A member of the Honduran elite and elected president with a right-of-center platform in 2005, Manuel Zelaya soon came to be allied with Latin America's bloc of radical left-wing governments-this being the first case of a post-democratization right-to-left policy switch in the region. The aim of this article is to assess the reasons that could have motivated Zelaya's ideological turn. After a brief discussion of the Honduran political process, we review the literature about the issue of policy switching and proceed to an empirical analysis of the Honduran case. We find that the fragility of the country's energy sector and the alliance with Venezuela in a context of international economic crisis and high oil prices could have triggered a causal mechanism in Honduras similar to the one caused by currency scarcity and international pressure pointed to by the literature as the leading cause for traditional left-to-right switches, which suggests that this case study could serve as a pattern-matching exercise to the general findings of currently accepted switch theory.
In the 1930s the Bolivian and Mexican governments decreed the nationalization of their respective oil industries, thus starting a juncture of tensions in their relationship with the United States government and companies. In both cases foreign companies quit the respective host countries, but Bolivia was less successful than Mexico in maintaining its initial stand in face of the external pressure. Following a most-similar-system design strategy to compare both cases of asymmetrical confrontation, which share a similar set of conditions regarding simultaneity, starting causes of the conflict, actors involved and international context, we contend that the difference in the confrontation’s resolution is mainly attributable to differing domestic variables. Controlling for the similarity in external conditions, we show that the building and maintenance of a strong internal support coalition was critical for the capacity of the weakest part to advance its interest in an asymmetrical atmosphere.
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