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Low-Intensity Democracy Revisited: The Effects of Economic Liberalization on Political Activity in Latin America

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 June 2011

Moises Arce  and
Paul T. Bellinger Jr
Moises Arce
Affiliation:
University of Missouri-Columbia, [email protected].
Paul T. Bellinger Jr
Affiliation:
University of Missouri-Columbia, ptbhwb@ mizzou.edu.
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Abstract

Existing literature emphasizes the disorganizing or weakening effects of economic liberalization on civil society, whereby free-market policies are said to demobilize and depoliticize collective actors. The article evaluates the effects of economic liberalization on large-scale societal mobilizations across seventeen Latin American countries for the period 1970–2000. The article further tests the effects of economic liberalization on individual political participation across sixteen Latin American countries for the period 1980–2000. In contrast to the atomization literature, this article provides strong evidence that economic liberalization leads to greater levels of societal mobilization in the context of free-market democratization. The article also demonstrates that economic liberalization does not induce a decline in political participation. Collectively, these results cast doubt on the theoretical underpinnings and empirical findings presented in Kurtz (2004).

Type
Research Article
Information
World Politics , Volume 60 , Issue 1 , October 2007 , pp. 97 - 121
Copyright
Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 2007

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References

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32 We thank an anonymous reviewer for bringing this omission to our attention.

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40 Morley, Machado, and Pettinato (fn. 26); Escaith and Paunovic (fn. 26).

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48 We are grateful to Carolina Fornos, Timothy Power, and James Garand for sharing the data that they used in their voter turnout study. The authors of this manuscript were able to replicate their results as reported in Fornos, Power, and Garand (fn. 33), 923. We collected the data on turnout as the percentage of registered voters that vote, which is the measure used by Kurtz, from the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (http://www.idea.int) and other electoral data sources.

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68 World Bank (fn. 43).

69 Fornos, Power, and Garand (fn. 33), 921.

70 These data are from Freedom House, available at http://www.freedomhouse.org/.

71 The presidential and legislative founding election years are respectively Argentina (1983,1983), Bolivia (1980, 1980), Brazil (1989, 1986), Chile (1989, 1989), El Salvador (1984, 1985), Guatemala (1985, 1985), Honduras (1985, 1985), Mexico (1994, 1994), Paraguay (1989, 1989), Peru (1980, 1980), and Uruguay (1984,1984). See also Fornos, Power, and Garand (fn. 33), 935.

72 The source of these data is the same as for the turnout sources; see fn. 48.

73 Morley, Machado, and Pettinato (fn. 26); Escaith and Paunovic (fn. 26).

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76 Ibid., 295, emphasis added.

77 Ibid.

78 These results also do not change using Polity scores higher than or equal to 7. There is also no support for the atomization thesis when we substitute the index of economic liberalization for the trade liberalization subindex as in Kurtz (fn. 6), 293.

79 The results reported in Tables 3 and 4 have also been cross-checked utilizing a counter or trend variable. The estimates remained identical to those generated with a single dummy variable. Substituting year dummies for these period dummies did not significantly alter our results. Adding a lagged dependent variable to the right-hand side of the equation also did not produce substantive changes in our main results.

80 Banks (fn. 39); see Appendix 2 for a summary of descriptive statistics.

81 Similar to Fornos, Power, and Garand (fn. 33).

82 Similar to Kurtz (fn. 6).

83 Model 10 is the only exception to this finding. The interaction term economic liberalization 'de mocracy becomes statistically significant at the 10 percent level at high levels of democracy. Specifically, only when democracy (based on the Freedom House rating) reaches the values of 9 and 10, there appears to be a drop in turnout. Given that this relationship appears only at very high levels of democracy (the maximum level of democracy is 10), we believe that the drop in turnout may have to do less with social anomie than satisfaction.

84 Fornos, Power, and Garand (fn. 33), 923.

85 Lora, Eduardo and Panizza, Ugo, ”The Future of Structural Reform,” Journal ofDemocracy 14 (April 2003Google Scholar). In Argentina, for instance, support for labor reforms was mostly rhetorical and calls for reform were made ”largely as a signal to appease international organizations and foreign investors.” Bambaci, Ju-liana, Saront, Tamara, and Tommasi, Mariano, ”The Political Economy of Economic Reforms in Argentina,” Policy Reform 5, no. 2 (2002), 83–85CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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88 Polanyi, Karl, The Great Transformation (New York: Farrar & Rinehart Inc., 1944Google Scholar).

89 Fornos, Power, and Garand (fn. 33), 923.

90 Kurtz (fn. 6), 298.