The three pillars of neoliberalism: Chile’s economic policy trajectory in comparative perspective

ABSTRACT

Since the Great Recession, the durability of neoliberalism has been at the forefront of scholarly debates, and explanations of this durability have proliferated. Yet, no systematic attempt has been made to test these theories’ individual explanatory power and/or fit them into a coherent framework. In this article I argue that neoliberalism’s dynamics and continuity in time are based on three pillars: ideas, institutions and interests. I disentangle the causal contribution of each pillar to understand the continuity of neoliberal policy regimes and offer a guide to test them against empirical evidence. Using congruence analysis, I use this framework to analyze the durability of neoliberalism in Chile. The article provides a theory of neoliberalism based on the complementarity between ideas, institutions and interests, gives an explanation for the continuity of neoliberalism in Chile, and puts the Chilean case in comparative perspective, offering a set of hypotheses about neoliberalism’s dynamics in different contexts.

KEYWORDS:

• Neoliberalism
• continuity
• economic policy
• Chile
• congruence analysis

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Jens Beckert, Tomás Bril-Mascarenhas, Candelaria Garay, Antoine Maillet, Cecilia Rossel, Cristóbal Rovira, Eduardo Silva, participants at LASA (2015), REPAL (2016), the Santiago Summer School on Economy and Society (2016) and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions. Usual caveats apply.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributor

Aldo Madariaga is Assistant Professor at the Centre for Economics and Social Policy (CEAS), Universidad Mayor, Santiago, Chile and Adjunct Researcher at the Centre for Social Conflict and Cohesion Studies (COES) (CONICYT/FONDAP/15130009). His research has been published in Governance, Socio-Economic Review, Policy Sciences Journal, and The Journal of Development Studies, and is the author of Neoliberal Resilience. Lessons in Democracy and Development from Latin America and Eastern Europe (Princeton University Press, forthcoming).

ORCID

Aldo Madariaga http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1219-8355

Notes

1 Although the three turning points are temporally ordered, I do not provide a path-dependency or temporal-causation argument.

2 Although one can imagine the three propositions to be causally linked, the congruence method here employed allows confirming or disconfirming the presence of each causal link but not testing the complete causal chain (Beach & Pedersen, 2016, pp. 272–273; Blatter & Haverland, 2012). Hence, I leave the analysis of the complete causal process for future research.

3 Interview with the author, Santiago, 2013. Italics added.

4 Senators Pinochet and Errázuriz were impeached, temporarily depriving them of voting rights in Congress.

5 In the Pinochet constitution, outgoing presidents had the authority to nominate three non-elected senators and become themselves life-long senators.

6 Data from ECLAC.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Comisión Nacional de Investigación Científica y Tecnológica [grant number CONICYT/FONDAP/15130009]; Comisión Nacional de Investigación Científica y Tecnológica [grant number Fondecyt regular 1190070].