Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Figures and Tables
- Acknowledgments
- The Market and the Masses in Latin America
- Part I Introduction and Theory
- Part II Mass Beliefs about Market Policies in Latin America
- 3 THE ECONOMIC CONSEQUENCES AND ELITE RHETORIC OF MARKET REFORM IN LATIN AMERICA
- 4 ARE LATIN AMERICANS NEOLIBERALS?
- 5 ARE THE POOR NEOLIBERALS?
- Part III Mass Support for Reform in Brazil
- Part IV Conclusion
- Survey Data Appendix
- References
- Index
- Titles in the series
4 - ARE LATIN AMERICANS NEOLIBERALS?
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 August 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Figures and Tables
- Acknowledgments
- The Market and the Masses in Latin America
- Part I Introduction and Theory
- Part II Mass Beliefs about Market Policies in Latin America
- 3 THE ECONOMIC CONSEQUENCES AND ELITE RHETORIC OF MARKET REFORM IN LATIN AMERICA
- 4 ARE LATIN AMERICANS NEOLIBERALS?
- 5 ARE THE POOR NEOLIBERALS?
- Part III Mass Support for Reform in Brazil
- Part IV Conclusion
- Survey Data Appendix
- References
- Index
- Titles in the series
Summary
It's like Sweden with sunshine.
– Cícero Péricles de Carvalho, professor of economics at the Federal University of Alagoas (Brazil), on the welfare state and weather of his home state (Economist 2008, 39)By the time Fernando Lugo ascended to the Paraguayan presidency in 2008, only one South American electorate (Colombia's) had not elected a left-of-center president in the new millennium. Many observers spoke with certainty that this trend indicated a “massive rejection of the International Monetary Fund and the Washington Consensus” (Rohter 2005, A3), yet most made such assertions in lieu of actual data on what voters thought about market reforms. While a few scholars have conducted studies of public opinion data, they have focused on attitudes in the reform initiation stage toward broad-based structural adjustment packages. The result is a muddled understanding of whether market reforms evoke enthusiasm, outrage, or something in between.
In this chapter, I settle these questions by describing and explaining the contours of aggregate support for various market reforms in Latin America between 1990 and 2007. I do so as part of a series of hypothesis tests regarding the macro-level implications of the bottom-up and top-down theoretical arguments central to this book. The most important finding is that Latin Americans have been persistently favorable toward globalizing policies yet rather unenthusiastic about privatization. The consumer consequences (described in the previous chapter) of each policy explain this popularity gap: Globalization has benefited consumers, while privatization has harmed them.
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- The Market and the Masses in Latin AmericaPolicy Reform and Consumption in Liberalizing Economies, pp. 86 - 120Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2009