Ideologization of Economic Policies

Abstract

A great part of politics is easy to explain by interest conflicts. According to this account, voting is primarily an expression of social position and interests associated with it: parties develop in order to express these interests.³³² Some parties in Latvia represent the interests of the poor, others those of the farmers or specific business sectors and so on. To make a rough grouping, parties divide into economically and socially oriented parties, a division which follows from their approach to economic policy. Liberals who give precedence to economic results adhere to shock therapy, whereas socially oriented parties that are concerned with the costs of the transformation are influenced by gradualism. Why some parties promise to alleviate the burden on the population can be understood against the initial assumption. What is puzzling is the existence of parties whose programmes punish a majority of the population in the short term and whose political demands cannot be extrapolated from the demographic features of any constituency. A party’s detachment from the social group interests raises the question of the coherence-maintaining force behind the party: what is the primus motor that prescribes its course of political and economic action? This is basically the question of what makes economic transformation possible in a democracy.