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Social Development through State Occupation: Health Professionals Movements and Declining Child Mortality in Urban Brazil

Sat, August 16, 2:30 to 4:10pm, TBA

Abstract

Sociologists of the global South increasingly trace social development outcomes to left party rule, women’s electoral representation, participatory democracy, conditional cash transfer programs, and basic public services. Yet, such scholarship rarely addresses the conditions under which professionals movements might also matter for development. Here, I demonstrate that “state occupation” of subnational, politically-appointed offices by health professionals from Brazil’s Sanitary Movement (sanitaristas) has been one such condition for improving social development outcomes in recent decades. Through regression analyses of pooled, time-series data from all eleven Brazilian capital cities with over one million residents, I show that sanitarista occupation of politically-appointed offices atop the municipal health bureaucracy had strongly negative, statistically significant effects on infant mortality between 1995 and 2012. These findings emerge from instrumental variable and OLS models using panel-corrected standard errors, autoregressive disturbance terms, and variables capturing left and patronage party rule, Participatory Budgeting, women’s political representation, health and sanitation expenditures, coverage through Bolsa Família, and controls. I correspondingly argue that state occupation by professionals movements can have important developmental consequences in fragmented, federalist democracies of the global South such as Brazil, where politically-appointed positions in porous sub-national states can provide platforms for the state-building projects of pragmatically-oriented social movements.

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