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Chile has maintained a limited industrial policy for nearly three decades. Policy resilience during the 2000s and 2010s is especially puzzling given the political and economic context: three Socialist-led administrations; the retreat of the Washington Consensus; resource abundance from the commodity boom; and the decline of the so-called economic ‘miracle’. We present the first comprehensive analysis of industrial policy in post-authoritarian Chile (1990–present) and show the significant political influence of business actors with a preference for limited state intervention in the economy as a mechanism of policy reproduction.

What explains the remarkable resilience of pension regulation in postauthoritarian Chile, even after decades of majoritarian voter discontent and growing international and domestic criticism of Pinochet’s pioneering private capitalization system? This puzzling outcome can be understood only by looking at the combined effect of the pension industry’s long-term power-building investments and its short-term political actions to outmaneuver state and societal challengers. Engaging new theoretical developments in political economy and historical institutionalism, this study examines the long-term process by which the previously nonexistent Chilean pension industry expanded and leveraged its power during key episodes of open contestation. The analysis of pension regulation in Chile between the 1980s and the 2010s illustrates the importance of placing business power in time, motivating new rounds of theory building in the quest to address the perennial question of how business gets what it wants in the political arena. Fil: Bril Mascarenhas, Tomas. Universidad Nacional de San Martín. Escuela de Política y Gobierno; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; Argentina Fil: Maillet, Antoine. Universidad de Chile; Chile

RESUMEN El process tracing es un método para arribar a inferencias causales sólidas. Preocupados por la fragmentación creciente de la literatura en torno a variantes de process tracing, ponemos de relieve aquello que unifica el método: la reconstitución, desde distintas entradas, de una narrativa plausible y persuasiva para explicar resultados de interés. Nuestro argumento se construye a partir de la presentación de dos procesos de investigación, seleccionados por haberse iniciado desde dos entradas distintas: inductiva en un caso —por la novedad del fenómeno—, deductiva en el otro —por la existencia de teorías previas—. Mostramos cómo hacer process tracing rigurosamente, alternando momentos inductivos y deductivos según la entrada adoptada, y destacamos que estos estudios convergen en la producción de una narrativa que articula hipótesis y mecanismos causales para explicar los resultados de interés.

© 2014, The Author(s). Developing countries devote significant resources to lowering consumer prices for basic goods and services such as food and electricity. Theories of the welfare state only partially elucidate why consumer subsidy regimes grow so large and become entrenched. While the welfare state literature stresses how concentrated, organized beneficiary groups push for the expansion and protection of well-known programs such as pensions, the developing world’s consumers are atomized, and subsidies themselves are of low visibility. The size and durability of consumer subsidy regimes stem primarily from political uncertainty and price shocks that provide politicians with strong incentives to avoid blame for repeal. Over time, environmental pressures and fears of political backlash against repeal reinforce one another, increasing the fiscal burden subsidies impose and dramatically raising the political cost of program exit. In this sense, consumer subsidy programs come to form “policy traps”—initially modest policies that quickly grow and become entrenched, thereby greatly reducing politicians’ maneuvering room. We utilize this framework to analyze the meteoric growth and entrenchment of utility subsidies in post-crisis Argentina. In Argentina, subsidies grew despite the private provision of subsidized services—making it difficult for the government to claim credit—even in sectors with weakly organized interests.