Resumen

CAMPUSANO, Marina Noemí. “The quitter gets no prize”: an analysis of the rewards for political militancy in the trajectories of young people in political party organizations in Chaco, Argentina. Intersticios sociales [online]. 2022, n.24, pp.393-419.  Epub 26-Sep-2022. ISSN 2007-4964.

This study inquires into the rewards that political militancy generated in the development of young people’s trajectories in political party organizations in the city of Resistencia (Chaco, Argentina) in the period 2012-2017. We present partial results of a broader project that applied a qualitative approach to reconstruct trajectories of militancy from the actors’ perspectives. Our first task was to identify what it was that they actually received, how they received it, and how it made them feel as material or symbolic rewards. We understood that the rewards operated in a circuit that defined what the organized parties could offer their members and outlined a horizon of expectations and aspirations. Our study contributes to conceiving rewards as elements that make it possible to unravel processes of professionalization that result from political participation, processes that can have distinct destinations, from a career in the heights of political power to lower-impact grassroots activism. It also reveals the types of rewards most closely-linked to the reproduction of the division of political labor inside political parties. The essay thus constitutes a contribution to the study of such important topics as young people in politics, political militancy, and party structures; that is, to our knowledge of political dynamics in sub-national contexts.

Palabras llave : commitment; rewards; political activism; professionalization; activist career.

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