Organzing Interests and Coalitions in the Politics of Market Reform in Latin America

A recent wave of deep empirical research provides a solid basis for a comparative reassessment of the role of coalitions in the politics of market reform in Latin America in the 1990s. This research confirms earlier findings that interest groups and distributional coalitions were not major protagonists in either antireform or proreform coalitions. The new research goes further empirically into analyzing the origins of interests, especially business interests, and finds them to be much more ambiguous and dynamic than assumed in earlier studies. Consequently, other factors, especially organizations and the evolving macroeconomic context, were stronger influences on preferences regarding reform. Given the relative weakness of interest group coalitions, the article provides a typology and preliminary analysis of other kinds of coalitions—electoral, legislative, and policy—that have become more central to reform politics. These other types of coalitions still require further theoretical elaboration and empirical investigation in order to determine how they can best be deployed to illuminate reform politics.