(Industrial bourgeoisie and right-wing nationalizations: SIAM Di Tella (1970) and INDUPA (1994))

Abstract

This article compares the gradual nationalization of SIAM Di Tella, carried out by the Revolución Argentina governments between 1966 and 1973, and the INDUPA nationalization, carried out during the government of C. Menem in 1994, with the main goal of finding the differences in the companies’ “rescue” run by “right-wing” or “pro-business” governments. With a comparative political economy approach and following the theory-building process tracing method, the hypothesis of this article affirms that there are differences in the political uses assigned by right-wing governments to nationalized companies, and that these differences depend on the participation or the absence of industrial bourgeoisie in government coalitions: if the industrial bourgeoisie integrates the government coalition and imposes its own pattern of reproduction, the companies a) will be rigorously retained in the public sector under broad political control by Executive branch, and b) they will be used to provide external economies to the bourgeoisie in a regulated market designed for their own protection; this will be observed in SIAM Di Tella case. On the contrary, if the industrial bourgeoisie is not part of the coalition, companies a) will not be retained but rather quickly returned to market and b) they will be used, paradoxically, to deregulate markets; this will be observed in INDUPA case.