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The technocratic barrier to wage policy: theoretical insights from the Chilean Concertación
Abstract
After Latin America’s transition to a market economy in the 1980s and 1990s, most left-wing governments in the region recognised the importance of committing to macroeconomic equilibria and successfully managed to combine this goal with a wide array of social policies. Wage policy, however, proved a conflictive arena in the wake of a period of harsh austerity measures. This article provides unique insights from the experience of the Chilean Concertación governments (1990–2010) about the important role intra-left conflicts played in the advancement of collective labour rights. My working hypothesis is that the conflict between technocrats and non-technocrat political cadres in conjunction with a perceived trade-off between growth and distribution was a major determinant of wage outcomes. My analysis relies on a mixed-methods approach combining regression analysis and process tracing. Chile’s attempts at labour reform during the Concertación governments help explain how the perceived trade-off mentioned above may have unfolded not only in Latin America but also in other regions of the developing world. The novelty of this analysis lies in highlighting intra-left conflict as an important and understudied driver of labour and wage policies and elucidating the political economy of distributive strategies during the period 1990–2010.
Objetivo/contexto:
¿qué consecuencias tiene el conflicto intrapartidario sobre las reformas redistributivas de Gobiernos de izquierda? El objetivo del artículo es analizar los efectos del conflicto intrapartidario sobre la reforma de las políticas redistributivas, destacando el carácter de las fracciones -su ideología y vinculación con las bases sociales- y su papel en la negociación de las reformas.
Metodología:
consiste en un estudio de caso, que permite caracterizar los actores partidarios y su actuación en cuatro reformas de los Gobiernos del Frente Amplio de Uruguay, un partido fraccionalizado.
Conclusión:
el conflicto interno fue relevante y tuvo un efecto radicalizador o moderador, dependiendo del papel que desempeñaron las fracciones de izquierda y centro-izquierda en los procesos de reforma. La tensión surgió del imperativo de compatibilizar la adopción de políticas que redujeran la desigualdad y aseguraran el dinamismo de la economía.
Originalidad:
radica en mostrar que, en ciertos casos, las fracciones partidarias buscan atender intereses de sus bases sociales independientemente de -y en contradicción con- su posición ideológica. La política pública resultante no fue estrictamente la preferida por la fracción protagonista, sino que incluye concesiones a la fracción consentidora cuando existe un cierto equilibrio de poder entre ambas.
This paper focuses on understanding the different evolutions of business’ associational paths in post-Import Substitution Industrialization (ISI) Chile and Uruguay, offering an explanation at the crossroads of the institutional change and international trade literatures. The argument is that the different forms in which ISI institutions were transformed during the liberalisation period facilitated a greater mobility of factors to different degrees, triggering divergent enduring associational strategies on the part of business. The proliferation of narrow-based special benefits during the ISI fuelled preferences for the formation of sector-based coalitions oriented towards rent-seeking activities. Nevertheless, while ISI regulations were displaced in Chile during the military period, Uruguay followed a gradual process of layering of new rules alongside old ones. These diverging strategies, having different effect on established inter-sectoral regulatory distortions, propitiated alternative associational paths of local business.
Social Democracy in the Global Periphery focuses on social-democratic regimes in the developing world that have, to varying degrees, reconciled the needs of achieving growth through globalized markets with extensions of political, social and economic rights. The authors show that opportunities exist to achieve significant social progress, despite a global economic order that favours core industrial countries. Their findings derive from a comparative analysis of four exemplary cases: Kerala (India), Costa Rica, Mauritius and Chile (since 1990). Though unusual, the social and political conditions from which these developing-world social democracies arose are not unique; indeed, pragmatic and proactive social-democratic movements helped create these favourable conditions. The four exemplars have preserved or even improved their social achievements since neoliberalism emerged hegemonic in the 1980s. This demonstrates that certain social-democratic policies and practices - guided by a democratic developmental state - can enhance a national economy's global competitiveness. © Richard Sandbrook, Marc Edelman, Patrick Heller and Judith Teichman 2007 and Cambridge University Press, 2009.
This book is a breakthrough in the application of institutional economics to budgeting and public expenditure decisions. It is truly comparative in scope and probes beneath the formal rules of budgeting to determine how the process actually works. The studies published in this volume focus on Latin America, a region in which informality dominates public governance, but the conclusions are applicable to developing and developed countries around the world. Allen Schick Professor of Political Science University of Maryland The new political economy is long on theory and short on compelling empirical analyses. This volume is a significant contribution to what is missing: thoughtful country studies that are well motivated by a conceptual framework. Latin America is the testing ground, but the lessons are general. Both theorists, for inspiration, and practitioners, for examples of what works and what does not, will benefit from a careful reading of this volume. Long a leader in the systematic comparative analysis of Latin American economies, the IDB now turns its attention to the budget process and fiscal policy. The carefully constructed country studies employ an integrated approach that spans formal rules and actual practices to examine and explain an array of topics including executive-legislative relations, policy sustainability, quality of public provision, fit between policy and popular preferences, and the vagaries of reform. This volume is a landmark achievement and is essential reading for anyone that wants to understand how the region's economies, institutions, and politics interact to produce budget outcomes.
Although democratic regimes in Latin America since the early 1980s have been surprisingly durable, party systems in much of the region continue to experience very high levels of electoral instability. A critical juncture approach to institutional change suggests that variation in party system stability is related to the impact of market liberalization in the 1980s and 90s on the programmatic alignment -or (de)alignment- of partisan competition. Market reforms that were adopted by conservative leaders and opposed by a major leftist rival aligned party systems programmatically, allowing societal opposition to be channeled into institutionalized forms of competition that were highly stable in the post-adjustment era. By contrast, «bait-and-switch» reforms adopted by populist or leftist leaders were programmatically de-aligning for party systems, leaving them vulnerable to highly destabilizing reactive sequences in the aftermath to the reform process-including mass social protests, the demise of historic conservative parties, and the outflanking of traditional populist or leftist parties by more radical, anti-neoliberal outsiders. The political dynamics of market-based economic adjustment thus heavily conditioned the ways in which party systems would process the post-adjustment revival of populist and leftist alternatives in the region.
How should we judge competing explanatory claims in social science
research? How can we make inferences about which alternative explanations
are more convincing, in what ways, and to what degree? Case study
methods—especially methods of within-case analysis such as process tracing—
are an indispensable part of the answer to these questions (George
and Bennett 2005: chap. 10). This chapter offers an overview of process
tracing as a tool for causal inference, focusing on the study of international
relations, an area rich with examples of this approach. In contrast to the
subsequent two chapters in this volume (chaps. 11 and 12), where Freedman
and Brady analyze micro-level examples, the present chapter explores
process tracing in macro studies.
Resumen Este artículo ofrece la historia del debilitamiento del movimiento obrero en Chile en los últimos treinta años, en su rol económico, en su posición institucional, y en su poder político. Examina su trayectoria antes, durante, y después del gobierno militar de Augusto Pinochet. Analiza sus dificultades actuales estableciendo una comparación con la realidad similar por la que atraviesan muchos otros países. Pregunta si el golpe de 1973 fue la causa necesaria para generar la condición negativa que vive hoy el sindicalismo. Tras el análisis, concluye que el factor más importante para explicar los problemas actuales de los sindicatos es la evolución económica y por eso el futuro del movimiento de los trabajadores no parece auspicioso en este momento.Abstract This article offers a history during the last thirty years of the weakening of the labor movement in Chile, in its economic role, its institutional position, and its political power. This study examines that movement's trajectory before, during, and after the military government of Augusto Pinochet. This essay analyzes its current difficulties in comparison with the similar situation in many other countries. The question is asked whether the military coup of 1973 was necessary to create the negative condition of trade unionism today. The conclusion is that the evolution of the economy is the most important factor that explains the existing problems of unions. Consequently, the future of the workers' movement does not appear auspicious in this moment.
Why did Latin American governments adopt potentially costly, union-friendly labor reforms in the cost-sensitive 1980s and 1990s? The authors answer the question by exploring the relationship between trade unions and two of their most important allies: labor-backed parties at home and labor rights activists overseas. While labor-backed parties in Latin America have locked in the support of their core constituencies by adopting relatively union-friendly labor laws in an otherwise uncertain political and economic environment, labor rights activists in the United States have demonstrated their support for their Latin American allies by asking the U.S. government to treat the protection of labor rights as the price of access to the U.S. market. The former trajectory is the norm in traditionally labor-mobilizing polities, where industrialization encouraged the growth of labor-backed parties in the postwar era; the latter is more common in more labor-repressive environments, where vulnerable unions tend to look for allies overseas.
This article systematically analyses the inner circle of the coalition that governed Chile between 1990 and 2010. To this end, it takes the notion of 'technopol' and transforms it into a sociological category by clearly identifying the nature of the 'technical' and 'political' resources of 20 agents who served as ministers and undersecretaries in key government posts. Over two decades these agents provided the governing coalition, the Concertacion, with a form of collective leadership. The article thus shows that only this small group of powerful agents can be termed technopols since only they exhibited 'tech' and 'pol' resources as well as a particular form of political competence, making it possible to differentiate them from technocrats and politicians.
This essay discusses developments in the field of qualitative methodology since the publication of King, Keohane, and Verba's (KKV's) Designing Social Inquiry. Three areas of the new methodology are examined: (1) process tracing and causal-process observations; (2) set-theoretic methods and logic; and (3) strategies for combining qualitative and quantitative research. The essay argues that, in each of these areas, the new literature encompasses KKV's helpful insights while avoiding their most obvious missteps. Discussion especially focuses on contrasts between the kind of observations that are used in qualitative vs. quantitative research, differences between regression-oriented approaches and those based on logic and set theory, and new approaches for bringing out complementarities between qualitative and quantitative research. The essay concludes by discussing research frontiers in the field of qualitative methodology.
Mainwaring and Scully's concept of party system institutionalization (PSI) has greatly influenced the literature on parties and party systems. This article contributes to the “revisionist” literature on PSI by exploring the recent evolution of the concept's four dimensions in Chile. It finds that the Chilean party system is not homogenously institutionalized (as conventionally argued) but is simultaneously frozen at the elite level and increasingly disconnected from civil society. In this regard, it approaches some recent descriptions of the Brazilian party system, a prototypical example of an “inchoate” party system that has gained stability over time without developing roots in society. This article argues that the current operationalization of the concept of PSI is problematic. Not only should all four dimensions of the concept be simultaneously measured, probably through multiple indicators for each one, but their trends across time and space should also be better integrated into the concept's theoretical structure.
This book explains the contrasting strategies and their electoral fortunes of social democratic parties in the major European democracies in the 1970s and 1980s. Going beyond approaches that focus on the influence of class structure and political economic institutions, The Transformation of European Social Democracy analyses the party's competitive situation in the electoral arena, the constraints and opportunities of party organisation, and the role of ideological legacies to explain the strategic choices social democratic parties have made and the electoral results they have achieved. Far from being doomed to decline, social democracy's success depends on its ability to transform its political message and to construct new electoral coalitions.
The article presents a theory of class conflict between workers and capitalists who pursue their material interests under a form of societal organization that combines private ownership of instruments of production with representative political institutions. There exist economic and political conditions under which both classes would simultaneously choose courses of action that constitute a class compromise: workers consent to the institution of profit and capitalists to democratic institutions through which workers can effectively press claims for material gains. When these conditions hold and a compromise is in force, the role of the state consists in institutionalizing, coordinating, and enforcing the terms of a compromise that represents the preferences of workers as well as capitalists.
Why do labor unions resist economic restructuring and adjustment policies in some countries and in some economic sectors while they submit in other cases? And why do some labor leaders fashion more creative and effective roles for labor unions? This book addresses these critical questions in an in-depth elegant comparative study of Argentina, Mexico, and Venezuela in the 1990s. In each case, the book studies both the role of national confederations as well as individual unions in specific economic sectors in each country. It demonstrates the importance of the presence and nature of alliances between political parties and labor unions as well as the significance of competition between labor unions for the representation of the same set of workers. This work opens new horizons for appreciating the intellectual and practical importance of the variation in the interactions between workers, unions, political parties, and economic policies.
Process-tracing in social science is a method for studying causal mechanisms linking causes with outcomes. This enables the researcher to make strong inferences about how a cause (or set of causes) contributes to producing an outcome. Derek Beach and Rasmus Brun Pedersen introduce a refined definition of process-tracing, differentiating it into three distinct variants and explaining the applications and limitations of each. The authors develop the underlying logic of process-tracing, including how one should understand causal mechanisms and how Bayesian logic enables strong within-case inferences. They provide instructions for identifying the variant of process-tracing most appropriate for the research question at hand and a set of guidelines for each stage of the research process. © 2019 by Derek Beach and Rasmus Brun Pedersen. All rights reserved.
Throughout the twentieth century, much of the population in Latin America lacked access to social protection. Since the 1990s, however, social policy for millions of outsiders - rural, informal, and unemployed workers and dependents - has been expanded dramatically. Social Policy Expansion in Latin America shows that the critical factors driving expansion are electoral competition for the vote of outsiders and social mobilization for policy change. The balance of partisan power and the involvement of social movements in policy design explain cross-national variation in policy models, in terms of benefit levels, coverage, and civil society participation in implementation. The book draws on in-depth case studies of policy making in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Mexico over several administrations and across three policy areas: Health care, pensions, and income support. Secondary case studies illustrate how the theory applies to other developing countries.
We analyze when economists become top-level “economic policy-makers,” focusing on financial crises and the partisanship of a country’s leader. We present a new dataset of the educational and occupational background of 1200 political leaders, finance ministers, and central bank governors from 40 developed democracies from 1973 to 2010. We find that left leaders appoint economic policy-makers who are more highly trained in economics and finance ministers who are less likely to have private finance backgrounds but more likely to be former central bankers. Finance ministers appointed during financial crises are less likely to have a financial services background. A leader’s exposure to economics training is also related to appointments. This suggests one crucial mechanism for affecting economic policy is through the selection of certain types of economic policy-makers.
This article discusses developments in the field of qualitative methodology since the publication of King, Keohane, and Verba's (KKV 's) Designing Social Inquiry . Three areas of the new methodology are examined: (1) process tracing and causal-process observations; (2) methods using set theory and logic; and (3) strategies for combining qualitative and quantitative research. In each of these areas, the article argues, the new literature encompasses KKV 's helpful insights while avoiding their most obvious missteps. Discussion focuses especially on contrasts between the kind of observations that are used in qualitative versus quantitative research, differences between regression-oriented approaches and those based on set theory and logic, and new approaches for bringing out complementarities between qualitative and quantitative research. The article concludes by discussing research frontiers in the field of qualitative methodology.
Over the past twenty years, labor markets across Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries have been subject to comprehensive change, with workfare measures and the deregulation of employment protection at the heart of reforms. Although workfare and scant employment protection have long been key features of liberal welfare capitalism in the anglophone world, strict labor market recommodification is a more recent phenomenon in the welfare capitalism of Northern and Continental Europe, where coordination between the state, business, and labor allowed for greater levels of egalitarianism and social solidarity. In East Asia, state-led coordination achieved high levels of employment during the period of late industrialization (from the 1960s to 1980s), which produced low levels of social inequality despite very residual social welfare provision. But sharp increases in unemployment in the wake of the East Asian economic crisis of the late 1990s undermined the welfare-through-work system, and subsequent labor market deregulation accelerated its erosion.
As Latin American countries increasingly show symptoms of discontent with neoliberal policies and support grows for leaders opposed to neoliberalism, the Concertacion coalition that has governed Chile since 1990 constitutes an example of successful, popularly supported leftist commitment to neoliberalism. Its success has inhibited the emergence of a stronger popular challenge to neoliberalism in Chile. The Concertacion’s implementation of neoliberalism with a human face—despite shortcomings—has reduced the appeal to Chilean voters of anti-neoliberalism. The presidential election of Michelle Bachelet in early 2006 and the overwhelming electoral victory for the Concertacion in the legislative elections show that when neoliberalism is complemented by policies that promote social and economic inclusion, popular responses against neoliberalism lose appeal. Here, after examining the performance of both Ricardo Lagos and Bachelet as socialist presidents, I discuss the reasons for the Concertacion’s success. I then discuss the lessons that can be drawn by other leftist leaders in the region.
The global financial crisis has stimulated much research about the resilience of neoliberalism. However, concrete mechanisms of neoliberal resilience are yet to be elaborated. This article elaborates such mechanisms by incorporating Amable’s notion of institutional hierarchy into Mahoney and Thelen’s gradual institutional change theory. In doing this, it provides a dynamic and politically grounded framework to analyze institutional resilience. Neoliberalism is maintained over time because dominant social blocs defend those policies and institutions that they perceive as more favorable to their interests (high hierarchy institutions), while allowing degrees of freedom in those that matter less (low hierarchy institutions). Four mechanisms account for the resilience of high hierarchy institutions: marginal adjustment, solidification, accommodation and compromise. I explore the potential of this framework by comparing the trajectory of two related policy domains, exchange rates and industrial policy, in countries with a long history of neoliberal policymaking: Chile and Estonia.
The author advances the literature on the role of the state in the decentralization of industrial relations in France by providing a political economic analysis of Right- and Left-backed governments in recent decades. While both have pursued reforms to reduce regulation and to increase labor market flexibility, they have used the state apparatus in different ways to achieve these goals. The Right has reformed labor law by obtaining partial support from employers’ associations and unions—the social partners. The Left, by contrast, has relied on decentralized bargaining with the social partners because its political base would not have accepted flexibility-increasing legal reforms. The author examines critical episodes of reform in collective bargaining, unemployment insurance, and employment protection laws to show how the state has intervened in different ways depending on the political identity of the governing coalition.
Praised by some as islands of efficiency in a sea of unprofessional, politicized, and corrupt states, and criticized by others for removing wide areas of policy making from the democratic arena, technocrats have become prominent and controversial actors in Latin American politics. Nonelected state officials with advanced educations from top universities, technocrats achieve considerable autonomy from political and economic actors and exerted great influence over their countries' fates. This finding poses an intriguing paradox. These experts lack an independent base of authority, such as popular election. They also lack the tenure enjoyed by professional bureaucrats. What, then, explains the power of technocrats in democratic Latin America? And why do they enjoy and maintain greater policy influence in some areas than in others? Through an in-depth analysis of economic and health policy in Colombia from 1958 to 2011 and in Peru from 1980 to 2011, Technocracy and Democracy in Latin America answers these and other questions about experts in Latin America.
Inequality and taxation are fundamental problems of modern times. How and when can democracies tax economic elites? This book develops a theoretical framework that refines and integrates the classic concepts of business’s instrumental (political) power and structural (investment) power to explain the scope and fate of tax initiatives targeting economic elites in Latin America after economic liberalization. In Chile, business’s multiple sources of instrumental power, including cohesion and ties to right parties, kept substantial tax increases off the agenda. In Argentina, weaker business power facilitated significant reform, although specific sectors, including finance and agriculture, occasionally had instrumental and/or structural power to defend their interests. In Bolivia, popular mobilization counterbalanced the power of economic elites, who were much stronger than in Argentina but weaker than in Chile. The book’s in-depth, medium-N case analysis and close attention to policymaking processes contribute insights on business power and prospects for redistribution in unequal democracies.
Ben Schneider’s comparative historical analysis of the incorporation of business into politics in Latin America examines business organization and political activity over the last century in five of the largest and most developed countries of the region. Schneider’s explanation for why business became better organized in Chile, Colombia, and Mexico than in Argentina and Brazil, lies neither in economic characteristics of business nor broader political parameters, but rather in the cumulative effect of state policy actions.
Based on the key idea that social protection in a modern economy, both inside and outside the state, can be understood as protection of specific investments in human capital, Torben Iversen offers a systematic explanation of popular preferences for redistributive spending, the economic role of political parties and electoral systems, and labor market stratification (including gender inequality). Contrary to the popular idea that competition in the global economy undermines international differences in the level of social protection, Iversen argues that these differences are actually made possible by a high international division of labor.
This chapter shows how production regimes are complementary to welfare state regimes and political systems, perusing a number of arguments which have been developed over the period since the original publication of VoC in 2001. These complementarities serve as a background for understanding a fourth complementarity which has not been discussed before in any detail - that between CMEs and conservative systems of aggregate demand management. This is critical in understanding the quite different patterns of adjustment of CMEs and LMEs to the demand shocks of the last decade. It argues that while LMEs can use discretionary monetary and fiscal policy, CMEs find this much harder. The chapter also explains why income restraint, and hence, real exchange rate depreciation is more effective in small CMEs than large CMEs.
Millions of enfranchised people live in abject poverty in democracies around the world. Yet in representative democracies, the success or failure of political parties rests on their ability to effectively engage voters. In today's highly unequal and individualized societies, the diversity of voters along socioeconomic, religious, and other lines presents an obstacle for parties vying for electoral success. How, then, can widespread, crushing poverty still exist in stable democracies, if every citizen has a vote? Two wildly different parties, Chile's right-wing UDI and Uruguay's left-wing Frente Amplio, have achieved stunning victories in this supposedly inhospitable political landscape. They have done so by simultaneously segmenting and strategically harmonizing their linkages to distinct cross-sections of voters in each society. While that electoral strategy makes for a winning hand for parties in fragmented modern societies, it perpetuates the gross inequalities that characterize the social, political, and economic landscapes of the developing democratic world. This book develops a new analytical and conceptual framework to unveil and explain segmented representation, revealing new implications for democratic societies.
With all the talk of Latin America's turn to the left, few have noticed that there are really two lefts in the region. One has radical roots but is now open-minded and modern; the other is close-minded and stridently populist. Rather than fretting over the left's rise in general, the rest of the world should focus on fostering the former rather than the latter--because it is exactly what Latin America needs.
This volume explains why some contemporary Latin American labor-based parties adapted successfully to the challenges of neoliberalism and working class decline. It argues that loosely structured party organizations tend to be more flexible than the bureaucratic structures found in most labor-based parties. The argument is illustrated through an analysis of the Argentine (Peronist) Justicialista Party (PJ). The book shows how PJ's fluid internal structure allowed it to adapt and transform itself from a union-dominated populist party into a vehicle for carrying out radical market-oriented economic reforms.
Political parties provide a crucial link between voters and politicians. This link takes a variety of forms in democratic regimes, from the organization of political machines built around clientelistic networks to the establishment of sophisticated programmatic parties. Latin American Party Systems provides a novel theoretical argument to account for differences in the degree to which political party systems in the region were programmatically structured at the end of the twentieth century. Based on a diverse array of indicators and surveys of party legislators and public opinion, the book argues that learning and adaptation through fundamental policy innovations are the main mechanisms by which politicians build programmatic parties. Marshalling extensive evidence, the book's analysis shows the limits of alternative explanations and substantiates a sanguine view of programmatic competition, nevertheless recognizing that this form of party system organization is far from ubiquitous and enduring in Latin America. © Herbert Kitschelt, Kirk A. Hawkins, Juan Pablo Luna, Guillermo Rosas, and Elizabeth J. Zechmeister 2010.
How was Chile transformed both politically and economically during the two decades of center-left coalition (Concertación) government that followed the country's return to democracy in 1990? How did the coalition manage to hold on to power for so long—but not longer? And were its policies in fact substantially different from those that preceded them? Addressing these questions, the authors of this landmark volume critically assess the successes and failures of Concertación politics and policies in post-Pinochet Chile.
The relevance of socioeconomic class and of class-related parties for policymaking is a recurring issue in the social sciences. The perspective holds that in the present era of austerity, class-based parties once driving welfare state expansion have been superseded by powerful new interest groups of welfare-state clients capable of largely resisting retrenchment pressures emanating from postindustrial forces. We argue that retrenchment can fruitfully be analyzed as distributive conflict involving a remaking of the early postwar social contract based on the full employment welfare state, a conflict in which partisan politics and welfare-state institutions are likely to matter. Pointing to problems of conceptualization and measurement of the dependent variable in previous research, we bring in new data on the extent of retrenchment in social citizenship rights and show that the long increase in social rights has been turned into a decline and that significant retrenchment has taken place in several countries. Our analyses demonstrate that partisan politics remains significant for retrenchment also when we take account of contextual indictors, such as constitutional veto points, economic factors, and globalization.
How can policymakers circumvent obstacles to taxing economic elites? This question is critical for developing countries, especially in Latin America where strengthening tax capacity depends significantly on tapping under-taxed, highly-concentrated income and profits. Drawing on diverse literatures and extensive fieldwork, the paper identifies six strategies that facilitate enactment of modest tax increases by mobilizing popular support and/or tempering elite antagonism. Case studies from Chile, Argentina, and Bolivia illustrate the effect of these strategies on the fate of tax reform initiatives. The analysis builds theory on tax politics and yields implications for research on reform coalitions and gradual institutional change.
Why would a national political party that has been competitive for decades collapse overnight? In recent years, parties across Latin America went from being major contenders for executive office to electoral irrelevance over the course of a single electoral cycle. The author develops an explanation that highlights the impact of elite actions on voter behavior. During the 1980s and 1990s leaders across the region implemented policies that were inconsistent with their traditional party brand, provoked internal party conflicts, and formed strange-bedfellow alliances with traditional rivals. These actions diluted the brands of their parties, eroding voters' partisan attachments. Without the assured support of partisans, parties become more susceptible to retrospective voting. Voters who now had no party attachments deserted incumbent parties when they performed poorly. The author tests this interactive hypothesis using matched comparisons of six party-election cases from Argentina and Venezuela.Noam Lupu is an assistant professor and Trice Faculty Scholar in the Department of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His research interests are in comparative political behavior and political representation, with a focus on parties and partisanship, class and inequality, and redistribution. His book, Party Brands in Crisis, will be published in 2015. He can be reached at lupu@wisc.edu
This article evaluates the thesis that the relationship between national labor movements and social democratic political parties has become 'delinked' in the past two decades as a result of globalization. As globalization has undermined the political relevance of unions, social democratic parties have pursued independent, and more conservative, policies and have courted a diversity of other interest groups. This thesis is tested using a pooled time-series multiple regression analysis of 16 advanced industrialized countries spanning the period 1950-95. Globalization measured both in terms of a country's general 'openness' to the world economy and specifically in terms of international trade and direct investment abroad - is found to be positively related both to the widening success gap between unions and social democratic parties and to the growing policy conservatism of social democratic parties.
In rapid succession leftwing parties have been elected to government in some of the most important countries in the Latin American region. I challenge the view that there are two distinct variants of the left—one populist, the other social democratic—and argue that variation on the left reflects the diverse conditions under which these forces emerge and evolve. I outline common features shared by the left in Latin America; suggest how the concept of populism and analysis of social movements can help explain this variation; and show how the left's commitment to egalitarianism, balancing markets, and, in some cases, its appeals to the constituent power of the people enabled it to benefit from disillusionment with the results of neoliberalism, the poor performance of democratic governments in Latin America, and the evolving international context.
Europe has over the past century experienced an impressive increase in the number of presidential heads of state. Many of the new democracies since the mid-1970s are semi-presidential regimes that combine a popularly elected president with the traditional features of parliamentary democracy. At the same time, the frequency of the appointment of non-partisan cabinet members has risen. Cabinet appointments are the most important personnel decisions in parliamentary systems, and traditionally such appointments have been virtually monopolized by the governing political parties. Under semi-presidentialism, however, cabinet appointments may instead become a tug-of-war between a prime minister and a president with different partisan preferences. In this article the relationship between presidential power and the incidence of non-partisan cabinet appointments is examined and a game-theoretic model of cabinet appointments in parliamentary systems with a strong president is developed. In this model the prime minister has proposal power over cabinet appointments and the president an expost veto. This model yields three comparative statics predictions concerning non-partisan cabinet appointments. The incidence of such appointments should covary positively with the president's powers and negatively with the prime minister's electoral prospects. The likelihood of such appointments should also correlate in a non-intuitive way with the value that the president and the prime minister attach to non-partisan appointees. Based on these results, eight operational hypotheses are developed, which are tested against a sample of 134 European cabinets representing twelve semi-presidential and twelve purely parliamentary regimes in the 1990s. Significant empirical support is found for all three comparative statics results and for most of the specific hypotheses.
Geoffrey Garrett challenges the conventional wisdom about the domestic effects of the globalization of markets in the industrial democracies: the erosion of national autonomy and the demise of leftist alternatives to the free market. He demonstrates that globalization has strengthened the relationship between the political power of the left and organized labour and economic policies that reduce market-generated inequalities of risk and wealth. Moreover, macroeconomic outcomes in the era of global markets have been as good or better in strong left-labour regimes ('social democratic corporatism') as in other industrial countries. Pessimistic visions of the inexorable dominance of capital over labour or radical autarkic and nationalist backlashes against markets are significantly overstated. Electoral politics have not been dwarfed by market dynamics as social forces. Globalized markets have not rendered immutable the efficiency-equality trade-off.
As Latin America has moved leftward, why have the governments of Brazil, Chile, and Uruguay pursued moderate, gradual change, whereas their counterparts in Venezuela, Bolivia, and Ecuador have proceeded with considerable economic and political radicalism? Comparative analysis and case studies of Brazil and Bolivia indicate that backlash against market reform and the differential strength of party institutions do not satisfactorily explain this striking difference. Instead, natural resource rents and commodity booms and busts play a crucial role. The unearned windfalls produced by bonanzas inspire risk-acceptance among political leaders and common citizens, which can prompt ideological radicalism and political confrontation. This argument, based on a novel, cognitive-psychological microfoundation, contributes to theories of the rentier state and the "resource curse."
Business-state relations in Chile's new democracy had been relatively tension-free for the first two governments of the centre-left Concertación de Partidos por la Democracia. However, during the first two years of the third Concertación administration, under the presidency of Ricardo Lagos, the relationship soured dramatically. At first glance, an ideological shift in the ruling coalition's centre of gravity would seem to explain the change in business-state relations. During the first two governments more conservative factions of the centrist Christian Democratic party had controlled the Concertación. Lagos, on the other hand, represented the left pole of the coalition and his socialist credentials brought the long shadow of the past on his presidency. This, however is an insufficient cause, three additional conditions must also be taken into account. The first one considers changes in the institutional and economic context that eroded the private sector's confidence in the Concertación's commitment to maintain the free-market socioeconomic model imposed under military rule. The second and third conditions are a decline in the electoral fortunes of the Concertación in favour of conservative parties and a shift in power relations among employers' associations towards more confrontational factions.
The period of Tony Blair’s leadership preceding the 1997 general election saw a transformation of the Labour Party. This was of immense importance to the political role of trade unions. The emergence of New Labour can only be understood through analysis of developments in both party and unions. This paper discusses the recasting of the party’s industrial politics and reform of party structure, locating its provenance in electoral, representational and governmental strategies. It examines the unions’ response, rooted in their industrial predicament but shaped by political reaction to it. Union politics intersected but did not coincide with the policies of New Labour. Political differentiation in the unions and opposition to New Labour is considered. It is concluded that change represents restructuring rather than termination of the link, but it will be further tested with New Labour in government.