THE POPULIST ROAD TO MARKET REFORM Policy and Electoral Coalitions in Mexico and Argentina By EDWARD L. GIBSON* I N T RODUCTION D URING his tenure of office between 1988 and 1994, Mexican President Carlos Salinas de Gortari proclaimed a new guiding ideology for his presidency and his country’s ruling party, the Partido Revolucionario Institutional (PRI). Liberalismo Social (Social Liberal- ism) would replace the statist and corporatist Nacionalismo Revolu- cionario (Revolutionary Nationalism) as the vision advanced by the party in a new age of free-market development. During much the same period, five thousand miles away, Argentina’s President Carlos Saul Menem committed his government to the pursuit of a new develop- ment model, the Economia Popular de Mercado (Popular Market Economy), a policy shift that reversed the Peronist party’s historic commitment to state-led economic development. These leaders headed the two most important populist movements in Latin America, move- ments that had strong ties to labor and embodied their countries’ pur- suit of state-led economic development. The policy shifts thus had tremendous coalitional and institutional consequences. They implied a restructuring of the social coalitions that had historically supported the Peronist party and the PFU, and the alteration of many of the represen- tational arrangements that linked key social actors to the state. Al- though these reforms reversed historic policy commitments and l I would like to thank Robert Ayres, Valerie Bunce, Ernest0 Calvo,Tulia Falleti, Jose Maria Ghio, Judith Gibson, Bela Greskovits, Michael Hanchard, Blanca Heredia, Mark Jones, Kevin Middlebrook, Maria Victoria Murillo, Mick Moore, Hector Schamis, Ben Ross Schneider, Jeffrey Winters, and Meredith Woo-Cumings for comments on earlier versions of this article. The Centro de Investigation y Docencia Economicas (CIDE) in Mexico and the Universidad Torcuato Di Tella in Argentina pro- vided much appreciated forums for presentation of the article. I am grateful as well to the Center for International and Comparative Studies and the Department of Political Sdence at Northwestern Uni- versity for the financial support that made the research for this article possible. World Politics 49 (April 1997), 339-70