Assessing Development and Subnational Inequality: Urban Brazil in Comparative Perspective

• In Event: The Politics of Subnational Inequality

Abstract

Latin Americanists have long examined sources of social inequality between macro-level units of analysis (e.g. between Latin American countries; between regions of a given country), as well as between micro-level units (e.g. between households). Yet, despite increasing urbanization throughout Latin America and the Caribbean, few meso-level studies systematically examine why major cities within the same country have become less – as opposed to more – unequal during the contemporary period. For example, existing scholarship on Brazil struggles to fully account for why and how distributions of human development within some of its largest cities have become less unequal during the last 20 years, while other cities have witnessed the stagnation of such inequalities. In this paper, I offer a conceptual foundation, methodology, and preliminary analysis of variation across Brazil’s largest cities in the direction and degree of inter-temporally dynamic inequalities since the mid-1990s. The paper first conceptualizes and operationalizes inter-temporal changes in city-level inequality, and then reviews diverse explanations for these changes, such as subnationally variable degrees of colonial penetration, coverage by Bolsa Família, levels of infrastructure development through the Growth Acceleration Program (PAC), local political party rule, women’s political representation, interest group penetration of municipal government, and other factors. Next, it offers a methodology for explaining these changes that combines fuzzy-set Qualitative Configurational Analysis (fsQCA) and multivariate regression analysis of pooled, cross-sectional time-series data. Drawing on preliminary results, the paper concludes by offering theoretical and methodological implications for the study of subnational inequality in Latin America.

Author

• Christopher L Gibson, Simon Fraser University