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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.
This book explores the pivotal role of think tanks in the democratization and economic reform movements by evaluating their overall effect on the transformation process in developing and transitional countries around the world. James G. McGann assesses twenty-three think tanks, located in nine countries and four regions of the world: Chile, Peru, Poland, Slovakia, South Africa, Botswana, the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam, that have most impacted political and economic transitions in their respective countries. The author examines the role they played in the process of democratization and market reform during the late 80s and 90s and identifies the importance of think tanks in these processes by evaluating their overall effect on the policymaking process. He argues in the early stages of a transition from an authoritarian regime to an open and democratic society the activities of think tanks are especially critical, and they have provided a civil society safety net to support these fragile democracies. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of political science, democratization, development, economic development and civil society.
One of the most comprehensive texts on the political economy of Korea available Up-to-date - goes up to 1999
This book develops a new political-institutional explanation of South America's 'two lefts' and the divergent fates of the region's democratic regimes.
The emergence of new democracies in Eastern Europe has raised anew the question of the relationship between economic reform and political liberalization. This work brings together a group of authorities to examine this question as it relates to Latin America, Europe, Asia, and Africa.
Analyzes contemporary Latin America, Europe, and the United States to show the many ways democracies withstand populism's threat.
A 1993 assessment of differing experiences of the transition to democracy in the countries of Southern Europe, Latin America 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.
Do people in new democracies that are undergoing market reforms turn against these reforms when the economic adjustment is painful? The conventional wisdom is that they will. According to "economic voting" models, citizens punish elected governments for bad economic performance. The contributors to this collection, in contrast, begin with the insight that citizens in new democracies may have good reasons to depart from the predictions of economic voting. They use state-of-the-art statistical techniques to analyze changes in aggregate support levels, as reflected in public opinion polls, in response to changes in inflation, unemployment, production, and wages. They find that public opinion of reforms does not always conform to the expectations of the economic voting model.
This volume focuses on the relationship between the tasks of institutional design and the outcomes of the process of economic and political liberalization in Latin America and in Central and Eastern Europe. The contributors emphasize the design of institutions to serve a market economy, the design of electoral laws, and the design of executive-legislative relations. Within this framework each chapter discusses the legacy of the pre-existing authoritarian regime; the range of preferences among various strategic actors with regard to the pace and mix of reforms; and the consequences of final choices for the institutionalization of effective economies and the process of democratization. Countries throughout Latin America and Central and Eastern Europe are moving from semi-closed to open economies and from authoritarian to democratic political systems. Despite important differences between the regions, these transitions involve similar tasks: the establishment of governmental institutions and electoral systems conducive to legitimation of the new and fragile democracies and expansion of the institutional infrastructure of a market economy. This volume looks at both regions, focusing on the relationship between the tasks of institutional design and the outcomes of the process of economic and political liberalization. In particular, the contributors emphasize the design of institutions to serve a market economy, the design of electoral laws, and the design of executive-legislative relations. Each chapter discusses the legacy of the pre-existing authoritarian regime; the range of preferences among various strategic actors (the government, state bureaucracies, opposition parties, and interest groups) with regard to the pace and mix of reforms; and the consequences of final choices for the institutionalization of effective economies and the process of democratization.