The revolving doors in academia, government and think tanks: Colombian neoliberal economists as a case study

Abstract

We use process tracing to test the hypothesis of a specific strategy in the process of discussing and enacting a policy agenda. Our case study is Colombia, where the trace of events and milestones allow us to detect the strategy followed in implementing neoliberal reforms during the 1980s-2000s. The analysis is performed by compiling and offering in a directly comparable setting, the individual professional trajectories and scholarly viewpoints of a set of 61 key economists. The analysis reveals a process of revolving doors between academia, think tanks and government, where the key individuals rotated between different institutions, using their networks of social capital to access the highest level of policy making. The key individuals are mostly extracted from Colombian elites, obtained under and post-graduate degrees in international universities, mostly in the USA, and appealed to academic credentialism in legitimizing their ideological positions. However, the process tracing of their scholarly output shows that it was not very high and mostly published in domestic journals, endogenous to the institutions where they worked. It also shows the scholarly viewpoint of every individual regarding two features of policy making: their preferred degree of market freedom and of government regulation.