Charles H. Blake

Market reforms and corruption in Latin America: New means for old ways

Abstract Many liberal economists hail market‐oriented reforms as a means to combat corruption in emerging Latin American democracies with state‐led economies. Such arguments assume that reforms like privatization and market deregulation by definition will eliminate the politicians’ ability to use state enterprises and government regulations to their own personal advantage. However, there has been little academic scrutiny of how these reforms have been actually implemented in Latin America. In this article, we contend that, unless market reforms are pursued in a context of transparency, they can be used as new means to pursue old corrupt ends. We begin by constructing an actor‐centered model of corruption as a function of willingness and opportunity. We then develop two hypotheses regarding die influence of economic reform on the opportunity structure for corruption: executive discretionary power will increase, and the modalities of corruption will adapt to put the economic reforms to corrupt use. An analy...

The enactment of national health insurance: a Boolean analysis of twenty advanced industrial countries.

The scholarly literature on health care politics has generated a series of hypotheses to explain U.S. exceptionalism in health policy and to explain the adoption of national health insurance (NHI) more generally. Various cultural, institutional, and political conditions are held to make the establishment of some form of national health insurance policy more (or less) likely to occur. The literature is dominated by national and comparative case studies that illustrate the theoretical logic of these hypotheses but do not provide a framework for examining the hypotheses cross-nationally. This article is an initial attempt to address that void by using Boolean analysis to examine systematically several of the major propositions that emerge from the case study literature on the larger universe of twenty advanced industrial democracies. This comparative analysis offers considerable support for the veto points hypothesis while still finding each of the factors examined to be relevant in certain scenarios. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of these findings for future research and for advocates of national health insurance in the United States.

The dynamics of political corruption: Re-examining the influence of democracy

With the emergence of the Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI), several recent studies have conducted cross-national, empirical analyses of the determinants of political corruption as measured by the CPI. These studies find stable support for the importance of economic factors (such as national wealth and trade) while the role of political factors has been limited. This article develops some conceptual and methodological modifications to the study of democracys influence on the probability of corruption. These changes demonstrate that the consolidation of a vital democracy maintained over time exercises a more powerful influence over corruption than past research had indicated.

Social Pacts and Inflation Control in New Democracies The Impact of “Wildcat Cooperation” in Argentina and Uruguay

This article examines both the advocacy of social pacts in new democracies and the common assumption that labor presents the chief obstacle to social pacts. Game theory is used heuristically to demonstrate that in slack labor markets business will be more opposed to pacts than labor because individual workers will make more concessions at the plant level than labor confederation leaders will offer in peak-level negotiations. An examination of wage bargaining in the first 3 years of the new Argentine and Uruguayan democracies supports this hypothesis. The article closes with a reexamination of the wage-centered debate on inflation in contemporary new democracies.

The politics of inflation-fighting in new democracies

Several scholars have advocated social pacts as a means to combat inflation in new democracies. This article examines efforts to negotiate social pacts in five nascent democratic regimes during their first five years in existence. Boolean analysis demonstrates the improbable nature of the social pacts negotiated in Spain; subsequent analysis aims at improving our understanding of why Spain successed. While social pacts have been minimally useful in most new democracies, inflation has been combatted more successfully in many countries (including some of the cases analyzed here) via the move from state capitalism toward more free-market policies. While market economics has been more successful in fighting inflation, the political effects of such policies have been mixed.

Resolving the Argentine paradox : politics and development, 1966-1992

The Crisis of Argentine Political Economy and the Breakdown of Corporatism, 1969-1989 Ogania and the Industrial Alliance, 1966-1973 Juan Peron and the Populist Alliance, 1973-1976 Videla and the Liberal Alliance, 1976-1983 Alfonsin and the End of the Breakdown, 1983-1989 An Overview of the Breakdown of Corporatism The Menem Presidency and the Break with the Past.