Policy drift in ideologically heterogeneous governments: tax policy in Latin America

Abstract

The relation between taxation and partisanship is a widely studied topic in Political Science. However, previous works have provided conflicting findings without clarifying which parties are most prone to progressive taxation. These studies also did not consider one distinctive feature of Latin American politics: coalition governments. Using the level of direct tax collection as a proxy for progressive taxation and panel data of Latin American countries since 1990, we investigate how progressive taxes vary across a scale of ideology observed in the executive branch along with the ideological heterogeneity of its coalition. The results show that ideologically heterogeneous governments present a policy drift, as the policies being enacted depart from parties’ original preferences. Homogeneous left-wing governments collect more direct taxes than ideologically heterogeneous coalitions led by governments with the same ideology. The same dynamic is observed with homogeneous right-wing governments, which collect more indirect taxes in ideologically homogeneous coalitions. These results create new paths of research highlighting the need to include the government’s composition in the analysis to understand policy design and the need to unravel the mechanism through which policy drift occurs in ideologically heterogeneous governments.

The design roots of policy problems: Unpacking the role of procedural tools in design fitness and resilience

“…Conceptual clarity on the design of policy mixes is necessary for the diagnosis of such design-linked policy problems. To be sure, policy scholars have long recognized the importance of understanding how policy designs contribute to policy problems or undermine policy objectives and developing design solutions to keep policies from drifting (Lazzari, 2022). Design-focused studies have sought to understand why a particular "assemblage" (or portfolio or package) of tools is chosen over another.…”