Citation:
Date Presented:
10 February 2012Abstract:
This thesis will examine policy stability in Argentina and Brazil, where by “policy stability,” I mean “the level of fluctuation in policies.” In a comparison of the levels of policy stability in Argentina and Brazil, an intriguing puzzle becomes evident. By the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s, both countries could be described as “messes” in terms of their levels of policy stability. In Argentina and Brazil at this moment, laws and governance models would change radically in a relatively short period of time, with no apparent external cause. Nevertheless, throughout the next two decades through today, Brazil was able to stabilize, whereas Argentina has continued to exhibit an extremely high degree of policy volatility. Throughout the thesis, in trying to solve this puzzle, I will narrow my focus to policies in the economic realm. I will analyze two root causes of this divergence between the countries, namely the strength of institutions of horizontal accountability and the degree of consensus-building in both the executive and legislative branch. With regards to the former, I will examine the weakness of the Argentine congress, Supreme Court and government bureaucracy relative to its Brazilian counterparts. With regards to the latter, I will demonstrate how although the different political actors in Brazil became willing to compromise and sort out differences starting in the mid-1990s (particularly through coalitions), in Argentina negotiation and cooperation among politicians continue to be virtually nonexistent. After linking these two independent variables to policy stability on a theoretical level, I will use three representative case studies to illustrate this link, namely pension reform, monetary policy, as well as privatization/nationalization schemes.