Luna 2010

"The left turns : why they happened and how they compare", Juan Pablo Luna 2010 

in Cameron, Maxwell A, and Eric Hershberg. 2010. Latin America's Left Turns: Politics, Policies, and Trajectories of Change. Boulder [Colo.: Lynne Rienner Publishers.

“Available narratives fail to identify and explain the important political and policy divergences that occur within each type, not distinguishing between cases pertaining to different leftist types and to crucial intragroup divergences.” (25)

To understand what (left) governments do while in office, need to consider partisan constraints and nonpartisan ones

in terms of partisan constraints:  Interest group fragmentation in LA means that parties need to cobble together heterogeneous coalitions to win elections.  This, in turn, means that once a governing left party is in office, it  faces stark distributive conflicts and usually competing interests from base.

Finally, there are exogenous constraints, particular to each country’s long-term development

Chile

• Little relationship between organized labor and Concertacion, creating few endogenous constraints.
• most Chileans seem alienated from politics, don’t identify with any party
• likely that voters switched from conservative vote in 2001 to Socialist in 2005 because both candidacies represented a “renovating swing”
• thus LOWER constraints for Concertacion
• progressive policy change will demand top-down leadership (Lagos or Bachelet will have to want to do it!)
• Moreover, ISI totally demolished, so there are no rents to be taken away
• Social groups marginalized, have become alienated from social mobilization in favor of individual market consumption and targeted poverty relief measures
• Concertacion will have to take the lead on creating a social democratic state
• however, business sectors still have lots of clout, can block lots of things

Uruguay

• party with ‘mass appeal’
• originally allied with organized labor, solidified their link in 1990s
• in 2000s got more support from the poor, who were usually coopted by mainstream parties
• 55% align themselves with party, 65% are ‘sympathizers’
• Overall structure of the party (good regional bases, alliances with interest groups, consolidated leadership, programmatic appeal) translates into higher levels of endogenous constraints
• Vazquez filled cabinet with FA people to keep fighting “inhouse”
• labor has mobilized against FA to get what it wants
• ISI only partially dismantled, so there are three Uruguays
• upper class who are market-oriented, trade with the world
• a group of legacy corporatists who rely on rents
• socially marginalized group who can’t compete on the market, but also don’t have access to rents in corp. system
• second is FA’s traditional base, third becoming more important to them
• CONCLUSION:
• should pay attention to partisan and nonpartisan constraints, shape ability of governments to make changes