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Why do some movements in Latin America succeed in rolling back neoliberalism or more specifically privatization while others fail? Recently, voters have elected leaders who challenge economic orthodoxy, but previous resistance was largely channeled outside of formal political institutions. We argue that protest against privatizations tend to be successful under two conditions. First, protests are much more likely to succeed when the privatization's opponents form linkages (or "brokerage") across multiple sectors of society. Broad coalitions are much more likely to achieve their goals, while groups acting alone, such as labor unions, are much more easily isolated and defeated or ignored by governments. Second, protests against privatization are more successful in achieving their goals in cases where civil rights are protected, but political representation is weak. In those cases, opponents have the legal rights to protest, but are unlikely to have opportunities for communicating their concerns through formal institutions, prompting them to channel their demands outside of existing political institutions. Using both case examples and a logistic regression our arguments are confirmed and the implications for democracy in the region are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the implications of partisanship for economic policy making in Latin America. It argues that partisanship is significant to economic policy and that general left-wing governments limit the scope of neoliberal reforms on financial system and taxation. It explains that commercial liberalization has provided an opportunity to raise domestic competitiveness in the region by opening the economy to more trade. It concludes that privatization and financial reform did not reflect any relationship with partisan differences in the government.

In the first section we briefly review different approaches to studying capital liberalization and discuss why they may not be applicable to explaining the process in Latin America. In the second section, we offer our argument to account for the nonlinear political dynamics of capital account liberalization in Latin America. Next, we discuss the research design for our empirical analysis, and then present our empirical findings for 15 Latin America countries from 1975 to 1984 and then from 1985 to 2003. Finally we conclude our paper. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Neoliberal economic policy has enjoyed a hegemonic position in Latin America for close to two decades. International Financial Institutions, successive US administrations, domestic political and economic elites, benefiting from the collapse of the Soviet Union, have left opponents of neoliberalism politically disorganized and without a coherent programmatic alternative. In recent years, however, organized resistance to neoliberal reform ? primarily over privatization -- has emerged in the region. These protests are among the first significant, successful instances of resistance against neoliberalism’s hegemony in the region. It is not clear, though, how these protests emerge, what they represent, and to what extent they represent coherent coalitional alternatives rather than simply explosions of anger among excluded populations? In other words, to what extent does this growing trend represent the emergence of a home-grown alternative to the Washington Consensus. This paper examines this issue by tracking the emergence of protest and the extent of political mobilization and coalition building in four significant episodes: the Water War in Bolivia; the 2002 protests against electricity privatization in Peru; the successful opposition to telecommunications and electricity privatization in Costa Rica; and the emergence of protests against water and energy privatization in Brazil. Our central hypothesis is that the extent to which they represent incipient coalition building around an alternative project is a function of the party system and the opportunity structure for political mobilization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]