uruguay (1954–1994),” in Luis Eduardo González, Felipe Monestier, Rosaria Quierolo, and Mariana Sotelo Rico, eds., Los Partidos Políticos Uruguayos en Tiempos de Cambio (Montevideo: Fundación de Cultura Universitaria, 1999), 58.

9. Juan J. Linz and Alfred Stepan, Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation, 164.

10. See Marcelo Pereira, “El Proyecto, sus Pros y sus Contras,” Brecha (Montevideo), 5 December 1996: 2–3; Ruben Correa Freitas and Cristina Vázquez,

La Reforma Constitucional de 1997: Analisis Constitucional y Administrativo

(Montevideo: Fundación de Cultura Universitaria, 1997); and Miguel Semino, “Panorama del Nuevo Sistema Electoral,” in Carlos Mata Prates, ed., Reflexiones Sobre la Reforma Constitucional de 1996 (Montevideo: Fundación de Cultura Universitaria, 1998).

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11. “En todo el país habrá 425 listas,” El Observador (Montevideo), 5 October 1999, 5.

12. The percentages reported do not include blank and voided ballots, which made up around 2 percent of all votes cast.

13. “Batlle opinó que si Vázquez gana no sólo habrá ‘devaluación de la moneda sino también una devaluación de la democracia,’” Búsqueda (Montevideo), 7 October 1999, 7.

14. The Tupamaros also became part of the Frente Amplio coalition in 1989. See Charles Guy Gillespie, Negotiating Democracy, for an extended discussion of the role of the Left in the transition.

15. Only 35 percent of undecided voters had completed secondary school, compared with 45 percent nationwide. Ideologically, 86 percent of these unde-cided voters identified themselves as part of the Center or Right, compared with 62 percent nationally. These poll results were reported in “Batlle y Vázquez llegan iguales, aunque el Colorado es favorito,” El Observador (Montevideo), 25 No-vember 1999, 8–9.

16. “Encuestadores con actitud conservadora,” El Observador (Montevideo), 30 November 1999, 8.

17. If we assume (conservatively) that half of the Nuevo Espacio voters voted for Batlle in the second round (almost certainly, fewer than half did), then Batlle would have needed more than 80 percent of the Blanco votes to reach his vote total.

18. See Nelson Cesin, “Arriba, arriba, presidente la . . . Batlle,” Brecha (Monte-video): 12 November 1999, 2–3.

19. These Latinobarómetro poll results from 1996 are reported in Agustín Canzani, “La Década del desencanto,” El Observador (Montevideo), 20 November

1999.