We started this chapter by presenting the attitudinal stimuli that we use to understand how Latin American citizenries think about the choice between “state” and “market” when it comes to economic policy-making. We thus inspect citizen policy moods in Latin America, providing a sense of how these have moved over the almost two decades that go from 1996 to 2014.

We begin by summarizing our findings regarding congruence and responsiveness in Latin America's presidential systems. We then lay out our theoretical framework that we call the chain of representation. We discuss the citizens' preferences, policy-makers' preferences, and policy orientations that make up the stages in our chain. We then describe the electoral systems and policy-making processes that are the institutional linkages holding those stages together. The chapter ends with an outline of the structure of the rest of the book.

We present in this chapter a panoramic view of the policy moods that characterize three important sets of political actors – deputies, senators, and presidents – in Latin America over the past two decades. We construct these policy moods to share the same scale on which the policy moods of citizens and the policies implemented by Latin American governments are located.

To conclude, we summarize our original theoretical argument, the empirical findings that support that argument, and the empirical findings that would lead us to reformulate that argument before seeking to test it again on a different set of observations.