Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Social Protection and the Market in Latin America
- PART I RECASTING THE DEBATE OVER PENSION PRIVATIZATION
- PART II HOW PATH-DEPENDENT INSTITUTIONS CHANGE
- PART III THE TRANSFORMATION OF SOCIAL PROTECTION IN LATIN AMERICA
- 4 Pension Reform in Latin America: Overview and Scope of Institutional Transformation
- 5 Pension Reform in an Open Economy: Negotiating Globalization's Double Bind
- 6 Contesting Institutional Change in Society: Where Political Strategies Meet Institutional Legacies
- 7 Legislative Conflict and Institutional Change: Building Majorities behind Loss-Imposing Reform
- PART IV CONCLUSIONS AND IMPLICATIONS
- References
- Index
6 - Contesting Institutional Change in Society: Where Political Strategies Meet Institutional Legacies
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 July 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Social Protection and the Market in Latin America
- PART I RECASTING THE DEBATE OVER PENSION PRIVATIZATION
- PART II HOW PATH-DEPENDENT INSTITUTIONS CHANGE
- PART III THE TRANSFORMATION OF SOCIAL PROTECTION IN LATIN AMERICA
- 4 Pension Reform in Latin America: Overview and Scope of Institutional Transformation
- 5 Pension Reform in an Open Economy: Negotiating Globalization's Double Bind
- 6 Contesting Institutional Change in Society: Where Political Strategies Meet Institutional Legacies
- 7 Legislative Conflict and Institutional Change: Building Majorities behind Loss-Imposing Reform
- PART IV CONCLUSIONS AND IMPLICATIONS
- References
- Index
Summary
Scholarly research has long struggled to define the nature and role of institutional legacies – the inheritance of earlier forms – in processes of institutional change. Although conceptualization of such legacies varies widely, from distributions of power and resources to institutional performance and ideologies, the avatars of an institution's past are generally considered an ineluctable feature of its present. And while legacies often enter accounts of institutional stability, how such history bears upon processes of institutional change remains far from clear. In the case of pension reform, some scholars argue that as the cost of an institution's prior financial commitments rises, so too does pressure for fundamental change; others claim precisely the opposite: that expanding political constituencies and financial liabilities make radical change increasingly unlikely. As the analysis in Chapter 2 showed, both accounts may be correct, but not universally so. The effect of prior pension commitments on the likelihood of privatization depends upon the magnitude of that commitment, such that rising pension costs generate pressure for structural reform only when these liabilities are modest; only in large and generous pension systems does policy “lock-in” obtain with rising benefit costs.
The cross-national analysis also pointed to an alternative conceptualization of institutional legacies that helps to explain how large and small welfare states can long be stable but later become subject to path-departing change. Such legacies entail citizens' beliefs about and perceptions of the institution, or what I call its political legacy.
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- Chapter
- Information
- Social Protection and the Market in Latin AmericaThe Transformation of Social Security Institutions, pp. 191 - 245Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2008