A wide-scholarly and interdisciplinary literature has analyzed neo-liberalism in various facets. Typically, this term is referred to as a new form of “political-economic governance premised on the extension of market relationships” (Larner, 2000:5). On the public policy side, it has been also depicted as Thatcherism or Reaganomics, and it has been identified with a political manifesto in which privatization and liberalization were the essence of public policies, especially for those economic services – namely those delivered in network industries – previously managed by state-owned monopolies. While this first wave of neo-liberalism clearly identifies an ideological divide, as these policies were almost exclusively promoted by right-wing, conservative governments, its later diffusion around the world, progressively lost this original ideological bias. Some authors have recently identified the policy agenda launched by President Clinton’s ‘market globalism’ and Prime Minister Tony Blair’s ‘third way’ (Roy et al. 2006) as “second-wave neo-liberalism”. As the first wave, this new form of neo-liberalism encourages public policies aimed at promoting decentralization, market competition and private ownership in economic sectors previously reserved to monopoly. This second wave neo-liberalism is generally deemed to have started in the 1990s and to have pursued the principle of “strengthening social solidarity without dropping the neo-liberal ideal of market-oriented entrepreneurship” (Steger and Roy 2010). There are indeed many examples of center-left executives embracing a political agenda based on the promotion of market-oriented policies. This was the case, among others, of the Dutch Prime Minister Wim Kok, Italian Prime Ministers Romano Prodi and Massimo D’Alema, French Prime Ministers Pierre Beregovoy and Lionel Jospin, and the German Chancellor Gerard Schroder. One question that still remains open in the political economy research agenda is whether the global diffusion of the neo-liberal policies constitutes a definitive trespassing of traditional ideological cleavages, thus the decline of ideological division itself (Manza 2010). Surprisingly, the empirical literature on the political economy of public policies contrasts with the view that the political determinants ceased to affect the adoption of market-oriented policies in the last 30 years (Alesina 1988; Alesina and Rosenthal 1995; Persson and Tabellini 2000). A large consensus could be found in this economic literature on the idea that right-wing parties should in principle promote market-oriented outcomes (such as privatization and liberalization), as this is embedded in their traditional ideological cleavages. Consequently, right-wing governments are deemed to promote market-oriented policies more intensively than left-wing executives around the world. This prediction has been unanimously confirmed by a scholarly-wide empirical literature on deregulation in network industries, which has focused on privatization policies, (i.e. on policies aimed at reducing or eliminating public ownership). Recent empirical works include Bortolotti and Pinotti (2008) and Belloc and Nicita (2012). However, much less consensus is to be found in the literature with reference to liberalization policy (i.e. to policies aimed at reducing barriers to entry in network industries, independently of the nature of incumbent’s ownership). While some authors (Pitlik 2007; Potrafke 2010) argue that, as for privatization, the likelihood of liberalization increases under right-wing governments, in recent research based on the most updated release of OECD data (Belloc and Nicita 2011a) we find the opposite results: the analysis of liberalization policies in 30 OECD network industries (including telecommunication, electricity, gas, railways), from 1975 to 2007, reveals a neglected role of so-called neo-liberalism in promoting leftSoc (2012) 49:444–450 DOI 10.1007/s12115-012-9582-4