The Left Turn's Social Reform in the Southern Cone: A Qualitative Approach (Pre-Recorded)

• In Event: Neoliberalism and Governance in the Global South

Abstract

This paper presents a novel approach to assess social policy reforms conducted by left-turn governments in the Southern Cone. It examines electoral programs, institutional designs and public discourse in Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay from a qualitative, hermeneutic perspective.

Abundant literature has been produced on the electoral wave also known as the “Latin American Pink Tide”, which brought progressive forces and left-leaning coalitions to presidential office in the past 20 years. Much optimism was initially laid out for their shared policy interventions oriented towards combating inequality (e.g. through conditional cash transfers, "one laptop per child” programs) and fostering political inclusion (for instance, by means of affirmative action legislation). And while these interventions have been assessed by scholars as incrementalist attempts towards regimes of universal social protection (Cecchini, Filgueira & Martinez, 2015), the performance of these governments has also been subject to critique due to their rather orthodox economic and international incorporation models (Levitsky & Roberts, 2011). Diverse typologies have been developed to better capture the nature of such hybrid regimes, ranging from the ideas of 'post-neoliberalism' and the ‘inclusion of outsiders’, to debates between pragmatism and populism, and the critical evaluation of more recent authoritarian developments (Reygadas & Filgueira, 2010, Grugel & Riggirozzi, 2012, Yates & Bakker, 2014, Garay, 2016, Falleti & Parrado, 2018, Ellner, 2020).

Building upon more recent interpretations of these political experiences as ‘inclusionary’ (Kapiszewski, Levitsky & Yashar, 2020), I propose a qualitative empirical approach towards a reconstruction of the left turn’s legacy in the region. In the face of the dramatic end that progressive governments in office have faced in recent years, between institutional coups and the rise of conservative and reactionary forces, new forms of assessment are needed if we are to understand not only the advances but also the shortcomings of social reform from the perspective of problem-framing and collective identity-building. Strategies of politicization of social issues, collective identities and political values deserve more attention, and qualitative approaches are better suited to offer insight into political framing and meaning-making processes (Arditi, 2008).

To pursue this idea, this paper examines similar social programs in Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay, advanced during the same time frame (2003-2016), which offer comparative ground to evaluate the substantive commitments that qualify these forces as left-leaning and progressive, and the extent to which they have translated into policy interventions that reflect those commitments. While most research on this area has focused on examining state expenditure, social protection coverage, and income distribution (Weyland, 2005, Huber & Stephens, 2012, Mirza, 2014, Cameron, 2018), this paper aims to identify (re)politicization strategies by means of the creation and circulation of specific framings of social issues and public policy responses.

The empirical analysis is conducted by means of qualitative content and thematic analysis. An original document corpus has been compiled to this end, comprising policy documentation, presidential speeches and electoral programs of progressive governments in office between 2003 and 2016: Frente para la Victoria in Argentina, PT in Brazil and Frente Amplio in Uruguay. The analysis software MAXQDA is used to identify code frequencies and correlations in order to reconstruct pledges in electoral programs, and hermeneutic procedures from thematic analysis are subsequently applied to assess political speeches and institutional designs. In this manner, four analytical dimensions are explored: what is the relative weight of different policy areas in programs and speeches? What are the social issues addressed in discourse and how are social programs designed to match their framing? Which groups are targeted and how are their collective identities constructed? What are the principles guiding political action and how do these governments describe and argue for their policy interventions?

The main findings point towards a (re)politicization of social policy through the inscription in public discourse of collective identities, fostering recognition; while redistributive measures are missing in actual policy designs (Fraser, 2019). This strengthens prior findings in the literature, but from a different methodological perspective that allows for a better understanding of how progressive governments can construct consensus through meaning-making mechanisms that underlie both identity-building and polarization processes.

Author

• Melisa Ross, WZB Berlin Social Science Center