Political Competition, Partisanship, and Policy Making in Latin American Public Utilities

Maria Victoria Murillo is Associate Professor of Political Science and International Affairs at Columbia University. She has been a faculty member at Yale University, a Fellow at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies, and a Peggy Rockefeller Fellow at the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard University. She is the author of Labor Unions, Partisan Coalitions, and Market Reforms in Latin America (Cambridge University Press, 2001) and co-editor of Argentine Democracy: The Politics of Institutional Weakness (2005). Her articles have appeared in numerous US and Latin American social science journals, and she was co-recipient of the Luebbert Award for the best article from the Comparative Politics Section of APSA in 2004.

• 1. Voice and light: the politics of telecommunications and electricity reform; 2. Political competition and policy adoption; 3. Casting a partisan light on regulatory choices; 4. Regulatory redistribution in post-reform Chile; 5. Post-reform regulatory redistribution in Argentina and Mexico; 6. A multilevel analysis of market reforms in Latin American public utilities; 7. Conclusion.

'This is a splendid, shrewd book on the political economy of policy reform and policy making in Latin America. Focusing on the regulation of two key economic sectors, telecommunications and electricity, Murillo shows that, even at the height of the liberalization and privatization waves of the last decades, electoral competition and the partisan composition of governments crucially mattered to explain how politics and distributional considerations shape the economy. This is a very welcome rebuttal of the convergence and globalization literatures and a must-read book for any political economist.' Carles Boix, Princeton University