In recent years, thousands of men and women have been organizing, participating, debating, and interacting within their community or neighborhood, outlining a picture whose contours express an undeniable transformation in the practice and consciousness of the urban popular sectors of Lima. Social praxis that, of course, does not involve all of the poor in the city, but it does involve a large part of them.
The aim of the following essay is to investigate the relationship between this new political dynamic and its expression in the consciousness of the urban popular classes of Lima, during the last decade. To do this, we will refer to analyzing the changes that result from the electoral participation of the poor in the capital city.
We are aware that we will focus on only a limited aspect of political participation, which is the electoral one, acknowledging that the former encompasses aspects of social dynamics as diverse as the creation of organizations, the management of institutions, various political militancies, or the different forms of pressure or questioning of the State.
Assuming these limitations, we must clarify that what we present below are features of the political tendencies of Peruvian society and, as such, we cannot consider them as static manifestations, let alone fully developed phenomena, if the term is applicable in the social sciences.
We also want to show that there is no causal relationship between poverty and radical voting, but that for such a relationship to be established, other elements must intervene. In the Peruvian case, these elements were—without being the only ones—the urban social movement and political parties.
For the observation of the political participation of urban popular classes, we have considered their members to be urban workers, employees, independent or informal workers, and domestic workers.
For this, we will take the electoral vote of the poorest districts of the province of Lima, in the six electoral processes of the period 1978-1986. In order to establish a comparative temporal axis, we will initially show what happened in the sixties. Subsequently, we will offer an explanation of the changes that occurred, interweaving the residents’ own impressions with reference to the historical process.
What has been the extent of electoral participation of Lima’s popular sectors, a city where a third of the national electorate is concentrated? What have been their political preferences and the nature of these throughout the continuous electoral processes? Is this electoral profile the same or has it changed in recent decades?
Publishing: Centro de Estudios y Promoción del Desarrollo – DESCO | Year: 1989 | Pages: 46 | Download PDF