Is there alternation of political parties or alternation of elites? An analysis of the mayors in the five GBA districts with the greatest party alternation from 1999 to 2019

Abstract

The province of Buenos Aires (PBA) and, particularly, the Greater Buenos Aires (GBA) are territories of transcendental importance for Argentine politics. Their political elites both at provincial and local levels gain a leading role that deserves more attention in academic studies. In parallel, these are political players who have exhibited different characteristics and behaviors from the return to democracy in Argentina to the present and share points of contact that merit the drawing of temporal parallelisms among districts and regions [or at least based on the (South, West or North) area or (first or third) electoral section they belong to]. Thus, in this presentation, we will analyze the sociologic profiles of the GBA mayors who served in the districts with the highest party alternation in power from 1999 to 2019. Here, party alternation will refer to those electoral processes that, viewed in the long term, resulted in a change in the municipal leaders from at least three different parties or electoral fronts. Our general purpose is to systematically and comparatively explore and analyze these profiles from a subnational and sociohistorical perspective using a prosopographic method (studying variables such as their sociodemographic characteristics, their educational and occupational career paths and their social and political background). For this purpose, we will concentrate on the study of the only five cases that meet all these criteria: the mayors of Morón, Quilmes, San Martín, San Miguel, and Tigre. As it might be expected, many of these alternations are due to election defeats suffered at the hands of opposite forces. However, a significant number of them correspond to cases of electoral survival of the same political force or mayor that momentarily opt to change their political label.