CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2024
| Author | De Gaspi, Renato |
|---|---|
| Title | Democratic Developmentalism: Essays on the political aspects of development policies in Latin America |
| Summary | This dissertation discusses the practice of state-led development strategies and industrial policies in Latin American democracies and is comprised of three independent papers with different and complementary methodologies and levels of analysis. The first paper presents a fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA) of 59 presidential administrations in 14 Latin American democracies. The paper posits that the state's proactive economic interventions in Latin America were usually incomplete, focusing on only one of two complementary channels: the sectoral, through sector-specific incentives like credit and subsidies, and the macroeconomic, pursued via exchange rate devaluation. Moreover, the paper explores the political dynamics that underlie each channel, taking advantage of the methodology to explore causal conjunctions. The second paper uses a case-study methodology to unpack the cases of Brazil and Chile. With similar political conditions, these countries had governments who attempted to create state-led development strategies aimed at diversifying productive structures which were overly reliant on commodity production. Informed by an inductively derived theoretical framework and by 50 interviews with stakeholders triangulated with documents, news articles, and secondary literature, the paper presents a detailed analysis of the developmental alliances forged by governments and their state managers to support their development strategies, with different levels of success. The third and final paper dives into the sectoral politics of industrial policies in Brazil, studying the specific dynamics that leads to the alignment of business interests and developmental goals. Analysing three prototypical sectors, the paper shows that the strength of a sectoral countermovement, or the existence of countervailing power enables the state to impose conditions and discipline investments in the sector. Overall, the dissertation shows democratic developmentalism as a factor of governments, their policies, and their capacity to form alliances to support their policy choices. |
| Supervisor | Bruszt, Laszlo |
| Department | Political Science PhD |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2024/de-gaspi_renato.pdf |
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