Contestation and incorporation: Brazil and Argentina’s “Left Turns” amidst legacies of market reform
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Abstract
In the early 2000s Brazil and Argentina each departed from the neoliberal experiment that defined the 1990s and experienced electoral victories by leftist leaders—Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Néstor Kirchner, respectively. While both leaders campaigned on promises of redistribution and social policy expansion, Lula and Kirchner's leftist regimes varied in their degrees of moderation. Increased social spending, heterodox macroeconomic policy, innovative inclusionary policy innovations, and high degrees of political participation by previously excluded groups defined the ‘Left Turn’ in Argentina, whereas policy advancements under Brazil’s leftist regime were largely parallel to that of the center-regime that preceded Lula’s term. Macroeconomic orthodoxy was sustained, government spending changed marginally, and many of the innovative social policies put forward were in line with previous social policy expansions. This paper attempts to explain the variation between Lula and the Kirchners leftist agendas, arguing that the scope of neoliberal reform in each state informed the nature of moderation in the regimes that followed. Rapid and far-reaching reform in Argentina would destabilize the political arena and facilitate the incorporation of popular actors by the Kirchners. Pragmatic and more moderate reform in Brazil would consolidate the stability of the political arena and peripheralize the role of popular actors during Lula’s term.
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Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International