What explains Latin Americans' beliefs about market liberalization? The extraordinary economic policy changes that have occurred since the early 1980s have been drastic enough to have exerted noticeable material impacts on citizens' everyday lives. Among other changes, jobs have disappeared, prices have changed, new transfer-payment programs have been created, and state-funded benefits have been taken away. Because the consequences of economic policies have so obviously “hit people over the head,” I claim that citizens have formulated policy beliefs partially out of economic self-interest. Amid these turbulent and obvious economic shifts, however, politicking has persisted. Politicians have continued to sell themselves and their preferred policies, making promises and other rhetorical attempts to sway voters' opinions about the new market economics. Moreover, many citizens have clung to long-standing political affinities that bias their perceptions of elite discourse and objective economic consequences. In other words, political predispositions and politicians' rhetoric have colored voters' self-interested calculus of the region's drastic economic policy transformation.

This chapter develops a theoretical framework that incorporates elements of both economic self-interest, the basis of bottom-up influences on public opinion, and elite persuasion, also referred to as top-down influences. First, I argue that scholars of Latin America have miscast the nature of citizens' self-interest.