Political Competition, Partisanship, and Policy Making in Latin American Public Utilities (Cambridge Studies in Comparative Politics)

This book studies policymaking in the Latin American electricity and telecommunication sectors. Murillo’s analysis of the Latin American electricity and telecommunications sectors shows that different degrees of electoral competition and the partisan composition of the government were crucial in resolving policymakers’ tension between the interests of voters and the economic incentives generated by international financial markets and private corporations in the context of capital scarcity. Electoral competition by credible challengers dissuaded politicians from adopting policies deemed necessary to attract capital inflows. When electoral competition was low, financial pressures prevailed, but the partisan orientation of reformers shaped the regulatory design of market-friendly reforms. In the post-reform period, moreover, electoral competition and policymakers’ partisanship shaped regulatory redistribution between residential consumers, large users, and privatized providers.

Maria Victoria Murillo is Associate Professor of Political Science and International Affairs at Columbia University. She has been a faculty member at Yale University, a Fellow at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies, and a Peggy Rockefeller Fellow at the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard University. She is the author of Labor Unions, Partisan Coalitions, and Market Reforms in Latin America (Cambridge University Press, 2001) and co-editor of Argentine Democracy: The Politics of Institutional Weakness (2005). Her articles have appeared in numerous US and Latin American social science journals, and she was co-recipient of the Luebbert Award for the best article from the Comparative Politics Section of APSA in 2004.