The technocratic barrier to wage policy: theoretical insights from the Chilean Concertación

Abstract

After Latin America’s transition to a market economy in the 1980s and 1990s, most left-wing governments in the region recognised the importance of committing to macroeconomic equilibria and successfully managed to combine this goal with a wide array of social policies. Wage policy, however, proved a conflictive arena in the wake of a period of harsh austerity measures. This article provides unique insights from the experience of the Chilean Concertación governments (1990–2010) about the important role intra-left conflicts played in the advancement of collective labour rights. My working hypothesis is that the conflict between technocrats and non-technocrat political cadres in conjunction with a perceived trade-off between growth and distribution was a major determinant of wage outcomes. My analysis relies on a mixed-methods approach combining regression analysis and process tracing. Chile’s attempts at labour reform during the Concertación governments help explain how the perceived trade-off mentioned above may have unfolded not only in Latin America but also in other regions of the developing world. The novelty of this analysis lies in highlighting intra-left conflict as an important and understudied driver of labour and wage policies and elucidating the political economy of distributive strategies during the period 1990–2010.

Keywords:

• Chile
• wage policy
• labour
• party–labour relations
• labour reform

Acknowledgements

The author is grateful to Santiago Anria, Mathew Carnes, Carlos Freytes, Diego Gianelli, Evelyne Huber, Santiago Lopez-Cariboni, Juan Pablo Luna, Aldo Madariaga, Sara Niedzwiecki, Maritza Paredes, Pablo Perez Ahumada, Rafael Piñeiro, Timothy Power, Jennifer Pribble, Kenneth Roberts, Fernando Rosenblatt, Cecilia Rossel, David Shwartz, Liz Zeichmeister, participants in workshops at the Universidad Católica del Uruguay and Universidad Mayor in Chile, and participants in panels at LASA and APSA annual meetings for their useful comments on earlier versions of this manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 See the History of the Law (Chilean Congress National Library 2001b, 115, 665, 675 and 690) for explicit mentions of these issues during the project debate. See Drake (2003) for an in-depth analysis of these conflictive issues during the period.

2 Similar trends were observed outside Latin America, most notably in the British Labour Party (McIlroy 1998) or France’s Socialist party (Amable 2016), during the period.

3 Institutional senators (also referred to as designed senators) which existed in Chile between 1990 and 2006, were appointed members to the senate. A total of nine were to be appointed by the National Security Council (four), the Supreme Court (three) and the President (two).

4 Williamson (1994), Maxwell and Domínguez (1997) and Joignant (2011) use the term ‘technopol’ to characterize a ‘technocrat’ with political skills and usually formally belonging to a party. This distinction, however, is not relevant for the analysis.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Agencia Nacional de Investigación e Innovación del Uruguay (ANII) under Grant ‘Fondo Clemente Estable’ (FCE_1_2017_1_135444).

Notes on contributors

Juan A. Bogliaccini

Juan A. Bogliaccini is a professor of political science in the Department of Social Sciences, Universidad Católica del Uruguay. He has a PhD in political science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (2012). His research focuses on the study of the political economy of capitalist systems and welfare-related policymaking. He was founding chair of the Department of Social and Political Sciences (renamed Social Sciences in 2019) at the Universidad Católica del Uruguay (2012–2016).