Rethinking economic populism in Latin America: a most-similar design for institutional consolidation in Brazil and Argentina during the Pink Tide

• Ano de defesa: 2022
• Autor(a) principal: Rafael de M. BALDRIGHI
• Orientador(a): Maria Antonieta Del Tedesco Lins
• Banca de defesa: Andrea Ribeiro Hoffmann, Silvio Yoshiro Mizuguchi Miyazaki
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Tipo de acesso: Acesso aberto
• Idioma: eng
• Instituição de defesa: Universidade de São Paulo
• Programa de Pós-Graduação: Relações Internacionais
• País: BR
• Link de acesso: https://doi.org/10.11606/D.101.2022.tde-05102022-125427

Economic Populism is a concept popularized by a series of works by Dornbusch and Edwards in the late-1980s and early-1990s after observing a series of similar boom and bust cycles in Latin America. According to the duo, it is an approach to economics that tends to emphasize growth and reduction of inequalities while dismissing inflation, public deficits, external constraints, and the reaction of agents to non-market policies. Even though those founding works still are the main references on the subject and greatly represent the core of theories and models on Economic Populism, much has changed in the region. Thus, the objective of the present work was to conduct a Theory Refinement exercise, methodologically and conceptually, to better adequate Economic Populism in the 21st century, mainly during the Pink Tide. To do so, we added a new qualitative independent variable to the instrumentalized model: institutional consolidation. It explains how, more than three decades after Dornbusch and Edwards works, institutions in Latin America have stronger constraints than they previously had, which limits the room for maneuver of Economic Populist leaders and policies. To apply such refined theory and test the inference quality of this newly added variable, in a qualitative most-similar design, we compare the positive case for Economic Populism during the Kirchners Era in Argentina and the pragmatism in Lulas macroeconomic administration in neighboring Brazil. We conclude that the different outcomes in Brazil and Argentina are a result of a more robust evolution of institutions in Brazil after the late eighties or when Dornbusch and Edwards (1989) inaugurated the field than in Argentina. In the former, a series of economic reforms conducted by Cardoso and Lula favored pragmatism and a sound fiscal and inflationary scenario. In Argentina, a series of noxious policies from Menem to Cristina Kirchner explains how, in the early 2010s, the countrys economy (and its population) suffered. In summary, institutions were strengthened in Brazil and weakened in Argentina. More permissive economic institutions lead to the implementation of an Economic Populist agenda and more constrained institutions lead to sound macroeconomic policy and effective reduction of poverty and inequalities during the administrations analyzed.