Producing Pragmatism: Subnational Democratic Institutions and Agents of Social Policymaking in Urban Brazil

• In Event: Subnational Politics and Public Policies

Abstract

Latin Americanists increasingly address how weak institutionalization of subnational states within the region’s federalist democracies can impede the implementation of social policies. Nevertheless, existing literature focuses less explicitly on the related question of how weak subnational institutions in highly decentralized, federalist democracies like Brazil’s may affect the very existence and tactics of actors seeking to build state capacities required to more effectively enact such policies. Rather, the presence or absence and variable assertiveness of such agents is often left unexplained, or is understood as having place-specific and historically-contingent origins that bear no structural relationship to constant features of such federalist systems. By examining the historical influence of activists from Brazil’s Movimento Sanitário (sanitaristas) on the subnational implementation of health policies, this paper examines evidence that a more structured relationship exists between highly decentralized and weakly institutionalized federalist democracy, on the one hand, and the tactics of subnational advocates for social policy implementation, on the other hand. More specifically, it suggests that such contexts create political opportunities for pragmatically-minded movements like Brazil’s sanitaristas to enact their core ideology of universal rights to health by creating and then occupying the subnational state offices responsible for enacting that right. It also suggests that weakly institutionalized local states themselves create palpable incentives for elected politicians to task these actors with designing such state-building programs in the first place. The paper concludes by highlighting key implications of such a dynamic for theories of social policies, social policymaking, and subnational governance in Latin America’s federalist democracies

Author

• Christopher L Gibson, Simon Fraser University