Introduction : Latin American Public Policies: From Import to Export

Abstract

In Latin America, colonial legacies from Spain and Portugal shaped political institutions in the early stages of nation-state building in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. After many Latin American countries went through a period of dictatorship, the democratization that has been taking place since the 1980s and 1990s meant rebuilding and creating new institutions, norms and public policies. From the late 1980s until the early 2000s, Latin America became a laboratory for public policies, in particular social policy. Within the Anglo-Saxon perspective, policy transfer studies started to gain space in the field of public policy analysis in the 1990s. The notion of circulation refers to a transnational movement—which may be more or less broad and may include multiple comings and goings—of different instruments of public action. The history of Latin American political institutions is grosso modo characterized by the process of adopting political models from Europe and the United States.