Democracy, Free Markets, and the Rightist Dilemma in Latin America

Kenneth M. Roberts
Department of Government
Cornell University
203 White Hall
Ithaca, NY 14853
kr99@cornell.edu

Paper presented at the annual conference of the American Political Science Association, New
Orleans, August 30-Sept. 2, 2012. Rough Draft—do not cite without permission of the author.
 During the first decade of the 21st century, the political Right was on the defensive in

much of Latin America. This was an unexpected turn of events, given the alignment of political

forces in the region at the end of the Cold War. Conservative predominance in Latin America

appeared unassailable for much of the 1990s: the Cold War had ended with the collapse of

communism in the Soviet bloc and the virtual extinction of socialism as a model of economic

development; revolutionary movements had been defeated or contained, their remnants

transformed into domesticated party organizations that competed for influence in electoral arenas

(Castañeda 1993); and the class-based labor and peasant movements that challenged Latin

American elites for most of the 20th century had been gravely weakened by political repression,

the debt crisis, and market-based economic restructuring. Even the Right’s most formidable

historic rivals—the labor-based populist parties traditionally associated with statist development

policies—had embraced (and often led) the crisis-induced process of market liberalization. The

technocratic convergence around free market or “neoliberal” policies that resulted—the so-called

“Washington Consensus” (Williamson 1990)—seemingly attested to the resiliency of U.S.

political and economic hegemony in post-Cold War Latin America. This hegemony provided

international reinforcement and democratic legitimation for a project of “conservative

modernization” that had begun, under authoritarian auspices, in Pinochet’s Chile (see Luna and

Rovira Kaltwasser, this volume; also Foxley 1983 and Schamis 1991).

By the start of the new millennium, however, the tables had clearly turned. The

economic effectiveness and political viability of the neoliberal model were increasingly called

into question by a range of different social and political actors. Popular movements were on the

1
ascendance, with a succession of pro-market governments being toppled by mass protests in

Argentina, Ecuador, and Bolivia. Most unexpectedly, an unprecedented series of electoral

victories by leftist parties or movements placed eleven different countries with some two-thirds

of the regional population under left-leaning national governments by 2011. Although this

political shift to the left became a focal point of scholarly attention (see, for example, Weyland,

Madrid, and Hunter 2010; Levitsky and Roberts 2010), its flip side—the decline of the Right—

has too often been neglected. What explains this decline, and why did it follow so quickly on the

heels of the Right’s advantageous position at the beginning of the 1990s?

To understand this paradox, it is necessary to explore the political challenges encountered

by the Latin American Right during the unique historical juncture of the 1990s and early 2000s.

This period had three distinctive political markers that shaped the strategic opportunities and

constraints faced by conservative forces: it was post-Cold War, post-democratic transition, and

post-economic adjustment. The confluence of these three factors buttressed the political

position of the Right in the short-term, while undercutting its historic populist and leftist

competitors. Over the longer term, however, they weakened the institutionalized (i.e., partisan)

political representation of conservative forces in much of the region, while creating new

opportunities for a variety of leftist contenders. Indeed, the seemingly impregnable position of

the Right during the heyday of the Washington Consensus—a position derived largely from the

collapse of historical rivals and the presumed structural imperatives of global market

integration—may well have undermined conservative parties by making them appear dispensable

to the central task of protecting elite interests in the democratic arena.

Ironically, then, rightist parties in many countries entered into decline precisely when

2
their economic project was most hegemonic in policymaking circles. Rightist parties rarely led or

capitalized politically on the dramatic shift in public policy towards their positions in the 1980s

and 1990s, and their electoral support declined as social and political resistance to market

liberalization intensified in the post-adjustment era. These shifting political winds have thus

forced the Right to reassess its strategies for competing in democratic contexts under unfavorable

structural conditions—that is, where deep structural inequalities create popular majorities with

objective material interests in redistributive policies that the Right opposes.

Contextualizing Left-Right Competition in Contemporary Latin America

As Luna and Rovira Kaltwasser explain in the Introduction to this volume, the Left-Right

cleavage is in essence an ideological conflict centered on the politics of inequality and

redistribution. So conceived, rightist actors defend elite interests against redistributive pressures

mobilized from below. How they do so, however, can vary considerably across time and space;

the political and organizational resources they employ, the ideological framing of class and

national interests, and the prospects for forging middle and lower class support on the basis of

non-redistributive appeals are all heavily context-dependent. This can clearly be seen in Latin

America, where the Left-Right cleavage and the conflict it sows have shifted dramatically over

the course of the last generation. Three key dimensions of this shift are discussed below: the

end of the Cold War, the regionwide transition to democratic governance, and the process of

“structural adjustment” associated with neoliberal reform.

The End of the Cold War

From the 1940s through the 1980s, the Left-Right cleavage in Latin America was

3
embedded in the larger global Cold War struggle between capitalism and communism. In this

ideological struggle, the Right—staunchly supported by the regional hegemon, the United

States—defended capitalism and private property (as well as religious identities), while the Left

advocated redistributive policies and statist or socialist development models. Neither pole of the

ideological continuum was consistently democratic. Especially in the aftermath of the Cuban

Revolution, many on the Left viewed liberal democracy as a façade for class domination, and

renounced the pursuit of social and economic reforms within established democratic regimes.

Part of the Left thus opted for strategies of armed revolution or, in a number of Andean

countries, supported left-leaning military regimes that adopted redistributive social reforms.

The spectre of revolution, on the other hand—whether real or imagined—provided a

rationalization for conservatives to abandon democracy and “knock on the barracks door.” This

pattern was especially prevalent in the 1960s and 1970s, when the Right in much of the region

supported military intervention and authoritarian coercion to repress leftist rivals and defend the

status quo (O’Donnell 1973). Given the intensity of ideological polarization, the Right could

often exploit the politics of fear, portraying even moderate and democratic leftists as communist

allies and revolutionary threats to the social order. For the Right, then, anti-communism and the

fear of disorder created a powerful “negative referent” against which to mobilize support, not

only among privileged and propertied sectors, but also among middle classes who feared

insurgent threats from below, and anyone else threatened by social upheaval.

The collapse of communism in the Soviet bloc and the gradual demise of revolutionary

movements in Latin America allowed the Right to celebrate an ideological victory and breathe a

sighe of relief, given the virtual extinction of its most dangerous adversaries. Indeed, the early

4
1990s found leftist movements of all types in Latin America on the political defensive and beset

by fractious internal debates, a clear sign of their strategic and ideological uncertainty (Roberts

1998). In a context of diminished threat, elites had less to fear from democratic competition, and

the Right was able to distance itself from patterns of military intervention and authoritarian rule

that had long tainted its democratic credentials. If elite interests could be defended within

democratic institutions, then authoritarianism was an increasingly dispensable tool of rightist

politics in the region.

The flip side of this victory, however—as Castañeda (1993) recognized—was that the

demise of revolutionary projects also opened new political space for democratic alternatives of

the left that were not easily discredited by an association with communism. The democratic Left

after the Cold War was less threatening to middle class groups and more capable of building

broad-based coalitions for redistributive social and economic reform. And without the spectre of

communism looming in the background, rightist actors in the post-Cold War era could not easily

play the “military card” or cultivate U.S. support for authoritarian alternatives to block the

mobilization of democratic majorities for redistributive policies;1 they would have to compete in

the democratic arena to uphold the status quo.

That democratic arena, furthermore, was occupied by citizens with a newfound sense of

individual civil and political rights—a legacy, in part, of the human rights and women’s

movements that contested military regimes (Brysk 1994; Alvarez 1990), as well as the broader

struggles to restore democratic citizenship. And by the 1990s, political mobilization by

1
This did not mean that they could not try, as seen in the ill-disguised U.S. enthusiasm for the
military coup against Hugo Chávez in 2002 and the rather ambivalent U.S. response (including staunch
Republican congressional support) for the military coup against populist figure Manuel Zelaya in
Honduras in 2009.

5
indigenous groups was pressuring democratic regimes to recognize new forms of collective and

communal rights rooted in ethnic identities (Yashar 2005). If the Right could no longer fall back

on authoritarian solutions, neither could it assume that traditional methods of social control under

democracy—such as patriarchy, vote buying and patron-clientelism—would suffice to contain

popular demands. New forms of civic associationism had created a more complex,

heterogeneous, and autonomous civil society that articulated claims for an expanded set of

citizenship rights and enhanced democratic accountability. The post-Cold War era thus

dovetailed with a second major shift in the political context, one that was fraught with both

opportunities and challenges for the political Right: a regionwide process of democratic

transition that began in the late 1970s, then gathered steam and consolidated in the 1980s and

1990s.

Democratic Transition and Consolidation

As the previous section suggests, rightist political actors—from civilian parties to

military institutions and landowning and business elites—have historically been highly

ambivalent and contingent supporters of democratic regimes in Latin America. This is hardly

surprising, given the extreme levels of social and economic inequality found in the region. As

the formal models proposed by Meltzer and Richard (1981) and Acemoglu and Robinson (2006)

suggest, median voters have an objective material interest in redistributive policies where high

levels of inequality exist. The greater the degree of inequality, the larger are the popular

majorities who stand to benefit from redistribution; Huber and Stephens (forthcoming) estimate

the figure at roughly 70 percent of the Latin American population, a level that, if fully mobilized,

would clearly made democracy a significant threat to elite interests. Under such conditions,

6
conservative elites can be expected to resist democratization, unless they are confident of their

ability to compete for electoral support on non-redistributive grounds—for example, by

developing patron-client linkages to lower class constituencies, articulating religious identities,

nominating highly attractive personalities for public office, or cultivating a reputation for

competence on valence issues like economic growth, modernization, clean government, or public

order and safety.

The historical record provides amples evidence of the democratic dilemma encountered

by the Right in Latin America (Middlebrook 2000; Gibson 1996; Power 2000). Conservative

oligarchic rule predominated in the region for a century after independence, sometimes through

competitive (though highly exlusive) civilian regimes that strictly limited mass democratic

participation, but often through military or patrimonial forms of authoritarian rule. The onset of

mass politics did not begin in earnest until the early decades of the 20th century, when

urbanization, industrialization, and economic modernization spawned new working and middle

class groups that clamored for democratic citizenship rights (Collier and Collier 1991;

Rueschemeyer, Stephens, and Stephens 1992). As popular mobilization eclipsed oligarchic rule,

the political Right struggled to defend elite interests under more inclusive democratic regimes

and ward off the rise of labor-based populist and leftist competitors who invariably politicized

socioeconomic inequalities. Where the latter succeeded in mobilizing democratic majorities for

redistributive policies that threatened core elite interests, the Right often responded by

abandoning the democratic arena and seeking shelter behind the protective shield of military

rule.

This dynamic was especially prevalent in the 1960s and 1970s, when a series of military

7
coups took place for the express purpose of repressing the political parties and popular

movements that had been activated during the populist era of the mid-20th century (O’Donnell

1973). When militaries began to retreat to the barracks in the late 1970s and 1980s, considerable

uncertainty surrounded the fate of the new democratic regimes that took their place. In

particular, scholarly accounts questioned the commitment of conservative business and political

elites to the new democratic regimes; wary of a return to polarizing patterns of social

mobilization, O’Donnell and Schmitter (1986), for example, warned that political and economic

pacts would be necessary to restrain popular mobilization and safeguard elite interests under

democracy.

Ultimately, however, Latin America’s new democratic regimes proved to be far more

durable and resilient that anyone imagined at the onset of the wave of regime transitions. With

military institutions widely discredited as political actors by economic mismanagement and

egregious human rights violations, and with the U.S. shifting to a more consistent (if hardly

unconditional) pro-democratic stance as the Cold War wound down, the political Right

progressively lost the option of resorting to authoritarian rule to protect elite interests. Instead,

the Right would have to compete within the parameters of democratic institutions that became

increasingly consolidated, despite the political traumas associated with the debt and inflationary

crises of the 1980s and early 90s.

Paradoxically, the regionwide economic crisis may have enhanced the prospects for

democratic consolidation in two crucial ways, both of which helped to alleviate the potential

threats posed by democratization to elite interests. First, the debt crisis and its ensuing

hyperinflationary spirals thoroughly undermined the statist development models that had been in

8
vogue in the region since the Great Depression of the 1930s, ushering in a period of austerity,

state retrenchment, and market-based structural adjustment that largely conformed to the policy

preferences of leading business and financial interests (Schamis 1999). With staunch support

from the U.S. and international financial institutions, market reforms deepened the insertion of

Latin American economies in global circuits of investment, production, finance, and exchange,

thus tightening global market constraints on the macroeconomic and redistributive policies of

democratic governments in the region. If austerity and market liberalization did not fully tie the

hands of democratic rulers, they surely narrowed their range of options, and thus their potential

to challenge elite interests. Second, the combination of economic crisis and market liberalization

wreaked havoc on the class-based labor and peasant movements that historically mobilized

redistributive pressures through democratic institutions (Roberts 2002; Kurtz 2004). With labor

unionization in steep decline and populist and leftist parties hamstrung by the collapse of statist

development models, democratic competition seemingly posed little threat to the political Right

and its core elite constituencies—in the short-term, at least, as explained below.

Structural Adjustment and Market Liberalization

During the era of state-led import substitution industrialization (ISI) in the middle of the

20th century, conservative parties in Latin America were not necessarily supporters of free

markets, much less the Chicago-school neoliberal orthodoxy that was subsequently imported by

Chilean technocrats and a legion of imitators after the mid-1970s. Agrarian export elites with

close ties to conservative parties generally supported open trade regimes, as they were threatened

by the protectionism and price distortions of ISI policies that forced them to subsidize industrial

development. ISI policies appealed broadly, however, to urban workers and sectors of industrial

9
capital that depended on protected domestic markets or state subsidies. Consequently, business

and elite groups were often divided by sectoral interests that forced conservative parties to water

down their ideological commitments to market liberalism, even if they were clearly more

market-oriented than their labor-based populist and leftist rivals.

Over time, however, severe market distortions and related economic inefficiencies

combined with the ascendance of more diversified and internationalized business-financial

groups to create powerful business lobbies with vested interests in market reform (Frieden 1991;

Silva 1996). Business groups that operated in competitive niches or had mobile capital and

international ties were positioned to capitalize on trade liberalization, the privatization of public

enterprises and services, and the deregulation of capital and foreign exchange markets. As

Schamis (1999) argues, these business groups provided a crucial domestic support base for

market liberalization, in alliance with technocratic elites who directed the process of policy

reform. Labor unions, on the other hand, invariably opposed these reforms as threats to the

organizational, political, and material interests of workers (Murillo 2001; Burgess 2004).

One of the great puzzles of the neoliberal reform period, however, is that elite groups

often did not channel their demands for market liberalization through conservative parties.

Furthermore, these parties often failed to assume political responsibility for structural adjustment

policies. This was especially the case in countries that developed strong labor-based populist or

leftist parties during the ISI era. Since conservative parties were sure to encounter well-

organized opposition to neoliberal reforms in these countries, parties with historic ties to

organized labor had a comparative advantage in the reform process: they could offer

inducements for cooperation, coopt union leaders, and draw upon reservoirs of political capital

10
and trust to contain popular mobilization, at least in the short term (see Murillo 2000; Levitsky

2003; and Burgess 2004). Consequently, historic populist or labor-based parties (such as the

Peronists in Argentina, the PRI in Mexico, AD in Venezuela, and the MNR in Bolivia) assumed

political responsibility for initiating structural adjustment policies in the midst of economic

crises, even though these policies clashed dramatically with their historic programmatic

commitments and societal linkages. In other countries with weaker labor movements– such as

Costa Rica and Ecuador– center-left parties sometimes led or collaborated in the reform process

(i.e., the PLN in Costa Rica and the ID in Ecuador). Elsewhere, market liberalization was

launched by military dictatorships (Chile and Uruguay) or independent figures with a popular

touch but no significant party organization (Fernando Collor in Brazil and Alberto Fujimori in

Peru). Conservative parties played major roles in the reform process primarily in countries

where labor-based parties were historically weak, and/or where recent experiences with

authoritarian rule and military repression had constrained the political mobilization of popular

sectors– i.e., Colombia, Honduras, Paraguay, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, and

Uruguay.

The fact that such a broad range of political parties and independent leaders played major

roles in the process of market liberalization attests to the economic constraints faced by

governments in the region, as well as the breadth of the technocratic consensus for neoliberal

policies in the late 1980s and early 1990s. This technocratic consensus– while it lasted– surely

diminished ideological conflict in Latin America (Colburn 2002) and lowered the stakes of

democratic competition, but it also made it difficult for parties to construct collective identities

or societal linkages on the basis of meaningful programmatic distinctions. Indeed, where even

11
historic statist and populist parties could be counted on to adhere to the Washington Consensus,

rightist parties were largely dispensable to the process of market liberalization, and elites had

little need to invest in party organizations as institutionalized forms of interest representation.

Such interests, after all, were seemingly safeguarded by the structural imperatives of global

markets, which appeared to be increasingly effective at disciplining governments. Not

surprisingly, then, established conservative parties typically entered into decline in countries

where market reforms were adopted in a “bait-and-switch” fashion by traditional populist or

center-left parties or independent populist figures, such as Venezuela, Argentina, Bolivia, Peru,

Costa Rica, and Ecuador. Conservative parties could also be weakened by the erosion of

traditional clientelist linkages to popular constituencies as economic austerity and market

liberalization eliminated rent-seeking opportunities (Luna 2006).

In short, the dramatic shift in public policies towards the right was not necessarily led by

conservative political actors, and it often undermined rather than enhanced their institutionalized

political representation. Although neoliberal reforms clearly strengthened the economic and

political influence of business and financial elites, such elites are often loathe to engage in

partisan politics, as they often prefer to cultivate direct access to policymakers rather than work

through partisan intermediaries. As Middlebrook (2000: 5-6) states, “Economic and social elites

rarely depend upon political parties as the exclusive means for advancing their policy goals.”

Indeed, rather than invest in party building activities that would bind their interests to the fate of

a particular political organization, business elites may opt to hedge their bets and cultivate fluid

relationships with a number of parties to ensure that they retain policymaking access no matter

the outcome of electoral contests. This pattern is especially prevalent where there is a broad

12
political consensus on the neoliberal model, or at least a dearth of perceived viable alternatives,

which lowers the stakes of electoral competition for business interests and diminishes the

importance of parties “as direct vehicles for elite interest articulation” (Middlebrook 2000: 6).

Moreover, elite disdain for partisan representation is often shared by the technocrats who

played such a vital role in the design and implementation of neoliberal reforms (Domínguez

1997; Teichman 2001). The hallmark of technocratic policymaking is the application of social

scientific principles to problem solving tasks, and its legitimacy rests on its alleged expertise and

superior performance rather than popular democratic mandates. Indeed, the basic ingredients of

democratic politics– the need to cultivate popular support, to articulate, represent, and reconcile a

plurality of interests and ideological perspectives, to secure citizen input regarding the content

of public policies, and to hold public officials accountable to their constituents– are

fundamentally at odds with technocratic claims to the professional possession and application of

authoritative knowledge. Technocrats thus perceive themselves as purveyors of public goods

who rise above the narrow self-interests of parties and interest groups, which inevitably place

restrictions on policymaking autonomy and skew public policies toward the pursuit of private

gains.2 In short, parties and other representative bodies interfere with technocratic policymaking,

which thrives where society is disorganized, demobilized, and politically inert. It is for this

reason that neoliberal technocrats seek “to withdraw the economy from all processes of

democratic decision,” making economic efficiency the ultimate goal and subordinating politics to

“the alleged technical imperatives of the economy” (Lechner 1998: 29).

2
It goes without saying that this self-image denies that technocrats may themselves embody
particular interests, much as it denies that their “scientific” claims to authoritative knowledge may be
grounded in contested and ideological conceptions of the common good.

13
 In many respects, then, neoliberal reform was a classic expression of the “politics of anti-

politics” in Latin America—that is, an attempt to insulate macroeconomic policymaking from

societal pressures and democratic contestation. This began with the military dictatorships of the

Southern Cone in the mid-1970s, then spread across the region under more democratic auspices

in the 1980s as labor movements entered into decline, the debt crisis narrowed the range of

policy alternatives, and market constraints shielded technocratic policymakers from popular

democratic pressures. Although conservative parties were relatively modest players in the

market reform process, the Right was able to draw upon less institutionalized, de facto power

resources—what Latin Americans call poderes fácticos—to shape public policy. As debt-

saddled states liberalized markets and retreated from a broad range of developmental and social

welfare responsibilities, the structural power of internationalized business and financial elites

was accentuated, and economic well-being became increasingly dependent on their market

incentives and behavior. The ability of markets and capital flight to “discipline” governments

that failed to toe the line was amply driven home by the 1980s hyperinflationary spirals in

Bolivia, Argentina, Brazil, Peru, and Nicaragua. International lenders—both public and

private—drove home the point by making financial relief conditional upon the adoption of

structural adjustment policies. Market pressures and financial leverage were then buttressed by

highly concentrated and commercialized broadcast media that were closely intertwined with

local business establishments. As Hughes and Prado (2011: 109) assert, “Mass media in Latin

American societies, especially broadcast media, are controlled by a small elite that uses the

media’s definitional power to further, consciously or unconsciously, a set of class- and family-

based interests and ideologies,” thus influencing “the political and policy-making process” as

14
well as “societal norms of cultural appropriateness.” Consequently, even where rightist parties

did not win elections and directly control national governments, conservative forces wielded

powerful economic and political resources to shape and constrain national policy-making

agendas.

This dependence on poderes fácticos did not appear especially threatening to the Right

during the period of economic adjustment. With the Left plagued by ideological uncertainty,

labor movements in decline, and populist parties abandoning their historic commitments to failed

statist and heterodox policies, every country in Latin America responded to inflationary

pressures and balance of payments constraints by liberalizing markets in the late 1980s and early

1990s (Lora 2001). The Washington Consensus, however, proved to be fleeting (Mahon

2003)—a temporary and often tactical convergence around a set of policy prescriptions that had

been artificially narrowed by financial distress and the political disarticulation of its natural

adversaries. The convergence corresponded to a period of crisis-induced austerity and economic

adjustment, but it was destined to unravel when political and economic conditions changed in the

post-adjustment era after the mid-1990s—an era when the Right would pay a steep political price

for the organizational fragility and weakness of its intermediary representative institutions.

Re-politicization in the Post-Adjustment Era

The signature political achievement of the adjustment era was economic stabilization—

that is, the defeat of inflationary pressures driven by acute fiscal and balance of payments

deficits. Once the scourge of hyperinflation had been extinguished from the region, however—

Brazil in 1994 was the last country to escape its grasp—the political winds began to shift, and a

new, post-adjustment era started to take shape. The urgency for stabilizing austerity measures

15
diminished, while the long-promised payoffs of painful adjustment policies proved elusive to

obtain. Stabilization yielded only anemic growth in the 1990s, while the Mexican peso crisis of

1994-95 and the regional stagnation that followed in the wake of the 1997-98 Asian financial

crisis demonstrated that Latin America’s liberalized financial markets remained highly

vulnerable to global shocks. When international conditions turned more favorable and a

commodity export boom finally produced steady growth after 2003, Latin America had already

started its political shift to the Left, and the Washington Consensus had been broken.

In reality, the Washington Consensus had never extended far beyond the technocratic

circles that implemented it, and the neoliberal model certainly did not achieve ideological

hegemony within Latin American societies at large. Although prominent market reformers like

Menem in Argentina, Fujimori in Peru, and Cardoso in Brazil—none of them representatives of

established conservative parties—were re-elected after successively stabilizing economies

plagued by hyperinflation, in much of the region neoliberalism had advanced without an

electoral mandate. Indeed, neoliberalism was often adopted “by surprise” (Stokes 2001), in a

“bait-and-switch” fashion by presidents who ran for office on very different platforms,

demonstrating that many political leaders did not believe they could win elections by advocating

structural adjustment policies—that is, by truthfully divulging what they would do after taking

public office.

Once stabilization had been achieved, moreover, the longer-term social deficits of the

neoliberal model—in particular, low wages, underemployment, and acute inequalities (see Huber

and Holt 2004)—became increasingly salient politically. As seen in Figure 1, unemployment

consistently ranked as the most important problem facing Latin American countries in

16
Latinobarómetro surveys taken from 1995 through 2008, when it was overtaken by crime. More

striking, perhaps, an overwhelming 75-85 percent of citizens said that the distribution of income

in their society was unjust, with half of them claiming that it was “very unjust” (see Figure 2).

Given the tensions between univeral democratic citizenship and widespread social exclusion,

these sentiments encouraged a re-politicization of macroeconomic and social policymaking as

the Washington Consensus unraveled in the post-adjustment era. This re-politicization could be

seen in three principal arenas, all of which put the Right on the political defensive.

* * * Figures 1 and 2 about here * * *

First, although organized labor remained a greatly diminished political actor, other social

groups demonstrated a newfound capacity for collective action and social mobilization in the

post-adjustment era. Most prominently, a series of mass protests led to the collapse of multiple

pro-market governments in Ecuador, Argentina, and Bolivia in the late 1990s and early 2000s,

with indigenous movements, unemployed workers, and community associations often taking the

lead in social mobilization (Yashar 2005; Silva 2009). Second, following a series of experiments

with leftist governments at the municipal level (Chávez and Goldfrank 2004), an unprecedented

electoral shift to the left began at the national level as well, starting with Hugo Chávez’s

landslide victory in 1998 presidential elections in Venezuela. The “left turn” ushered into power

presidents from a diverse range of established populist (Argentina) or leftist parties (Chile,

Brazil, Uruguay, Nicaragua, and El Salvador), as well as independent populist figures

(Venezuela, Ecuador, Paraguay, Peru) and leaders of mass movements (Bolivia) who outflanked

traditional party systems on the left.

17
 Third, public opinion surveys manifested widespread skepticism or rejection of central

pillars of the neoliberal model, especially after the late 1990s. Surveys demonstrated that most

Latin American citizens supported a market economy, although the percentage dropped from

two-thirds to a little over half of survey respondents between 1998 and 2007 (see Figure 3).3

Given the absence of viable alternatives to a market economy in the post-Cold War era, this

growing ambivalence was notable. Moreover, satisfaction with the performance of the market

economy was much lower, bottoming out at 16 percent of survey respondents in 2003 before

recovering slightly as the commodity boom ushered in a new era of relative prosperity

(Latinobarómetro 2005: 63).

* * * Figure 3 about here * * *

More telling, perhaps, were public attitudes toward specific features of the neoliberal

model, as citizens demonstrated a capacity to differentiate between its varied components. Free

trade policies that provided consumers with access to a wide range of imported goods were the

most popular, receiving support from over 70 percent of survey respondents (Baker 2003: 425).

Support for privatization policies, however, was much lower, and it tended to decline over time,

in part due to concerns over higher prices for basic utilities like water, electricity, and

telecommunications. The percentage of survey respondents who said that privatizations had

benefited their country plunged from a regional average of 46 percent in 1998 to 21 percent in

2002-03 before partially recovering as macroeconomic conditions improved (see Figure 3).4

3
The graph shows the combined average of survey respondents who either agree or
strongly agree with the statement “A market economy is best for the country.”
4
Figure 3 shows the combined average of survey respondents who either agree or
strongly agree with the statement “Privatizations of state enterprises have been beneficial for the

18
Despite generalized support for private enterprise in the process of development, 71 percent of

citizens expressed dissatisfaction with the privatization of basic utilities (Latinobarómetro 2003:

57).

Indeed, most citizens looked to the state to provide social welfare and promote economic

development. This created a public opinion profile that was strikingly “statist” in Latin

America’s post-adjustment era, certainly in comparison to that of the United States, where

economic liberalism is most deeply entrenched. Surveys conducted throughout the Americas in

2008 by Vanderbilt University’s Latin American Public Opinion Project (LAPOP) found that

Latin American citizens were far more likely than U.S. citizens to believe that the state should

own major industries and assume primary responsibility for job creation, health care, and social

welfare (see Figure 4). A majority of survey respondents favored state ownership of key

enterprises in every Latin American country except Costa Rica and Hugo Chávez’s Venezuela

(where only 37.3 percent of respondents favored state over private ownership, compared to 20.8

percent in the U.S.). A majority in every Latin American country favored state responsibility for

job creation, ranging from 66.3 percent in Honduras to 90.4 percent in Paraguay. Similar

majorities in every country assigned primary responsibilities to the state for health care (ranging

from a low of 76.3 percent in Honduras to a high of 94.0 percent in Paraguay) and social well-

being (ranging from 62.6 percent in Honduras to 85.8 percent in Paraguay). In none of these

policy spheres did a majority of U.S. citizens—even prior to the rise of the Tea Party

movement—assign primary responsibilities to the state. The statist preferences of Latin

American citizens grew more pronounced after the mid-1990s; by 2008, over 80 percent of

country.”

19
citizens supported state control of major social services like primary and university education,

health care, and pensions, as well as major extractive industries (oil and gas) and some public

utilities (i.e., electricity) (see Figure 5).5

* * * Figures 4 and 5 about here * * *

This strong and growing support for vigorous state developmental and social welfare

roles helps to explain why the Right lost political ground to a variety of leftist alternatives in

Latin America’s post-adjustment era. Paradoxically, as Arnold and Samuels demonstrate (2011:

33-35), the political turn to the left did not signify that more Latin American citizens necessarily

identified themselves as leftist; ideological self-placements across the region changed little

during this period, and in fact remained slightly right-of-center. What is clear, however, is that

statist policy preferences were strong and growing, and were not restricted to citizens who

identified ideologically with the left. As such, leftist parties and leaders could solicit electoral

support on policy or programmatic grounds from citizens who did not think of themselves as

leftists, but preferred a more active economic role for the state.

In this context, the organizational weaknesses of conservative parties, and the tendency of

elites to rely on poderes fácticos to defend their interests, put the Right at a significant

competitive disadvantage in the electoral arena. Over the course of the 1990s and early 2000s,

traditional conservative parties largely collapsed in Bolivia, Colombia, Costa Rica, Peru, and

Venezuela, and they declined, splintered, or remained electorally marginal in Argentina, Brazil,

Ecuador, the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, Paraguay, and Uruguay. Traditional conservative

5
The questions asked respondents to identify which economic activities “should be
primarily in the hands of the state, and which should be primarily in the hands of the private
sector.”

20
parties remained formidable actors primarily in Mexico, where the PAN was the primary

beneficiary of the delayed democratization of a dominant-party authoritarian regime, and

Honduras and Paraguay, where conservative forces resorted to a military coup and a

congressional coup (thinly veiled as an impromptu impeachment) to nip populist or leftist turns

in the bud.

The handful of cases where strong new conservative parties did arise in recent decades—

namely Chile, El Salvador, and Colombia (after 2002)— are highly instructive, as they possessed

a number of distinctive features that marked their institutional development. All three countries

were major battlegrounds of the Cold War, where economic elites were directly threatened by

radical socialist or revolutionary projects. As such, elites had strong incentives to invest in a

conservative party organization to defend their interests in the electoral arena, if and when they

were forced to compete. More telling, perhaps, the major new parties of the Right were not

organized exclusively in the electoral arena; in their formative periods, all were able to draw

from extra-electoral organizational networks embedded within authoritarian states or their

coercive (sometimes parastatal) institutions (see Loxton 2011). The UDI in Chile, for example,

was forged out of the municipal apparatus of the Pinochet military dictatorship; ARENA in El

Salvador grew out of the paramilitary death squads formed during the country’s descent into civil

war; and the Partido de la U in Colombia drew cadres from demobilized paramilitary networks

as well as the remnants of traditional party organizations. Paradoxically, then, some of Latin

America’s most electorally successful rightist parties are those with the least democratic

formative experiences; as Panebianco (1988) would suggest, those formative experiences or

21
“genetic models” created organizational patterns that proved to be more resilient than those

spawned strictly for electoral purposes.

These anomalies aside, however, most conservative parties have performed poorly in the

electoral arena in Latin America’s post-adjustment era. This is not necessarily a crisis for elite

interests; after all, a number of the new leftist governments in the region have been strikingly

moderate, especially in countries where centrist or conservative parties remain viable contenders

in the democratic arena (i.e., Brazil, Chile, Uruguay, and El Salvador; see Flores-Macías 2012;

Levitsky and Roberts 2011; Weyland, Madrid and Hunter 2010). Leftist governments in these

countries have cautiously experimented with redistributive social policies—including higher

wages and more expansive public health, social security, and poverty relief programs—while

adhering to relatively orthodox macroeconomic policies and avoiding open confrontations with

business interests. Weyland (2011) provocatively suggests that this moderate Left may actually

enhance the political sustainbility of market economies in Latin America by helping them

address their accumulated social deficits.

Where the partisan Right has collasped or de-institutionalized, however—that is, in

Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Argentina—leftist governments have been more inclined to

break with neoliberal orthodoxy in both macroeconomic and social policy spheres. These

countries have experimented with a broader range of statist and nationalist development policies,

even if they remain well-short of the socialist models trumpeted in Hugo Chavez’s most heated

rhetoric. The differences between these two sets of cases can be seen in Figure 6, which charts

for each country the change between 2000 and 2010 in the Heritage Foundation/Wall Street

Journal’s “Index of Economic Freedom,” a multivariate indicator of aggregate economic

22
liberalism.6 Despite political shifts to the Left, Chile and Uruguay actually increased their score

on the liberalism index between 2000 and 2010, while Brazil under Lula experienced a moderate

decline of 5.5 points. Much sharper declines were registered in the remaining cases, with

Venezuela declining by 19.8 points, Argentina by18.8, Bolivia by 15.6, and Ecuador by 10.5.

These latter four countries accounted for much of the decline in the regionwide average index

score (from 64.8 to 60.6) between 2000 and 2010. In short, strong conservative parties—and

institutionalized partisan competition in general—exerted a moderating effect on heterodox

policy experimentation, even where the Left was in power.

* * * Figure 6 about here * * *

Even if these more heterodox experiments prove to be economically unviable or

uncompetitive in long term, as Weyland (2011) and others assert, the Right would be remiss to

underestimate the significance of its electoral slide—now well over a decade long—and assume

that its return to power is right around the corner. Latin America’s “left turn” was not a mere

cycle of conventional anti-incumbent vote shifts that produced multiple alternations in office. In

a region with notorious anti-incumbent voting patterns (Remmer 1991), 11 of the first 12 leftist

administrations to complete their term in office since the beginning of the “left turn” in 1998

have achieved re-election. The lone outlier—Chile in 2010—was clearly attributable to

institutional restrictions on vote choice, as Chilean electoral laws prohibited the incumbent

socialist president, Michele Bachelet, from standing for re-election after she completed her term

with approval ratings hovering near 80 percent. Within a year, the government led by Bachelet’s

successor, Sebastian Piñera—the first conservative to replace a leftist president since the onset of

6
The index ranges from zero to one hundred, with higher scores corresponding to more
liberalized economies and lower scores indicating greater state interventionism.

23
the “left turn”—was all but paralyzed by mass student protests against a highly unequal and

partially privatized educational system. Ironically, the conservative government sought to stem

the protest movement by offering major reforms to an educational system that was one of the last

remaining social pillars of Pinochet’s showcase neoliberal model.7

Conclusion

Sebastian Piñera will undoubtedly be joined by other conservative presidents from

countries now governed by the Left, but this should not disguise the basic political re-alignment

that has occurred in Latin America’s post-adjustment era. Simply put, political competition in

the region more thoroughly revolves around programmatic distinctions that are ultimately

grounded in redistributive conflicts. As the defender of minority elite interests opposed to

redistributive policies, the Right is at an inherent disadvantage where democratic competition

politicizes inequality and social exclusion. Their depoliticization during the period of economic

adjustment was grounded in a unique confluence of political and economic events that ultimately

proved to be transitory; indeed, these conditions were subject to transformation by the very

forces of economic stabilization and institutionalized democratic competition. With the Right

overly dependent on its poderes fácticos and lacking strong institutional intermediaries, this

competition gradually empowered its rivals on the Left. Consequently, even where the Left has

not come to power in recent years—in countries like Mexico, Colombia, Honduras, and Costa

Rica—democratic alternatives of the left have emerged or strengthened.

7
Piñera’s two socialist predecessors, Bachelet and Ricardo Lagos, had earlier implemented major
reforms of the pension and health care sytems left behind by the Pinochet regime. Reforms to Pinochet’s
labor code have been more limited, but the democratic trend has clearly pointed toward cumulative
change in the social policy model bequeathed by the dicatorship, even as macroeconomic policies have
remained relatively orthodox.

24
 The Right is hardly lacking in political resources, and it may well discover new or

invigorated means of appealing electorally to popular constituencies that diffuse or cross-cut

distributive conflicts. It has, after all, often done so in the past in Latin America. Otherwise, the

Right probably has little choice but to relax its attachment to a doctrinaire form of market

liberalism and encourage experimentation with more socially inclusive variants of market

economies. Such experimentation may even foster a policy convergence with elements of the

moderate Left that is strikingly different from the market fundamentalism and technocratic anti-

politics of the Washington Consensus—not to mention the polarized class and ideological battles

of the Cold War era.

25
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Figure 1: Public Opinion Toward the Most Important Problems Facing Latin American
Countries

Source: Latinobarómetro 2010: 7. Data points are regionwide average annual responses to the open-ended
question “In your opinion, which one is the most important problem in the country?”

30
Figure 2. Public Opinion Towards Income Distribution in Latin America, 1997-2007
(regional average)

60
50 50 50
48
50
Percentage pf Respondents

40 35
32
28 27
30

20 17
14
9 10
10 5 4
2 2

0
1997 2001 2002 2007

Very Just Just Unjust Very Unjust

Source: Latinobarómetro 2007: 36.

31
Figure 3: Support for Privatizations and a Market Economy, 1998-2007
(regional average)

80

66

57 59
Percentage of Respondents

60
52
46

40 36 35

21
20

0
1998 2000 2002/03 2007

Market Economy Privatization

Source: Latinobarómetro 2007: 25-26.

32
Figure 4. Average Support for State Economic Responsibilities in Latin America and the
United States, 2008

90 85.5
77.7 76.8
80

70

60 56.9

50 46.9 47.5
40.7
40

30
20.8
20

10

0
State Ownership Job Creation Health Care Citizen Well-Being

United States Latin America

Source: Calculated from Latin American Public Opinion Project, AmericasBarometer Insights, Nos. 1, 8, 16, and
50.

33
Figure 5: Preferences for State and Private Control over Social and Economic Activities,
2008 (regional averages)

Private Ownership
State Control

Source: Latinobarómetro 2008: 38.

34
Figure 6. Left Governments and Change in the Index of Economic Freedom, 2000-2010

80
77.8 77.2
75 74.7
70 70
69.3 69.8
Index of Economic Freedom

66.9
65 65
61.1 61.7
60 59.8
57.4 58.4
55 55.6
52.9
51.7
50 51.2
49.4
49.3
45 45.2
40
37.6
35
30
2000 2005 2010

Argentina Bolivia Brazil Chile Ecuador Uruguay Venezuela

Source: Heritage Foundation/Wall Street Journal “Index of Economic Freedom” (http://www.heritage.org/Index/)

35