The Politics of Market Reform in Fragile Democracies

By Kurt Weyland. 2002

249 citations recorded by the source corpus.

An examination of a question central to comparative politics and economics: Why do some leaders of fragile democracies attain political success - culminating in re-election victories - when pursuing drastic, painful economic reforms while others see their political careers implode? Kurt Weyland examines, in particular, the surprising willingness of presidents in four Latin American countries to enact daring reforms and the unexpected popular support. He argues that only with the robust cognitive-psychological insights of prospect theory can one fully account for the twists and turns of politics and economic policy in Argentina, Brazil, Peru, and Venezuela during the 1980s and 1990s. Assessing conventional approaches such as rational choice, Weyland concludes that prospect theory is vital to any systematic attempt to understand the politcs of market reform. Under this theory, if actors perceive themselves to be in a losing situation they are inclined toward risks; if they see a winning situation around them, they prefer caution. In Latin America, Weyland finds, where the public faced an open crisis it backed draconian reforms. And where such reforms yielded an apparent economic reco

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics

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Citations in the corpus

India’s New Middle Class: Democratic Politics in an Era of Economic Reform (2006, background): “For a discussion of individual cognitive-psychological factors see Weyland 2003.”
Governments and unpopular social policy reform: Biting the bullet or steering clear? (2009, background): “Moreover, ‘prospect theory explains which one of the available options is chosen, [but] does not account for the range of options that a decision-maker considers’ (Weyland 2002: 70; emphasis added).”
Neoliberalism and Democracy in Latin America: A Mixed Record (2004, background): “Thus, people’s economic calculations are much more complicated and sophisticated-and more susceptible to persuasion and leadership-than the literature used to assume (see Stokes 2001b; Graham and Pettinato 2002; Weyland 2002).”
Democratization and Economic Globalization (2009, background): “…and find empirically that political liberalization and democracy have a positive effect on trade and capital account openness (Brune et al. 2001, Dutt & Mitra 2002, Eichengreen & Leblang 2007, Garrett 2000, Milner & Kubota 2005, O’Rourke & Taylor 2006, Stokes 2001, Weyland 2002, Quinn 2003).”
Economic and Security Regionalism among Patrimonial Authoritarian Regimes: The Case of Central Asia (2009, background): “Political transition, especially from one authoritarian regime to another, is characterised by the rise and consolidation of vested interests, some old and others new (Hellman 1998, pp. 218–22; Weyland 2002, p. 60).”
Going Where the Money Is: Strategies for Taxing Economic Elites in Unequal Democracies (2013, background): “The observation that economic crisis and especially hyperinflation dispose elites to tolerate increased taxation or other economic reforms is common in literature on structural adjustment (Acuña, 1994; Weyland, 2002).”