This introductory essay argues that patterns of diffusion and cooperation among non-democratic regimes differ significantly in goal, mode, impulse, and scope. Autocracies that are guided by a ...dynamic, missionary ideology, such as interwar fascism and, less fervently, the Bolivarianism of Hugo Chávez, actively promote their new credo in a wide range of countries. Moreover, these messianic belief systems stimulate diffusion processes across the globe. A wide range of political leaders take inspiration from these missionary ideologies and emulate their values and ideas to a greater or lesser extent. By contrast, most authoritarian regimes in the contemporary era lack an expansive ideology and are driven mostly by political interests. International diffusion and cooperation among these regimes reflects mainly the defensive goal of immunization against Western efforts at democracy promotion. To guarantee regime survival, authoritarian great powers in the post-Cold War world, such as Russia and China, concentrate on fortifying their regional sphere of influence. Thus, targeted, calculated collaboration and instrumental learning prevail.
Can Latin America's 'new left' stimulate economic development, enhance social equity, and deepen democracy in spite of the economic and political constraints it faces? This is the first book to ...systematically examine the policies and performance of the left-wing governments that have risen to power in Latin America during the last decade. Featuring thorough studies of Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, and Venezuela by renowned experts, the volume argues that moderate leftist governments have attained greater, more sustainable success than their more radical, contestatory counterparts. Moderate governments in Brazil and Chile have generated solid economic growth, reduced poverty and inequality, and created innovative and fiscally sound social programs, while respecting the fundamental principles of market economics and liberal democracy. By contrast, more radical governments, exemplified by Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, have expanded state intervention and popular participation and attained some short-term economic and social successes.
This book takes a powerful new approach to a question central to comparative politics and economics: Why do some leaders of fragile democracies attain political success--culminating in reelection ...victories--when pursuing drastic, painful economic reforms while others see their political careers implode? Kurt Weyland examines, in particular, the surprising willingness of presidents in four Latin American countries to enact daring reforms and the unexpected resultant popular support. He argues that only with the robust cognitive- psychological insights of prospect theory can one fully account for the twists and turns of politics and economic policy in Argentina, Brazil, Peru, and Venezuela during the 1980s and 1990s. Assessing conventional approaches such as rational choice, Weyland concludes that prospect theory is vital to any systematic attempt to understand the politics of market reform. Under this theory, if actors perceive themselves to be in a losing situation they are inclined toward risks; if they see a winning situation around them, they prefer caution. In Latin America, Weyland finds, where the public faced an open crisis it backed draconian reforms. And where such reforms yielded an apparent economic recovery, many citizens and their leaders perceived prospects of gains. Successful leaders thus won reelection and the new market model achieved political sustainability. Weyland concludes this accessible book by considering when his novel approach can be used to study crises generally and how it might be applied to a wider range of cases from Latin America, Africa, and Eastern Europe.
Why do very different countries often emulate the same policy model? Two years after Ronald Reagan's income-tax simplification of 1986, Brazil adopted a similar reform even though it threatened to ...exacerbate income disparity and jeopardize state revenues. And Chile's pension privatization of the early 1980s has spread throughout Latin America and beyond even though many poor countries that have privatized their social security systems, including Bolivia and El Salvador, lack some of the preconditions necessary to do so successfully. In a major step beyond conventional rational-choice accounts of policy decision-making, this book demonstrates that bounded - not full - rationality drives the spread of innovations across countries. When seeking solutions to domestic problems, decision-makers often consider foreign models, sometimes promoted by development institutions like the World Bank. But, as Kurt Weyland argues, policymakers apply inferential shortcuts at the risk of distortions and biases.Through an in-depth analysis of pension and health reform in Bolivia, Brazil, Costa Rica, El Salvador, and Peru, Weyland demonstrates that decision-makers are captivated by neat, bold, cognitively available models. And rather than thoroughly assessing the costs and benefits of external models, they draw excessively firm conclusions from limited data and overextrapolate from spurts of success or failure. Indications of initial success can thus trigger an upsurge of policy diffusion.
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."
What accounts for the waves of policy diffusion that increasingly sweep across regions of the world? Why do many diverse countries adopt similar changes? Focusing on the spread of Chilean-style ...pension privatization in Latin America, this article assesses the relative merit of four theoretical explanations that scholars of diffusion have proposed. As the principal mechanism driving innovations' spread, these approaches emphasize external pressures, emanating especially from international financial institutions; the quest for symbolic or normative legitimacy; rational learning and cost-benefit calculation; and cognitive heuristics, respectively. The article assesses which one of these frameworks can best account for the three distinctive features of diffusion, namely its wavelike temporal pattern; its geographical clustering; and the spread of similarity amid diversity. While several approaches contribute to understanding policy diffusion, the analysis suggests that the cognitive-psychological framework offers a particularly persuasive account of the spread of pension reform.
Populism has traditionally been defined as a cumulative concept, characterized by the simultaneous presence of political, economic, social, and discursive attributes. Radial concepts of populism ...offer a looser way of spanning different domains. Criticism of modernization and dependency theory, which assumed tight connections between different domains, and the emergence of new types of personalistic leadership that lack some traditional attributes of populism have made cumulative and radial concepts of populism problematic. Populism can be reconceptualized as a classical concept located in a single domain, politics. Populism can be defined as a political strategy through which a personalistic leader seeks or exercises government power through direct, unmediated, uninstitutionalized support from large numbers of followers.
Responding to Rueda’s questions, this essay explains the political-strategic approach (PSA) to populism and highlights its analytical strengths, which have become even more important with the ...emergence of populist governments across the world. PSA identifies populism’s core by emphasizing the central role of personalistic leaders who tend to operate in opportunistic ways, rather than consistently pursuing programmatic or ideological orientations. PSA is especially useful nowadays, when scholars’ most urgent task is to elucidate the political strategies of populist chief executives and their problematic repercussions, especially populism’s threat to democracy.
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DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, ODKLJ, OILJ, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
Since the third wave reached Latin America in 1978, the region had seen only occasional threats and temporary interruptions of democracy in individual nations. The undemocratic incumbents in Bolivia, ...Ec- uador, and Venezuela have entrenched their rule and wield many tools for extending it, aided by the commodities boom. ...neither the domestic opposition nor the international community has found a way to stop discriminatory legalism.
