The Populist Road to Market Reform: Policy and Electoral Coalitions in Argentina and Mexico

Abstract

Governing parties face two fundamental tasks: they must pursue policies effectively and they must win elections. Their national coalitions, therefore, generally include two types of constituencies, those that are important for policy-making and those that make it possible to win elections. In effect, governing parties must bring together a policy coalition and an electoral coalition. Although often overlooked, the distinction sheds light on how the transitional costs of major economic policy shifts can be made sustainable in electoral terms. This insight provides a starting point for analyzing how two of Latin America's most important labor-based parties, Peronism in Argentina and the PRI in Mexico, pursued major free market reforms that adversely affected important sectors of their historic social constituencies while maintaining electoral dominance. Peronism and the PRI are conceived as having historically encompassed two distinctive and regionally-based sub-coalitions: a "metropolitan" coalition which gave support to the parties' development strategies, and a "peripheral" coalition which carried the burden of generating electoral majorities. This framework permits a reconceptualization of the historic coalitional dynamics of Peronism and the PRI, and sheds light on the current process of coalitional change and economic reform.