The Politics of Social Welfare in Electoral Democracies in the Global South

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

Over the past two decades, states across the Global South have established a wide range of social welfare programs including cash transfers, public works and subsidized healthcare and food distribution programs. These programs have brought millions access to government social safety nets. Social welfare expansion in new democracies in the Global South has been distinct from established welfare states in the Global North. Most of these programs have been targeted at a subset of poor and vulnerable citizens and have been implemented in settings where with high levels of inequality and uneven access to rights. While some of these programs have strengthened patronage linkages, other programs have established design features to improve targeting and undermine the influence of partisan brokers.
How do citizens access social welfare in electoral democracies where citizenship has been weak or highly uneven? Under what institutional conditions are citizen- state linkages strengthened or undermined by targeted social welfare expansion? This panel seeks to address some of these questions by presenting forthcoming scholarship on the politics of social welfare access in South Asia and Latin America.
Papers in the panel explore a range of ways in which citizens in new democracies obtain social welfare that moves beyond the dominant scholarly focus on clinetlelism and patronage. Instead, this panel seeks to explore a more diverse range of practices citizens use to access social welfare and the institutional conditions that enhance or stymie social welfare access and state responsiveness to citizens demands.
Papers selected for the panel focus on both the design and implications of specific types of welfare expansion in the Global South, as well as bottom up measures used by citizens use to mobilize and claim benefits. Key themes explored in the panel will include the distributional impacts of red tape in bureaucracies and the implications of rapid technology expansion in in fostering citizen access to social welfare in low income communities. The panel will also reflect on the specific institutional conditions and design features of large social welfare programs in the Global South and their implications for political participation and rights claims.

Sub Unit

• Division 12: Comparative Politics of Developing Countries

Individual Presentations

• The Dual Distributive Effects of Red Tape in Accessing Welfare - Tesalia Rizzo, University of California, Merced; Aditya Dasgupta, University of California, Merced

• With Camera in Hand: Citizen Journalism as Claim-Making in Rural India - Gabrielle Kruks-Wisner, University of Virginia

• Welfare as Devolution: Evidence from India's NREGA Program - Tanu Kumar, College of William and Mary

• Cash Transfers and Changing Citizenship Boundaries in Pakistan - Rehan Rafay Jamil, Brown University

Chair

• Alisha Caroline Holland Harvard University

Discussants

• Alisha Caroline Holland Harvard University

• Aditya Dasgupta University of California, Merced