Mandate for Change: Policies and Leadership for 2009 and Beyond

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These values include equality, respect, tolerance and integrity. Senior management must lead the way and set an example by ensuring that all federal managers manifest these values. Language is not just a method of communication; it is also a reflection of a culture and of a vision of Canadian society. Linguistic duality is an important milestone toward a society that is more diverse and more open to that diversity. A review of the literature on cultural diversity management Footnote 20 highlights the close ties between managing diversity and managing linguistic duality. In fact, these two types of management originate from the same source: Managing cultural diversity is not just about appropriate representation of individuals from various backgrounds, ethnicities and cultures within an organization; it is also about respecting people in the workplace as individuals and as representatives of their culture and background.

This type of management requires special attention to the variations between cultures and individuals as well as an open-mindedness to these variations. Today, the vast majority of public service managers accept cultural diversity principles and put them into practice. Sound management of cultural diversity ensures the well-being of employees in the workplace because respect for their ethnicity and cultural background is an essential condition of this well-being.

Managing linguistic duality should be based on the same elements and have the same objectives, particularly the respect and well-being of employees. Generally, the two language communities have different cultural references and different ways of living, of doing things and of understanding the world. Footnote 21 Respecting linguistic duality is therefore not just a matter of respecting language differences; it is also a matter of respecting cultural differences.

Looking at the issue in this way leads to the conclusion that, to foster respect for linguistic duality in the workplace, it is important for both language groups to have positive interactions so that they can get to know each other better and understand their differences.

There needs to be more training, not only language training, but learning of culture, context, history, cultural sensitivities. The consequences of not respecting language rights are significant.

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Based on consultations conducted during the study, some of the consequences were on a more practical level whereas others affected individuals in a more personal way. On a practical level, not being able to use the language of one's choice in the workplace has an impact on the quality of work produced. For example, because they are less comfortable in their second language, employees who do not have the opportunity to write in the official language of their choice could find it more difficult to express themselves and would therefore be less effective.

On a personal level, employees whose language rights are not respected on a daily basis often feel like second class citizens and can experience significant stress. Discussion group participants said that not being able to work in the official language of their choice resulted in feelings of being misunderstood and underappreciated.

The negative consequences of not respecting language rights do not end there, but go way beyond. Some researchers maintain that, over time, the lack of respect for the right to work in the official language of their choice could lead to the professional assimilation of members of a minority group.

Footnote 22 According to research conducted by Matthieu LeBlanc, Francophones experience linguistic insecurity because of their intense contact with English. Various discussion group participants also noted a loss of skills in their first language because of the regular and continued use of their second language, to the point where they now prefer to use their second official language in certain aspects of their work.

To counter these effects, senior executives and managers need to understand the negative consequences of inaction on this issue and must give the same attention to language rights in the workplace as they do to cultural diversity. Sound management of diversity requires more than just complying with the law, it also requires adherence to the intrinsic values of cultural diversity.

For linguistic duality management that goes beyond the Act, priority must be given to the equality of both official languages, and to the need to foster and value their use in the workplace, thus reflecting their status as a value of the public service and Canadian society. To achieve this, managers and senior executives must be proactive champions and defenders; they must find innovative practices and be constantly guided by these values.

Theories on Economic Policies under Rightist Governments in Latin America

Within each federal institution, managers have a duty to promote the value of linguistic duality by setting an example in all areas and taking action that reflects this value. Otherwise, according to many study participants, the work environment does not foster the use of both official languages. Individual leadership in the public service is therefore a crucial element in creating a bilingual workplace. Many studies Footnote 24 have demonstrated this connection, including:. The consultations conducted during this study helped to identify the essential characteristics and behaviours of a good leader within a bilingual public service.

A summary of these characteristics and behaviours is presented in the following sub-sections. According to many study participants, having language skills in both official languages is perceived as an essential characteristic of a good leader within a bilingual public service. These skills enable managers to better serve Canadians in the official language of their choice. Bilingualism also helps senior executives and managers to foster a bilingual workplace and thereby properly exercise a leadership role.

Language skills must be considered to be as important as any other leadership skill. According to some study participants, there must be a sufficient number of senior executives who are comfortable in both official languages. Even though unilingual individuals can support bilingualism and demonstrate diligence in the application of the Act, the implementation of linguistic duality principles would be easier if the senior executives were bilingual themselves.

It is not that they need to have a perfect knowledge of official languages, but rather that they be willing to use them. Furthermore, the responsibility of bilingualism should not only lie with one language group; it should be shared between the two groups to show that it is a value shared throughout the public service. You have to be willing to speak in your second official language in formal and informal settings. As a result, they are even more inspiring. During the study, questions were raised about language skills and the use of both official languages in the workplace in highly specialized, technical or scientific fields.

This issue seems to present some significant challenges. It is a reality that cannot be ignored, however, and should be further explored in order to find solutions, which may include providing specialized training in both official languages within the institution, or working with post-secondary institutions so that training in these types of fields is available in both official languages. Leaders in highly specialized fields need to recognize the difficulties involved and do their best to foster bilingualism and to respect their employees' language-of-work rights.

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Other skills, besides language skills, that are essential to diversity management also apply particularly well to linguistic duality management. Based on the literature review and feedback from study participants, in order to be good leaders, public service managers must also be:. Managers' actions reflect their values. According to the vast majority of study participants, leaders' actions have a direct impact on the use of both official languages within the public service. Second, it is important to include language training in employees' learning plans, even for incumbents of positions that are not designated bilingual.

This will enable interested employees to have access to management positions because they will already have the required language skills. It is also important for managers to understand the various issues related to second-language learning so that they can provide proper support for language learning and retention. Study participants also identified certain behaviours that managers should adopt in their daily interactions with employees in order to foster the use of both official languages in the public service. In their opinion, in order to be good leaders within a bilingual public service, managers must:.

Behaviour can be seen, particularly by employees. To be a good leader, you have to do more than just give instructions, you have to practise what you preach in all situations. The following table outlines the Leadership Competencies Profile for Official Languages that was developed using data gathered from the study.

The profile is essentially based on the contributions of participants throughout the study's last three stages. However, the Office of the Commissioner has made some additions to establish logical connections and to make some behaviours more explicit.

In order to make it easier to use and eventually integrate it into the Government of Canada's Key Leadership Competencies Profile, the Leadership Competencies Profile for Official Languages uses the same general competencies headings. Linguistic duality is a fundamental value of Canadian society that must also be fully integrated within the public service. A change in corporate culture is needed to ensure that official languages are no longer perceived as an administrative burden, but instead as an asset that enables the public service to be more representative of the population that it serves, and therefore more relevant.

Creating a corporate environment where official languages are valued requires commitment and a willingness to act from all executives and managers at all levels of government. The Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat and the Office of the Chief of Human Resources Officer must demonstrate exemplary leadership in order to set an example for all federal institutions.

This is a critical role that they must play to ensure that Part V of the Act is implemented consistently within federal institutions. Institutions must also develop and communicate a vision and priorities that encourage employees' commitment to linguistic duality in the workplace.

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Senior management must be more strategic in its various actions and work toward achieving concrete results in this area. Lastly, to help create a bilingual work environment where openness to both official languages is present and valued, linguistic duality must be conveyed through the behaviour of senior executives and managers within federal institutions. The actions of managers have a direct impact, on a daily basis, on the use of both official languages within the public service. Managing linguistic duality on a daily basis—and ensuring that federal employees who work in regions designated as bilingual for language-of-work purposes can effectively use the official language of their choice—is a matter of respect.

Fostering linguistic duality in the workplace requires more than just acknowledging linguistic differences: Looking at the issue in this way means that, to foster respect for linguistic duality in the workplace, it is important for both language groups to have positive interactions so that they can get to know each other better and understand their differences. Managers, through their actions, can have a significant influence on this. Managers must be official languages champions, guided by the values of linguistic duality and respect. Not only must they have good language skills in both official languages, they must also be willing to use both languages at work and demonstrate behaviour that shows their commitment to linguistic duality within the public service.

Leading in a Diverse Workplace: Lessons from Diversity Competent Managers. Paper presented at the meetings of the American Psychological Association. Honolulu, Hawaii, July Boisvert, Patrick, and Matthieu LeBlanc. Canadian Centre for Management Development, Also available online at http: The Linguistic Work Environment Survey. Treasury Board of Canada, Also available online at www. Clerk of the Privy Council. Privy Council Office, Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade.

Canadian Foreign Service Institute. Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade, Also available online at www2. Official Languages in the Public Service: Library of Parliament, Office of the Commissioner of Official Languages. Public Works and Government Services Canada, Towards Real Equality of Official Languages: Official Languages Act , R. Department of Justice Canada http: Clerk of the Privy Council, Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat, Presentation delivered at the Conference of Official Languages Champions.

John's, Newfoundland and Labrador, May 16—19, Statistics Canada catalogue number XCB Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat. Baker and Peter D. The Effects of Context, Norms, and Vitality. Canada School of Public Service, Leadership in the Public Service of Canada: Public Policy Forum, Report of the Government on the Application of Language Legislation Ministry of Justice, Made in Canada Leadership: The Power of Diversity: Global Insight Publishing, La politique linguistique du multilinguisme.

Conflict and Compromise in Multilingual Societies: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, Building the Future…with Two Languages. What do you think needs to be done to encourage managers and staff to use the official language of their choice? What do you do on an everyday basis to show your support for linguistic duality in your workplace? Over the past five years, has your institution had difficulties regarding the use of both official languages?

Over the past five years, has your institution made significant progress in terms of the use of both official languages? Progress can result from formal or informal initiatives, or even cultural change. We would like examples of any types of progress. You can make a person better if you talk to the person who is with them the most. All groups except the administrators provided examples of adaptive leadership facilitators to high-quality relationships.

Medical care providers described strategies to allow high-quality relationships to develop with nursing staff, such as bringing in homemade food to share with staff. Staff also provided examples of how adaptive leadership could occur. For example, several CNAs talked about how administrators and nurses could step in and help with some direct resident care when CNAs are clearly busy with other resident care, which might free CNAs to participate more fully in decision making.

This behavior was an example of adaptive leadership because it would facilitate the opportunity for CNAs to incorporate new perspectives on resident preferences in care plans. All groups identified barriers in this theme, largely focused on how meeting standards and expectations for care did not result in resident-directed care in one of two ways. First, rules and policies sometimes directly conflicted with strategies for providing resident-directed care. A medical care provider described how the nursing home used to post a picture of each resident when he or she was younger, as a strategy to promote better staff knowledge of the resident.

They had to take them down because of confidentiality. Second, traditional metrics did not fully describe the qualities of caring necessary for culture change. You have to get all the disciplines to work on this together. This nurse identified the new ways of thinking and normative value shifts required to establish standards and expectations that are congruent with culture change.

All groups identified adaptive challenges in standards and expectations, but not all groups identified adaptive leadership to address these challenges. Specifically, no examples of adaptive leadership were described by the administrator group to address these barriers of standards and expectations. In one example of adaptive leadership, a CNA described the need for administration to be clearer with residents and families about standards and expectations of how care is provided by talking with them rather than expecting written admissions policies to be adequate.

As an example of adaptive leadership, such discussion would facilitate residents, families, and staff to shift mutual expectations of care to figure out how to accomplish resident-directed care. She tells people they can work there as long as they care about the residents. Motivation and vision was defined as the individual and shared staff motivation and vision for caregiving. All groups described barriers to culture change within this domain, which included barriers that were coded as examples of adaptive challenges.

This adaptive challenge was echoed by medical providers and administrators. Providers described encountering nurses who were talking on their cell phones instead of supervising resident care, which was viewed as a lack of motivation to take responsibility for the residents. All groups provided examples of adaptive leadership facilitators. Direct care providers described examples of adaptive leadership that were behaviors that facilitated new perspectives on commitment and motivation to develop. I think if we could incorporate it to where we are more focused on the resident than getting our 8 hours in and doing the tasks.

If we could focus on the resident, it may take a bit more on our part but it would make be less of a burden in the long run. We have to re-learn how to do things. These are examples of adaptive leadership because such approaches open up the opportunity for individuals to do the adaptive work of reconsidering their vision of resident-centered care. Workload was defined as the direct caregiver workload, including case-mix and staffing ratios. All staff described adaptive challenges arising from the workload.

Two key types of adaptive challenges were described. The first type of challenge was how to provide resident-directed care in the context of current staffing ratios, whereby nurses and CNAs felt incorporating resident preferences required too much additional time. However, given fixed resources with limited ability to substantially change staff ratios, what may be considered an adaptive challenge is how to incorporate the process of eliciting and honoring resident preferences into care routines in the context of extant staffing ratios.

The second type of workload barrier coded as an adaptive challenge was that of staffing assignments. All staff groups described adaptive challenges in implementing consistent staffing assignments. Both nurses and CNAs also discussed how consistent assignments may facilitate relationships to know resident preferences, but that rotations are also important to avoid burnout with challenging residents, and to ensure staff ability to cross-cover for one another.

Examples of adaptive leadership to address adaptive challenges in workload were described by all groups except the medical care providers. Facilitators coded as examples of adaptive leadership were behaviors and strategies that could facilitate direct caregivers developing ways to balance consistency and workload. Respect of personhood was defined as the respect of resident dignity, individuality, and choice. All groups identified barriers to culture change related to the respect of personhood that were coded as adaptive challenges.

Staff provided examples of how resident preferences were in direct conflict with nursing home policies related to promoting resident safety or socialization. For example, CNAs and nurses described how residents in two of the nursing homes were required to go to the dining room to eat, even if a resident did not wish to go. Whether following from a safety issue e. New ways of configuring care to meet these multiple goals would be required of staff.

In fact, one CNA noted how her organization clearly discussed with direct care staff that residents have a right to refuse. She noted the inherent adaptive challenge following from this, as she found that procedures that were enforced in the nursing home did not support a right to refuse:.

You have to get up! Other examples of this adaptive challenge related to aspects such as how to address residents. We have to be very formal. Sometimes, the residents would prefer to be more casual and go by their first name. Nurses and CNAs provided examples of adaptive leadership that would allow such adaptive work to occur, including more flexibility in how to apply policies, through understanding the underlying rationale for it.

One CNA gave an example of how she modified her morning care routine to be able to sit with a resident in her room to allow her to eat her breakfast in her room. Are we missing something? By contrast, although medical care providers and administrators described barriers of respect of personhood that were coded as adaptive challenges, we did not code their descriptions of facilitators as adaptive leadership. Administrators, in particular, described the use of technical expertise to address adaptive challenges of the respect of personhood.

This application of technical expertise i. However, it does not address the adaptive challenges of personhood faced by currently employed staff. Physical environment was defined as the physical structure and furnishing of the nursing home. Adaptive challenges that emerged from this set of barriers related to the adaptive work required to identify a balance between making the environment personalized and home-like, yet maximize resident function.

Example of facilitators coded as adaptive leadership occurred among nurses and CNAs who provided suggestions for how to begin the adaptive work to create a better balance between home-like and accessible. You can do more. Another nurse gave an example of how administration allowed maintenance, direct care staff, and a resident to develop a novel solution to balance home-like with function, by cutting the table legs of a dining room table to fit the resident. This study highlights the importance of recognizing adaptive challenges to culture change and applying adaptive rather than technical solutions to them.

We found many barriers to culture change identified by nursing staff, medical staff, and administrators included elements of adaptive challenges, rather than technical challenges alone. Even themes that may appear to be readily addressed through technical solutions or expertise, such as workload or physical environment, also can be framed as adaptive challenges that require adaptive leadership to address. Yet, all groups in our study described adaptive challenges in both of these two domains, as well as our other key domains of barriers and facilitators.

We might hypothesize that this finding may be explained in part by whether implementing consistent staffing assignments was considered solely a technical challenge or whether staff acknowledged and addressed the simultaneous adaptive challenges. Therefore, an important implication of our findings is that successful implementation of all aspects of culture change may require identifying and addressing both adaptive challenges and technical challenges.

Thus, our findings suggest that recognizing the critical importance of adaptive challenges in all aspects of implementing person-directed care is an important first step in developing the necessary leadership practices for culture change. As adaptive challenges are only addressed through the use of adaptive leadership, failing to develop and support adaptive leadership practices among all levels of staff will result in the mismatch between problem and solution, wasting scarce resources, and not realizing person-directed care.

Indeed, Burns and colleagues provided examples of how wicked problems addressed with tame solutions resulted in resident abuse and neglect. This recognition of the importance of adaptive challenges in implementing culture change also means that current approaches to how we prepare and develop staff in nursing homes will need to move beyond hierarchical, rule-based management strategies. Our findings, therefore, indicate the importance of ensuring that development emphasizes how to facilitate the creation of new normative values and novel solutions for how to provide person-directed care—that is, strategies and behaviors for adaptive leadership.

The adaptive leadership framework, therefore, provides a leadership approach that helps to clarify what administrators and managers can do versus what they must facilitate other staff and residents in the nursing home doing i. Even in situations of improved economic performance, the fact that neoliberal reforms have tended to exacerbate economic inequality may contribute to more moderating policies that seeks greater economic redistribution. The basis for our theory evolves from the literature, showing how political mandates can affect the policies that governments implement Grossback, Peterson, and Stimson ; Johnson and Crisp ; Light , 26 ; Mainwaring and Shugart Political mandate theory would anticipate that, because of their ideological preferences, rightist executives favor neoliberal reforms Gibson ; Middlebrook Building on research on clarity of responsibility, we present a nuanced version of what political mandate theory would predict for rightist governments and market policies.

Before developing the argument, we first develop the concept of clarity of responsibility. Unlike in political systems with divided government, where the executive and majority in the legislature come from different parties—or in cases where the president won office in a close race and voters may not know who to credit or blame for economic policies, the legislative or executive branch—a mandate suggests unified control of policymaking as the government comes from the same party Powell and Whitten , Beyond the importance of mandates for assigning responsibility, clarity of responsibility matters most during periods of economic crises, as voters can observe shocks to the macroeconomy and assign blame Duch and Stevenson Although there has been some variation in economic performance among countries in the region see Kaplan , Latin America has experienced numerous economic crises in most countries over the past two decades.

The high frequency of economic crises across much of the region increases the chance that clarity of responsibility resonates with both Latin American leaders and voters. Complementing the work of Duch and Stevenson , and Powell and Whitten , we contend that clarity of responsibility affects the policies of mandate-holding rightists. The logic of the argument is that in attempting to serve constituents as well as protect the interests of the global and domestic financial community, leaders on the right frequently face cross pressures and will give more support to their broader constituent base by moderating neoliberal policies at the minor expense of the financial community and a small number of influential rightist backers.

On the one hand, right parties need to support the interests of constituents, many of whom question the benefits of most orthodox neoliberal policies. Percent saying they are very or rather satisfied with the functioning of the market economy in the country. Many Latin Americans also have been deeply critical of privatization, a fundamental component of neoliberal models.

As much as any economic reform, privatization draws intense domestic protest tied to concerns over sovereignty, unemployment, and regulation Roberts and Arce But privatization is not the only policy that unleashes public harangues. Indeed, with the exception of trade openness, support for the neoliberal model has fallen throughout Latin America Baker ; Baker and Greene Percent agreeing or strongly agreeing with the statement: The privatization of state companies has been beneficial to the country.

Ironically, previous research suggested that Latin American politicians initiated orthodox market reforms in the s, often breaking promises in political campaigns to support greater state intervention, because elected officials calculated that such reforms would benefit their constituents and ultimately would serve their own political ambitions Stokes Rightist politicians cannot rely on a minority of rightist constituents who fully embrace the most orthodox neoliberal model if they hope to succeed electorally. On the other hand, most rightist executives and their parties recognize that in an integrated global economy, as Latin American countries have operated under for more than two decades, politicians need to maintain some measure of market reforms or they will confront economic challenges from the international and domestic financial community Luna and Rovira Kaltwasser , 16 ; Roberts , There is, of course, liable to be variation in the degree of market openness countries will uphold, which we will discuss later, but the point is that the global financial community imposes constraints on economic policies.

Most leaders realize that disregarding the interests of the global financial community and overturning neoliberal policies risks their countries losing access to desperately needed foreign capital markets. We contend that clarity of responsibility that comes with a mandate and general dissatisfaction with most market reforms increases the probability that mandate-holding rightists will moderate from their presumed preferences and the interests of the investment community and support a less doctrinaire neoliberal model.

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Because mandate holders from the right likely would be held accountable if they maintained or amplified orthodox market policies, such governments have tended to downplay neoliberal policies and have focused on their perceived strengths tied to public order and security, conservative social issues, and pro-poor policies, measures favorably received by most of their constituents. Although mandates provide presidents with greater discretion to institute their preferred policies, mandates also enhance clarity of responsibility between voters and elected officials that compel presidents to follow voter demands, in this case softening neoliberal policies.

However, we expect the more moderate neoliberal stance will have greater impact on micro-level economic policies as compared to macro-level policies. Based on literature for the developing world, the financial community particularly opposes changes at the macro level. Foreign investors rail against macro-level reforms that restrict trade openness, increase government deficit spending, and raise levels of inflation and price controls, as such policies have the most effect on their economic bottom line Kaplan ; Mahon ; Mosley ; Wibbels Because foreign investors likely will respond with large capital flight against governments that institute macro-level policy changes, mandate holders will tend to uphold macro-level reforms.

Instead, rightist governments have leaned toward more moderate micro-level economic policies, including labor and business reforms. By instituting micro-level changes such as wage increases and higher regulations on starting new businesses, the governments can gain support from labor interests and already established businesses, which may favor restrictions that reduce competition from potential newcomers while imposing minimal damage on global finance.

In situations where rightist executives do not hold a mandate, such as in minority governments, coalitions, or a bicameral opposition, we maintain that blame or responsibility for policies is harder to assign to presidents or the party in power. The fact that voters cannot clearly apportion responsibility for policies to non-mandate-holding governments provides politicians with increased political cover to maintain stricter market reforms.

Politicians from both the left and right often have incentives to support such reforms because they placate the investment community, an important group for creating jobs and whose supporters frequently contribute to political campaigns on both sides of the aisle.

However, we do not believe that the moderating effect of clarity of responsibility on the enactment of neoliberal policies is unlimited. Research on clarity of responsibility asserts that as assignment of responsibility for policies becomes easier, political actors face greater electoral consequences for enacting unpopular policies Powell and Whitten This assertion is at odds with the mandate literature, which indicates that greater electoral margins insulate political actors from electoral vulnerability and allow politicians to use more discretion Biglaiser Our theory seeks to unify these seemly disparate theories by showing that clarity of responsibility can mitigate the discretionary power of political mandates, but only to a point.

When mandates reach a size necessary to reduce electoral vulnerability, the mitigating effects of clarity of responsibility will cease. Therefore, we expect that Latin American presidents with political mandates will support more moderate neoliberal policies as clarity of responsibility increases, but as their mandates increase, and their positions become less vulnerable, they will revert to their support of more orthodox neoliberal economic policies. Rightest governments thus enact greater neoliberal market reforms, when such reforms are fairly unpopular, under two conditions: Based on work related to political mandates and clarity of responsibility, we propose the following hypotheses:.

We collected annual data for up to eighteen presidential democracies in Latin America from — see the online supplementary Appendix for the list of countries and years of the administrations. We use the four independent measures developed by the authors to arrive at a consensus on the ideology of the government. For each observation there was a placement reached by a majority of the sources, which provides us confidence that the regimes are appropriately classified.

The index includes ten economic freedoms most associated with market reforms: Each economic freedom is graded on a scale from 0 to , with higher numbers indicating a greater market orientation. The primary independent variables, comprising previous operationalizations of political mandates, are unified government , and presidential margin of victory. Executives possess unified governments when their parties hold absolute majorities in their houses that have lawmaking powers.

In the case of a bicameral legislature, executive parties must have a majority in both houses. We coded presidential margin from the ultimate round, as some elections required a second round; in these cases, a dummy variable for second round is included. Presidential and legislative electoral data come from Adam-Carr. Since a presidential mandate comprises both of these variables, we employ an interaction term between presidential margin of victory and unified government.

Additionally, since we contend that the effects of a mandate are curvilinear, we include a squared presidential margin of victory term. Latin America has seen left parties become increasingly popular, with almost all countries having elected a leftist president in the last decade Biglaiser With left parties becoming more popular, there is some reason to believe that parties on the far right may be receiving smaller electoral margins, and therefore our mandate measure could be picking up unobserved ideology effects, which explain policy outcomes.

We thus include a measure of ideology , used in previous research on mandates Baker and Greene , which is a score on a continuous 0—20 scale with 0 coded as extreme left and 20 being extreme right.

We also control for alternative explanations that could account for strict market-oriented policies. We utilize electoral volatility developed by Pedersen , which is exactly one-half of the net change in the percentage of votes won by parties from the previous legislative election. We also include a measure of presidential duration to test whether the length of tenure has an effect on enacting market-oriented policies. The boom in industries and commodities tied to production for the global market, along with the collapse of most firms geared toward ISI since the late s, has generated greater export-oriented influence in domestic labor markets Murillo ; Wibbels and Arce Because of their increasing influence, export-oriented interests are successful in lobbying politicians, who, in turn, support more extensive, market-oriented reforms Frieden ; Remmer To address the growth of trade-oriented industries in influencing economic policies, we control for the export sector using a measure of exports as a percentage of GDP.

Other researchers contend that country natural resource endowments influence policies. Specifically, countries that derive much of their revenues from natural resources favor statist policies, as the abundant proceeds earned from resource exports, often under the control of the public sector, give political leaders added financial flexibility to benefit larger segments of the populace Weyland ; Hidalgo For testing the natural resource endowment argument, we add annual ores and metals exports as a percent of merchandise exports to fuel exports as a percent of merchandise exports , a measure used in the political economy literature Jensen International factors including international organizations and trends also potentially affect economic policy.

Researchers have found that when countries enter into agreements with the IMF, as many Latin American governments have, they are frequently required to enact policies that are contrary to their interests and are often detrimental to economic growth Dreher ; Stiglitz ; Vreeland Indeed, as we note in our theoretical discussion of political mandates, financial markets tend to impose pressures on developing countries to support more open markets. We control for IMF conditionality with a dummy variable for countries currently under an IMF extended fund facility or stand-by agreement, as these arrangements come with strict loan conditions Biglaiser and DeRouen Additionally, global capital mobility can affect neoliberal economic policies.

Mosley finds that, in the developing world, financial markets exert a considerable influence on government policy. To control for global capital mobility, we include the Chinn-Ito Index , which is a measure of financial capital openness. This measure has been used in previous research on Latin America as a proxy for global capital mobility De la Torre, Ize, and Schmukler ; Huber and Stephens We also include decade dummy variables to ensure that our findings are not a result of decade differences.

All independent variables are lagged a year. For the analysis, we employ a panel data approach that accounts for the unbalanced nature of our time series. Specifically, we use a fixed effects generalized least squares GLS procedure employing weighted least squares that can handle a wide range of unequally spaced panel data patterns Baltagi and Wu This approach allows for the estimation of unequally spaced panel data and provides natural estimates of the serial correlation and variance components parameter, while still accounting for the AR 1 disturbances.

Additionally, since we are examining the effects of within-country change in neoliberal economic policies, we include country- and year-specific fixed effects. We begin to present the results of our analysis in Table 3. Models 1—3 examine the effects of mandates and clarity of responsibility on right and center-right parties, Models 4—6 include center parties, and Model 7 examines the entire ideological spectrum. This indicates that countries with unified government are more likely, and countries with greater presidential margins less likely, to promote the most strict market-oriented reforms.

This finding offers support for Hypothesis 1, but not Hypothesis 2, while the statistically significant relationship found for the squared term indicates support for Hypothesis 2. Model 2, which tests the interactive relationship between our mandate variables, provides clearer evidence of our expected relationship. Model 2 supports our expectations that unified government and presidential margins are conditional on each other, with the effect of each being affected by the value of the other.

All independent variables lagged 1 year. All regressions include country and year fixed effects. Due to the difficulty of interpreting interactive relationships from regression coefficients, Figure 1 presents the findings from Model 2 graphically. Figure 1 indicates, consistent with Hypotheses 1 and 2, that the effects of presidential margins of victory are negative and curvilinear.

Initial increases in the presidential margin of victory, which produces greater clarity of responsibility, results in an expected decrease in the likelihood that right presidents will promote the strictest market-oriented reforms. However, this effect is not continuous across the entire spectrum of margin of victory.

Figure 1 indicates that once the presidential margin of victory surpasses about 25 percent, increasing presidential margins produce greater likelihood of the implementation of the strictest market-oriented reforms.

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