Suchergebnisse

This book is about the consolidation of different types of distributive strategies by left governments in Southern Europe and the Southern Cone of South America after thesimultaneous transition to democracy and the market economy –the dual transition. Some left governments have relied exclusively on redistribution through the welfare state while others have also relied in wage policy as an instrument. Distinguishing between strategies advancing distribution through the welfare state (social policy) from ones advancing distribution through labor markets (wage policy) and welfare states invites to revisit the political conflict of labor political inclusion in two regions with shared economic and political institutional roots (see Moore 1966; Stepan 1978). Three factors shape left governments choice: left unity, the historical recognition of labor as a political actor and the beliefs of policy makers with regard to the employmentwage trade-off. Left (dis)unity is the main factor shaping distributive strategies, in particular with regards to wages, factor that is linked backwards with by the historical recognition of labor as a legitimate political actor before the dual transition and political decisions made by left parties or sectors during the dual transition. Left (dis)unity is linked forward, for shaping distributive strategies in the presence of labor-mobilizing parties or sectors, with the ideational importance macroeconomic equilibriums aquired for policymakers in attempting to conciliate employment and wage egalitarianism goals vis-àvis the pre-transitional period may also generate disunity. I refer to this as the employmentsalaries dilemma.

Traditionally one of the countries with highest levels of social and human development in Latin America, Uruguay is a small and eminently urban country, with an extended welfare state and universal education. From the beginnings of the twentieth century, education has been one of its main tools for promoting nationality and citizenship. The region and Uruguay experimented with different economic development models, switching development models from an Import Substitution Model (ISM) to an exportoriented model. As a result, the second half of the twentieth century entailed a series of changes in the social structures of the country. Poverty and inequality indicators grew and the architecture of the welfare state gradually lost its capacity to respond to a changing structure of social risks (Filgueira et al., 2005). Education was not insulated from these changes. In 1995, there is a revolution in the educational public system caused by the reform initiated by the national government. This reform has concentrated most of its strategies on equity in resources (with compensatory emphasis) and has resulted in centralized models that combine focused and universal resources assignment. In primary educational level, Full-Time School model has been its main and more successful tool. Eleven years after the beginning of the reform, the educational system faces, in terms of its organization, a set of tensions between the traditional structure and the emerging model. The challenges are four: Teachers' stability in schools, degree of autonomy between the school and the central administration, cultural impoverishment of the underprivileged social sectors, and the necessity of basing the expansion of the new model on additional resources. This chapter provides an analysis of the educational system characteristics associated with these four tensions, and a discussion of the most important risks in terms of universalizing the emerging transformation.

AbstractResearch on the politics of skills formation in Latin America is severely underdeveloped. This article offers a novel characterisation of the supply of skills in the region or 'skills supply profiles', taking inspiration from the comparative capitalisms literature. We identify four configurations of skills supply profiles – universalising, dual academic-oriented, dual VET-oriented and exclusionary–and analyse their historical dynamics. By doing this, we challenge general assessments of Latin America's skills formation systems as pertaining to one overarching type. This sets the stage for a deeper understanding of the politics of skills in the region and their connection with different development alternatives.

Recent empirical research shows that if we look at the nature of party-society linkages the differences between cases in the "moderate" and the "radical" strands of the Latin American left are less stark than we initially thought. Uruguay's Frente Amplio (FA), for instance, has more in common with Bolivia's Movement Towards Socialism (MAS) than with Brazil's Workers' Party (PT)—particularly in its degree of openness and responsiveness to the party's social bases. In this article, we link this finding to broader macro political outcomes that are central in the study of Latin American political economy today. Bolivia and Uruguay are, in many ways, representative of broader regional trends of the early twenty-first century: both cases experienced a dramatic growth of the middle classes, the expansion of social programs benefiting large groups, notable declines in poverty as well as in social and economic inequalities, and the increased access of subordinate social groups to national decision-making. They have achieved, in short, significant progress advancing an agenda of incorporation, defined as the expansion of substantive citizenship rights. In this paper, we explain how party organizational attributes of the MAS and the FA, especially their strong societal linkages, have contributed to shaping such outcomes—which, despite similarities in their general tendency, vary in depth and scope across the two cases. We also trace how underlying socio-political pressures generated by each party's organized social bases have constrained progress in areas that are crucial to sustaining important advances made in the past decade, such as labor, tax, education, and health reforms. This article draws on data collected through extensive fieldwork in Uruguay and Bolivia.

This paper proposes to understand a singular but salient factor that enables the wealthy to deflect their tax burden downwards: elites' political leverage to shape legislation via their capacity to influence political actors and policy outcomes. The analysis sheds light on alternative mechanisms used by economic elites over time and space. Our analysis of the political economy of taxing upper-income groups in Chile and Uruguay reveals the importance of continuous political agency on the part of organized elite interest groups. Our results show how even centre-left parties competing on a redistributive programmatic platform confront and concede to the interests of wealthy elites, especially when sustained interaction between political leaders and economic elites becomes routinized in the long run.