The Child Health Consequences of Pragmatist Social Movements in Urban Brazil

• In Event: 303 - Section on Political Sociology Paper Session. The Consequences of Social Movements

Abstract

Increasing scholarship examines the conditions under which mobilized social movements can have consequences for outcomes of interest to them. Yet this growing literature remains insulated from a separate vein of research on movements of the global South that aim to improve child health outcomes. Thus, despite establishing their relevance for policies and programs that affect child health outcomes like infant mortality rates, existing scholarship has not persuasively demonstrated the consequences of social movements for health outcomes themselves. This paper does so by first offering a qualitative account of Brazil’s largest health movement – the Sanitarist Movement (Movimento Sanitário) – and then examining the effect of municipal office-holding by its activists on infant and child mortality rates in the country’s largest capitals between 1994 and 2012. Prais-Winsten regression analyses of all major capitals show that movement office-holding was negatively associated with these outcomes during the period, even after considering the separate influence of predictors drawn from the medical sociology literature. Fuzzy-set configurational analyses demonstrate that movement office-holding was necessary within all configurations of conditions that were sufficient for robust, inter-temporal reductions in infant mortality, and for expanded provision of primary health care and spending on health and sanitation. Ultimately, these qualitative and quantitative analyses suggest that pragmatically-oriented social movements like Brazil’s sanitaristas can have important consequences for medical sociology outcomes such as child health.

Author

• Christopher Laurence Gibson, Simon Fraser University