This paper investigates the relationship between International Monetary Fund (IMF)-sponsored economic programs and contentious collective action in Latin America from 1980 to 2007, hypothesizing a positive relationship between participation in IMF programs and the likelihood of social protest. Specifically, we suggest that people in recipient countries protest the unpopular IMF mandates not only because of the negative effects that orthodox economic policies have on their livelihood, but mainly because they perceive a loss of legitimacy and question the sovereignty of their domestic governments. That is, deciding to participate in an IMF program can make governments more prone to being perceived as caving in to the pressures of international agents, increasing the likelihood of contentious collective action. Results from two-stage negative binomial selection models provide strong statistical support for our main hypothesis, remaining robust to different specifications of the second-stage equation and other procedures that correct for potential statistical problems.
Extant research suggests that democracy fosters capital account liberalization in developing countries. Yet the data reveal that there exists substantial variation in the extent of capital account openness across democracies in the developing world. When do democratic governments in developing states liberalize their capital account policies? We hypothesize that the market concentration of domestic private banks has a positive effect on capital account liberalization, but only when the degree of electoral particularism in these states is sufficiently high. Specifically, we claim that highly market-concentrated private banks have interests and the capacity to lobby elected politicians to liberalize capital account transactions. We then argue that politicians in particularistic democracies will respond to such lobbying pressure by dismantling capital controls as they have political incentives to cater to the interests of powerful bankers. Statistical results from a comprehensive data set provide robust support for our main hypothesis.
What explains political polarization across developing democracies? In contrast to extant studies, this article develops a novel argument that links electoral (in)stability at the party system level with varying levels of polarization. Specifically, we claim that increasing levels of electoral volatility generate high levels of uncertainty among partisan elites, which respond by setting clear policy positions that are frequently far away from the center in the ideological spectrum. As such, higher levels of volatility engender higher levels of polarization. Further, because the majority of party system change in developing democracies comes mainly from the emergence of new parties, we decompose the effects of stable party system volatility (for established parties) and replacement party system volatility (for newly competing parties) and hypothesize that higher levels of replacement volatility—as opposed to stable volatility—generate higher levels of polarization. Our main theoretical claims find strong qualitative and quantitative support.
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