This does not mean that regime type is irrelevant. However, as these four cases will demonstrate, regime type matters in shaping strategies used by organized labor as it seeks to shape privatization program design and implementation. Strategies that are useful in a democratic context—for instance, lobbying parliamentarians—are less practical in an authoritarian system. How effective these different strategies are in influencing policy, however, seems to depend more on variables other than regime type. Specifically, the legal, financial, and experiential resources that organized labor acquired prior to reform initiation shape its ability to translate these different strategies into policy influence. By comparing states where authoritarianism has persisted with states that experienced a transition to democracy, I am better able to show how historically acquired resources can persist across even dramatic breaks with the past and shape policy dynamics.
Theoretical Approaches
One of the most important variables in the extant studies explaining interest group influence on economic policy making has been the regime type. The role political institutions play in shaping interest group influence has long been a matter of controversy. Many of the arguments marshaled during the debates between modernization theorists and those working within the bureaucratic authoritarianism tradition that took place in the 1960s and 1970s are reflected in contemporary studies. Modernization theorists posited that democracy and economic development were compatible with each other.10 Critics pointed out that democracy in fact posed numerous challenges to launching successful economic development because special interest groups and popular participation generated increasing demands on the state. The state, lacking adequate resources, could not satisfy these demands without sacrificing economic efficiency. These studies, drawing in particular on Latin American experiences, argued that authoritarian systems are more capable of undertaking ambitious development projects, thanks to their greater insulation from popular pressures. Democratic governments, however, are constrained by their need to win elections. They are therefore more likely to yield to political pressures from special interest groups and more hesitant to push through policies that may facilitate long-term economic growth, but undermine short-term electoral support.11 In other words, according to this approach, the ability of interest groups to influence policy making is directly linked to the regime type: in democracies interest groups will have a greater capacity to shape reform policies, whereas in authoritarian systems such influence is less likely to occur. These debates gained new currency as more countries began to initiate structural adjustment policies in the 1980s. The cases analyzed in this study, however, suggest that regime type provides at best an incomplete explanation.
As more democratic governments began to undertake economic restructuring, it became apparent that in fact democratically elected governments can impose heavy costs on their populations and still remain in power and, more important, continue policies that often hurt politically important social groups.12 This resilience of some democratic governments suggested that regime type may not be a fully satisfactory explanation of interest group influence on economic policy making. An alternative set of explanations looked to not just the regime type but also regime age. Some argue that consolidated democracies and authoritarian states have the ability to repress social demands and hence may have advantages in initiating economic reform programs. Newly established democracies, by contrast, face particular challenges, since they must simultaneously attempt to consolidate the new political system and initiate economic restructuring.13 Alternatively, others predict that newly established representative governments are likely to benefit from a honeymoon period, when large reservoirs of popular trust, support, and willingness on the part of the public to incur even substantial hardships means that few social groups will attempt to block the reforms being implemented.14
These explanations of interest group influence, however, do not fully account for the patterns observed in the four cases examined here. Although the type of political regime in existence when reform began shaped the types of strategies labor organizations employed to press their claims, their ability to make their voice heard was influenced by variables other than regime type and age. While none of the four cases examined in this book qualified as consolidated democracies when reforms were initiated, the other anticipated variation between states does not hold. In one old authoritarian system (Mexico), labor found it extremely difficult to have much input into policy making, while in the other (Egypt), labor had substantial influence. Similarly, in one new democracy (the Czech Republic), trade unions were unable to influence the privatization program, while in the other (Poland), their input was considerable.
Other studies suggest that it is the internal characteristics of a state rather than political regime type that accounts for the differences in the ability of governments to push through reforms without interest group influence. In this view, the cohesion and autonomy of the state are crucial variables affecting restructuring processes and the role that social actors come to play.15 Especially significant, and signaling autonomous state decision making, is the existence of change teams, insulated from popular pressures and with the bureaucratic capacity to push through the measures that shape the process of economic reform implementation.16 Such change teams are seen as indispensable to reform promotion, since they are composed of people who possess technical knowledge about the restructuring process and are not beholden to or dependent on old political patronage networks.17 Advocates of the so-called shock therapy approach to economic restructuring, in particular, have emphasized the importance of technocratic teams, fully committed to reforms. As Sachs has pointedly noted, “In times of crisis there simply is no consensus to build upon, only confusion, anxiety, and a cacophony of conflicting opinions. . . . The reform team must make its reforms an accomplished fact.”18 Similarly, Balcerowicz, both a theoretician and a practitioner of this approach, has argued that change teams, working far away from the political limelight, must make use of the period of extraordinary politics that frequently exists at the beginning of the reform process and, swiftly, without engaging in much political debate, initiate reforms.19 Moments of political transition when a new political elite comes to power may thus be a particularly auspicious time for pushing through reforms without interest group interference.
From this perspective, the existence of change teams not only makes interest group influence on policy making less likely, but such lack of influence is unambiguously seen as essential to successful reform process. Although change teams may indeed facilitate state autonomy from interest group pressures in some instances, the cases examined in this book suggest that such teams are at best a necessary but not sufficient condition for blocking interest group influence on policy making. The Polish case in particular suggests that the existence of a technocratic change team in itself does not block interest groups from being able to shape the reform process.
Analyses of structural adjustment and economic globalization have also explored how these processes have affected organized labor. A mixed picture emerges from these studies. In the view of some analysts, organized labor is no longer the powerful social, economic, and political force it once was and is unlikely to again reclaim its position. According to the pessimists, a nearly perfect storm has permanently weakened