By the time Fernando Lugo ascended to the Paraguayan presidency in 2008, only one South American electorate (Colombia's) had not elected a left-of-center president in the new millennium. Many observers spoke with certainty that this trend indicated a “massive rejection of the International Monetary Fund and the Washington Consensus” (Rohter 2005, A3), yet most made such assertions in lieu of actual data on what voters thought about market reforms. While a few scholars have conducted studies of public opinion data, they have focused on attitudes in the reform initiation stage toward broad-based structural adjustment packages. The result is a muddled understanding of whether market reforms evoke enthusiasm, outrage, or something in between.

In this chapter, I settle these questions by describing and explaining the contours of aggregate support for various market reforms in Latin America between 1990 and 2007. I do so as part of a series of hypothesis tests regarding the macro-level implications of the bottom-up and top-down theoretical arguments central to this book. The most important finding is that Latin Americans have been persistently favorable toward globalizing policies yet rather unenthusiastic about privatization. The consumer consequences (described in the previous chapter) of each policy explain this popularity gap: Globalization has benefited consumers, while privatization has harmed them.