Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-p9bg8 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-21T14:19:38.740Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Does Free-Market Reform Induce Protest? Selection, Post-Treatment Bias, and Depoliticization

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 January 2021

Marcus J. Kurtz Open the ORCID record for Marcus J. Kurtz [Opens in a new window]  and
Adam Lauretig
Marcus J. Kurtz*
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio, USA
Adam Lauretig
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio, USA
*
*Corresponding author. E-mail: kurtz.61@osu.edu
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Across myriad literatures, it is widely held that expanding economic grievances induce violence, protest, or other forms of backlash. In Latin America, where economic liberalization deepened the downturn of the ‘lost decade’ of the 1980s (and 1990s), reform has been tightly associated with protest and mobilization. At the same time, liberal economic reforms have proven to be remarkably durable, even where long-promised benefits are hard to discern. This article makes the case that economically liberal reforms, despite inducing or deepening severe and sustained economic downturns, have actually undermined political protest. Previous work confirming the conventional wisdom foundered on two main methodological problems. First, selection into economic reform was a consequence of the very economic pain and macroeconomic imbalances it also served to induce. Secondly, because of this, these key (macro)economic characteristics are both pre- and post-treatment. Utilizing a marginal structural model approach to assess the impact of economic liberalization on protest outcomes net of this selection process, and the prior history of treatment, the study finds that painful reform reduces political protest even as it heightens grievances. This depoliticizing dynamic helps to explain the surprising durability of liberal reforms in Latin America.

Keywords

economic liberalizationeconomic reformprotestbacklashLatin America
Type
Letter
Information
British Journal of Political Science , Volume 52 , Issue 2 , April 2022 , pp. 968 - 976
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Almeida, P and Walker, E (2006) The pace of neoliberal globalization: a comparison of three popular movement campaigns in Central America. Social Justice 33, 175–190.Google Scholar
Arce, M and Bellinger, PT (2007) Low-intensity democracy revisited: the effects of economic liberalization on political activity in Latin America. World Politics 60, 97–121.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Aslund, A (2002) Building Capitalism: The Transformation of the Former Soviet Bloc. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Bai, J (2009) Panel data models with interactive fixed effects. Econometrica 77, 1229–1279.Google Scholar
Bellinger, PT and Arce, M (2011) Protest and democracy in Latin America's market era. Political Research Quarterly 64, 688–704.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Blackwell, M (2013) A framework for dynamic causal inference in political science. American Journal of Political Science 57, 504–520.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Blackwell, M and Glynn, A (2018) How to make causal inferences with time-series cross-sectional data under selection on observables. American Political Science Review 112, 1067–1082.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chipman, HA, George, EI and McCulloch, RE (2010) BART: Bayesian additive regression trees. The Annals of Applied Statistics 4, 266–298.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Coxshall, W (2010) When they came to take our resources”: mining conflicts in Peru and their complexity. Social Analysis: The International Journal of Social and Cultural Practice 54, 35–51.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Espinal, R (1995) Economic restructuring, social protest, and democratization in the Dominican Republic. Latin American Perspectives 22, 63–79.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Garretón, MA (1986) The political evolution of the Chilean military regime and problems in the transition to democracy. In O'Donnell, G, Schmitter, P and Whitehead, L (eds), Transitions from Authoritarian Rule: Latin America. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, pp. 95–124.Google Scholar
Hellman, JS (1998) Winners take All: the politics of partial reform in postcommunist transitions. World Politics 50, 203–234.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Imai, K and Kim, IS (2019) When should we use unit fixed effects regression models for causal inference with longitudinal data? American Journal of Political Science 63, 467–490.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kurtz, M and Lauretig, A (2020) “Replication Data for “Does Free-Market Reform Induce Protest? Selection, Post-Treatment Bias, and Depoliticization””, https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/WU2WSE, Harvard Dataverse, V1, UNF:6:M2D3KzULc1a60aYpM4SdiQ==[fileUNF].Google Scholar
Kurtz, MJ (2004a) The dilemmas of democracy in the open economy: lessons from Latin America. World Politics 56, 262–302.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kurtz, MJ (2004b) Free Market Democracy in the Chilean and Mexican Countryside. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McAdam, D, McCarthy, JD and Zald, MN (1996) Comparative Perspectives on Social Movements: Political Opportunities, Mobilizing Structures, and Cultural Framings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Morgan, SL and Winship, C (2014) Counterfactuals and Causal Inference. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
North, J (2000) Sound the alarm: economist James Stiglitz rips Washington's ‘market Bolsheviks’. Wall Street Journal, 17 April. https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB955757044395088744.Google Scholar
Przeworski, A (1991) Democracy and the Market: Political and Economic Reforms in Eastern Europe and Latin America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Robins, JM, Hernán, MA and Brumback, B (2000) Marginal structural models and causal inference in epidemiology. Epidemiology 11, 550–560.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Simmons, ES (2016) Market reforms and water wars. World Politics 68, 37–73.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Solt, F et al. (2014) Neoliberal reform and protest in Latin American democracies: a replication and correction. Research & Politics 1, 1–13.Google Scholar
Stekhoven, DJ and Bühlmann, P (2011) Missforest – Non-parametric missing value imputation for mixed-type data. Bioinformatics 28, 112–118.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Stokes, SC (2001) Mandates and Democracy: Neoliberalism by Surprise in Latin America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tilly, C (1978) From Mobilization to Revolution. Reading, MA: Addision-Wesley.Google Scholar
Tilly, C (2017) From mobilization to revolution. In Castañeda, E and Schneider, CL (eds), Collective Violence, Contentious Politics, and Social Change: A Charles Tilly Reader. Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 71–91.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Walton, J and Seddon, D (1994) Free Markets and Food Riots: The Politics of Global Adjustment. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Williamson, J (1990) The progress of policy reform in Latin America. Policy Analyses in International Economics 28, 74–75.Google Scholar
Wolff, J (2005) Ambivalent consequences of social exclusion for real-existing democracy in Latin America: the example of the Argentine crisis. Journal of International Relations and Development 8, 58–87.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Xu, Y (2017) Generalized synthetic control method: causal inference with interactive fixed effects models. Political Analysis 25, 57–76.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Zagha, R and Nankani, GT (2005) Economic Growth in the 1990s: Learning from a Decade of Reform. Washington, DC: World Bank Publications.Google Scholar
Supplementary material: Link

Kurtz and Lauretig Dataset

Dataset

https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/WU2WSE
Link