Endogenous Policy Making

Ryan Carlin and Timothy Hellwig challenge our claim that voters misattribute responsibility for economic performance in low-savings commodity-exporting (LSCE) countries of Latin America. They argue that we overlook incumbents’ capacity to choose “policy regimes” that signal to voters their level of...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inThe Journal of politics Vol. 82; no. 2; pp. 800 - 807
Main Authors Zucco, Cesar, Campello, Daniela
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Chicago The University of Chicago Press 01.04.2020
University of Chicago Press
Subjects
Economic performance
Endogenous
Membership
Policy making
Popularity
Savings
Voters
Latin America
commodities
misattribution
exogenous shocks
economic vote
Latin America
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Summary:Ryan Carlin and Timothy Hellwig challenge our claim that voters misattribute responsibility for economic performance in low-savings commodity-exporting (LSCE) countries of Latin America. They argue that we overlook incumbents’ capacity to choose “policy regimes” that signal to voters their level of control the economy. They also claim that LSCE membership should be allowed to vary over time and that, even then, the concept is not useful to distinguish the impact of exogenous conditions on political outcomes. This article demonstrates that several implications of Carlin and Hellwig’s alternative theory are not supported by the evidence, that their measure of policy regimes is endogenous to international conditions, and that even considering variation over time, Latin American countries remain clustered into the two original categories we proposed. We finish by showing that exogenous conditions affect presidential popularity in other LSCE countries and that the deviating case of Chile only reinforces our theory.
ISSN:0022-3816
1468-2508
DOI:10.1086/706109