Welcome to Public Choice in Latin America
A new Substack for understanding Latin American politics through economics, with insights from academic research.
Why Latin America?
Latin America is special in many ways. Probably not for good reasons, though. Pundit Millôr Fernandes used to say that when an idea becomes really old and outdated, it comes to live here – he referred to his home, Brazil, but it certainly applies to Latin America in general: say, import-substitution industrialization.
The ideas that are born here are certainly not better. We are the region known for giving the world the worst of populism, home of Juan Domingo Perón, Getúlio Vargas, Alan García, and Salvador Allende. We developed our own tradition of bad constitutions, what Roberto Gargarella called “aspirational” constitutionalism. They serve not to organize a state and protect certain rights, but rather to serve as a manifest that drives social change and remedies inequalities. This tradition gave Brazil the third-longest constitution in the world; Chile seemingly dodged the bullet.
Even when we try to copy good ideas, it doesn’t work. The constitution of Argentina is heavily inspired by that of the United States, yet it failed miserably in providing stability. The same goes for the rest of the countries. Between 1950 and 1990 alone, there were 118 coup attempts in Latin America (Bjørnskov & Rode, 2020).
On the economic side, it is probably worse. In the 1960s, Cuba entered one of the most unsuccessful economic experiments of our time. In the 1970s and 1980s, we had the worst inflation rates across the world, with eight cases of hyperinflation. As we entered the 2000's, we experienced the return of populism, leading to the largest peacetime economic collapse in modern history in Venezuela, and the world’s worst inflation rate in Argentina.
You get the idea.
All of this has led scholars to reject well-established theories, arguing that they don’t apply to Latin America. While there are indeed a lot of theoretical shortcomings, we think the overall claim is misplaced.
Why Public Choice?
Our mission here is to leverage Public Choice to fill that gap as a major contribution to the study of Latin American politics. Put simply, we want to bring “the economic way of thinking” to explain phenomena like populism, corruption, and rent-seeking.
Public Choice has been a vibrant and highly productive field in the United States and Europe, but unfortunately, it has largely overlooked Latin America. We think the gains from trade, so to speak, are tremendous.
A brief history
This project has been, in many ways, several years in the making. In 2017, JP was still an undergrad in Brazil and attended a talk by Nicolás at a conference in Rosário, Argentina. Several years later, they met again as Nicolás came to Texas Tech University to give a seminar on populism at the Free Market Institute.
We immediately started working on a paper together, which is forthcoming soon in Constitutional Political Economy, and have also studied the institutional impact of populism in Latin America (with Alex Padilla and Karla Hernández), recently published in the European Journal of Political Economy.
But it was two years ago, at the 60th Public Choice Society Meeting, that we started to think more seriously about a broader “Public Choice in Latin America” project after Nicolás lectured on a presidential session with the same title.
What to expect?
As the first and main “product” of this joint project, we – with Alex Padilla – will soon be launching the Latin American Left-Leaning Populism Index (LALLPI). We highly recommend (and appreciate) that you consider subscribing to be the first to know as soon as it launches.
We will also be sharing highlights from some of our latest publications
We also plan for this to become a recurring newsletter, where we share conference and publication opportunities and guest posts from scholars wanting to share more about their research with a more general audience. We would highly value your opinion on the future of this project.
Do you have any other ideas? We’d love to hear them in the comments.
Thank you for being a part of this project. Again, please consider subscribing to get all future updates and sharing with other friends who might be interested.
Our many thanks to several people who participated in the “Public Choice in Latin America” sessions at PCS over the recent years and encouraged this project elsewhere, including Edward López, Santiago Fernández Ordóñez, Lenore Ealy, Carroll Ríos de Rodríguez, Pete Calcagno, Amy Willis, David Skarbek, Michael Munger, Ryan Yonk, Henry Moncrieff, and Ricardo Noé.