Coalitions and Compliance: The Political Economy of Pharmaceutical Patents in Latin America

Coalitions and Compliance examines the diverse ways that international changes can reconfigure domestic politics. Since the late 1980s developing countries have come under considerable pressure to revise their intellectual property policies and practices. One area where pressures have been exceptionally controversial is in pharmaceuticals: historically, fearing the costs of providing private property rights over knowledge in this area, developing countries did not grant patents to drugs. Now they must do so. This book analyses different forms of compliance with this new international imperative in Latin America, analysing the politics of pharmaceutical patenting in Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico. The book focuses on two periods of patent politics: initial conflicts over how to introduce drug patents, and then subsequent conflicts over how these new patent systems should function. In contrast to explanations of national policy choice based on external pressures, domestic institutions, or the ideological orientation of political leaders, this book attributes cross-national and longitudinal variation in patent policy to the ways that changing social structures affect political leaders' abilities to construct and sustain supportive coalitions. The analysis begins with consideration of the relative resources and capabilities of the transnational and national pharmaceutical sectors, and these rival actors' strategies for attracting allies. Emphasis is placed on two ways that social structures are transformed so as to affect coalition building possibilities: how exporters fearing the loss of preferential market access may be converted into allies of transnational drug firms, and the differential patterns of adjustment among state and societal actors that are inspired by the introduction of new policies. It is within the changing structural conditions produced by these two processes that political leaders build coalitions in support of different forms of compliance.