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Latin American pension reforms during the 1990s dramatically increased the number of people in the region who had a direct stake in the returns on financial capital. This article asks: How, if at all, has this expansion affected Latin American politics? It focuses particularly on popular attitudes towards neoliberalism. It argues that government-induced expansions of capital ownership do not directly affect public preferences about neoliberalism, but did so indirectly by shaping the information that people use to judge whether neoliberalism is welfare enhancing. According to this view, participation in a reformed Latin American pension system should lead to acceptance of neoliberalism when pensions returns are high, but have the opposite effect when returns are low. This study analyzes multiple datasets of Latin American survey data and finds support for this theory.

"The Ownership Society in Comparative Perspective" published on by Oxford University Press.

Foreign portfolio stock investors (FPSIs) often attach political criteria to their investment choices, sometimes in the hope of pressuring policymakers in boycotted markets to adjust their policies. This article asks when the decision to not invest in foreign stock markets for political reasons catalyzes policy change in those countries. Unlike investors in government bonds that target state interests directly, FPSIs directly target the interests of the shareholders and managers of publicly listed firms. I argue that FPSI's policymaking influence is limited by their ability to damage shareholders' and managers' interests and by those shareholders' and managers' ability to affect policy change. I test my theory with a quantitative analysis of a uniquely well-suited data set of policy reactions to CalPERS' Permissible Equity Markets Policy. The results largely conform to my theoretical expectations.

This paper argues that the foreign direct investment (FDI) data commonly used to test political science theories about FDI often diverge from the theorized about phenomena in ways that can introduce bias and complicate hypothesis testing. I describe some of the key conceptual issues surrounding the quantification of FDI, how commonly used data deals with these issues, and the extent to which those coding rules allow or prevent these data from speaking to political science theories. I show that the empirical relationship between democracy, political risk, and multinational corporations behavior is significantly impacted by 'getting the measure right.' I conclude by arguing that political science theories about FDI speak to such a wide variety of empirically and conceptually distinct phenomena that conflating them as 'FDI' does a disservice to the complexity of the topic. Adapted from the source document.

AbstractWhy and when do developing countries file trade disputes at the World Trade Organization (WTO)? Although financial conditions have long been considered an important driver of trade policy, they have been largely absent from the literature on trade disputes. We argue that developing country governments bring more trade dispute to the WTO when overvalued real exchange rates put exporters at a competitive disadvantage. This dynamic is most prevalent in countries where large foreign currency debt burdens discourage nominal currency devaluations that would otherwise serve exporters' interests. Our findings provide an explanation for differences in dispute participation rates among developing countries, and also suggest a new link between exchange rate regimes and trade policy.