Political Competition, Partisanship, and Policy Making in Latin American Public Utilities

Shows that electoral competition and partisan government helped balance the conflicting demands of voters' interests with the financial pressures generated by capital scarcity.

Maria Victoria Murillo (Author)

9780521884310, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 24 August 2009

314 pages, 16 b/w illus. 23 tables
22.9 x 15.2 x 2.2 cm, 0.63 kg

'This complex but lucid study makes an important contribution to the mounting evidence that domestic politics continue to matter greatly for policy choices of Latin American governments in the era of globalization and neoliberalism. In a theoretically innovative and empirically sophisticated analysis, Murillo demonstrates how electoral competition and partisan affiliations of governments shaped policy choices with distinctive distributive implications for an array of different interests in the course of privatization and regulation of public utilities.' Evelyne Huber, University of North Carolina

This book studies policymaking in the Latin American electricity and telecommunication sectors. Murillo's analysis of the Latin American electricity and telecommunications sectors shows that different degrees of electoral competition and the partisan composition of the government were crucial in resolving policymakers' tension between the interests of voters and the economic incentives generated by international financial markets and private corporations in the context of capital scarcity. Electoral competition by credible challengers dissuaded politicians from adopting policies deemed necessary to attract capital inflows. When electoral competition was low, financial pressures prevailed, but the partisan orientation of reformers shaped the regulatory design of market-friendly reforms. In the post-reform period, moreover, electoral competition and policymakers' partisanship shaped regulatory redistribution between residential consumers, large users, and privatized providers.

1. Voice and light: the politics of telecommunications and electricity reform
2. Political competition and policy adoption
3. Casting a partisan light on regulatory choices
4. Regulatory redistribution in post-reform Chile
5. Post-reform regulatory redistribution in Argentina and Mexico
6. A multilevel analysis of market reforms in Latin American public utilities
7. Conclusion.

Subject Areas: Comparative politics [JPB], Politics & government [JP]