Experiment as Statecraft: Poverty Policy Experiments and the “Democratization” of the Mexican State

• In Event: 497 - Regular Session. Sociology of Knowledge

Abstract

In recent years, policy experiments and randomized control trials have become increasingly common instruments for testing and legitimating social policy ideas and interventions. Though natural experiments have featured centrally in the sociology of knowledge and broader science and technology studies literature, only recently have scholars working at the intersection of democratic theory, STS, and political sociology begun to examine experiments outside of the lab in order to theorize the parallels, overlaps and entanglements of science and politics. In this paper I draw on this literature and the sociologies of state transformation to examine the significance of a paradigmatic policy experiment assembled around PROGRESA, Mexico’s famous conditional cash transfer program. The historical ethnographic analysis traces the administrative and scientific practices and tools through which this social policy experiment was assembled, a new theory of poverty was legitimated, and a techno-politics of policy was formed. I argue that the randomized control trial and accompanying evaluation scheme helped to mediate between competing and often conflicting political projects: authoritarian-corporatist, neoliberal and democratic. Most importantly, through the production and demonstration of the success of the PROGRESA experiment, expertise was afforded the capacity to bring about democracy. Data for this paper is drawn from a larger ethnographic project for which I conducted 16 months of ethnographic fieldwork and over 70 interviews with policy makers, experts, and civil society spokespersons in Mexico and the US. The paper’s analytic narrative draws on a subset of these interview data and on additional policy, archival and media analysis.

Author

• Diana Graizbord, Brown University