A DECADE OF DEVELOPMENT THINKING
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other factors that are less prominent in economic theory but noted by political scientists, such as the administrative cycle of government in which reforms are attempted and the availability of international financial resources. No econometric studies exist on the explanatory capacity of these factors in the case of second-generation reforms, but the ad hoc evidence mustered by Navia and Velasco (2003) suggests that they are scarcely significant. These authors observed: “All this intellectual activity... was exciting... [but] it all seems like much ado about little” (p. 274, emphasis in the original). The limited explanatory capacity of the hypotheses on the political economy of the reforms may stem from the difficulty of gauging such factors as the fragmentation of classes or the benefits expected from the reforms among the different social groups involved. Nevertheless, several case studies and econometric analyses, undertaken from a political science perspective, suggest that the problem more likely arises because the models are too general to capture the specific characteristics of the political contexts in which reforms take place. For example, ideologies and party affiliations are considered only vaguely in these models, yet they may be crucial in explaining the course of reforms. Voters choose candidates who reflect their ideological preferences and who may be expected to adopt policies consistent with their expectations should they win election. The combination of political parties without a clear ideological identification, voters who identify little with the parties, and independent candidates who have never had a political career may attenuate this connection and make the “surprise reform” strategy more viable, as was seen in Latin America in the early 1990s (Stokes, 2001). The econometric evidence shows in fact that the ideology of the president’s party is a poor predictor of the direction of a government’s economic policies. Nevertheless, the ideological orientation of legislators is a clear predictor of reform policies whose effectiveness depends on legislative willingness and authority with which to adopt reforms (Johnson and Crisp, 2003).