The three pillars of neoliberalism: Chile's economic policy trajectory in comparative perspective

Abstract

Since the Great Recession, the durability of neoliberalism has been at the forefront of scholarly debates, and explanations of this durability have proliferated. Yet, no systematic attempt has been made to test these theories' individual explanatory power and/or fit them into a coherent framework. In this article I argue that neoliberalism's dynamics and continuity in time are based on three pillars: ideas, institutions and interests. I disentangle the causal contribution of each pillar to understand the continuity of neoliberal policy regimes and offer a guide to test them against empirical evidence. Using congruence analysis, I use this framework to analyze the durability of neoliberalism in Chile. The article provides a theory of neoliberalism based on the complementarity between ideas, institutions and interests, gives an explanation for the continuity of neoliberalism in Chile, and puts the Chilean case in comparative perspective, offering a set of hypotheses about neoliberalism's dynamics in different contexts.

Since the Great Recession, the durability of neoliberalism has been at the forefront of scholarly debates, and explanations of this durability have proliferated. Yet, no systematic attempt has been made to test these theories' individual explanatory power and/or fit them into a coherent framework. In this article I argue that neoliberalism's dynamics and continuity in time are based on three pillars: ideas, institutions and interests. I disentangle the causal contribution of each pillar to understand the continuity of neoliberal policy regimes and offer a guide to test them against empirical evidence. Using congruence analysis, I use this framework to analyze the durability of neoliberalism in Chile. The article provides a theory of neoliberalism based on the complementarity between ideas, institutions and interests, gives an explanation for the continuity of neoliberalism in Chile, and puts the Chilean case in comparative perspective, offering a set of hypotheses about neoliberalism's dynamics in different contexts.