Overcoming Uneven Welfare States: The Politics of Welfare Reform in Latin America

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

This panel seeks to answer central questions in comparative politics: to what extent is the Latin American welfare state fragmented across demographic, territorial, and policy lines? What explains politicians’ incentives to make welfare provision more equal? The central concern of this panel is twofold: (1) to assess how egalitarian welfare policies are between insiders and outsiders, among policies, across the territory, and (2) to explain the political determinants behind different levels of egalitarianism.
Since the 1980s, globalization has reshaped productive, demographic, cultural, and institutional structures in a way that is particularly challenging for Welfare States in Latin America. First, union power declined and the formal working class shrank, making traditional welfare states –which targeted benefits to formal workers- increasingly unable to provide a decent safety net for individuals. Second, many governments decentralized welfare provision to subnational governments. However, governments’ capacity to deliver social protection to their citizens varied widely across subnational units. Finally, in the last decades intergovernmental organizations and NGOs have advanced ‘new’ demands to reshape existing Welfare States: from feminist movements demanding accessible public childcare and paid parental leave, to NGOs demanding improved architecture and special accommodations for persons with disabilities. To what extent were these groups able to reshape Welfare States to meet these ‘new’ needs? What political factors facilitated (or hindered) the expansion of social policies to outsiders?
This panel examines these questions in Latin America, an unlikely region to expand egalitarian social policy but one in which expansion is crucial. Three regional traits make the expansion of egalitarian social policies particularly challenging and necessary in Latin America. First, sweeping market reforms in the 1980s and 1990s increased the demographic importance of informal workers. Further, the wave of Left governments in the 2000s gave presidents programmatic and electoral incentives to expand social policies to these ‘new’ groups previously excluded from traditional Welfare States. Finally, the presence of many decentralized polities makes the egalitarian provision of welfare policies across national territories particularly difficult.
The papers in this panel seek to answer the questions posed above and make a contribution to the growing literature on the politics of Welfare expansion in the developing world. It includes papers that incorporate large-n analysis of all countries in the region with others that analyze policies through process tracing and case studies.
Sebastián Etchemendy (Universidad Torcuato di Tella) and Sara Niedzwiecki’s (UC Santa Cruz) paper study the extent to which popular parties in the 2000s reduced economic dualization in the labor market between insiders (unions and formal workers) and outsiders (precarious, informal and unemployed workers). Contra the existing literature, they show that governing parties that have strong coalitions with union insiders are better able to reduce labor market fragmentation.
Andrés Schipani (UC Berkeley) seeks to understand the conditions under which Left governments expand incomes and power resources towards both formal and informal workers. Through a case study of Argentina under the Kirchners (2003-2015), his paper shows that Left governments that are extremely weak within the Left movement adopt a partisan redistribution strategy. This strategy entails generous income redistribution towards both formal and informal workers, but an ambiguous power redistribution strategy towards popular sectors organizations: they are empowered vis-à-vis economic elites, but are also made more dependent vis-à-vis the national incumbent.
Jennifer Pribble (University of Richmond) studies social policies’ unevenness across regions. Focusing on the case of healthcare institutions in Chile, she shows that, even in the context of strong states that are highly centralized, the implementation of the national healthcare system was highly uneven across Chile. Pribble argues that this variation is explained by political factors present at the moment of the system’s creation in 1952: national-level political-economic constraints and distinct subnational power configurations in mid-20th century Chile.
Finally, Anna Landre and Mathew Carnes (Georgetown University) examine the factors enabling or hampering the expansion of disability and access laws and practices in Latin America. By employing quantitative analysis, they attempt to explain both the particular measures that have been proposed and adopted across the 18 major Latin American countries, as well as the political factors behind the passage or defeat of legislative bills. They find that reformist executives usually initiate policy adoption as a response to intergovernmental organizations and issue-focused NGOs.

Sub Unit

• DIVISION 12: Comparative Politics in Developing Countries

Individual Presentations

• Politics Against Dualization? Welfare and Labor Markets in Latin America - Sebastian Etchemendy, Department of Political Science; Sara Niedzwiecki, University of California, Santa Cruz

• Welfare Expansion under Weak Presidents: Partisan Redistribution in Argentina - Andres Schipani, UC Berkeley

• The Subnational Political Economy of Public Health Administration in Chile - Jennifer Pribble, University of Richmond

• How Accessible is Latin America? Discerning Patterns of Disability Accommodations - Matthew E. Carnes, Georgetown University

Chair

• Marcus J. Kurtz Ohio State University

Discussants

• Marcus J. Kurtz Ohio State University

• James W. McGuire Wesleyan University