Throughout the twentieth century, much of the population in Latin America lacked access to social protection. Since the 1990s, however, social policy for millions of outsiders - rural, informal, and unemployed workers and dependents - has been expanded dramatically. Social Policy Expansion in Latin America shows that the critical factors driving expansion are electoral competition for the vote of outsiders and social mobilization for policy change. The balance of partisan power and the involvement of social movements in policy design explain cross-national variation in policy models, in terms of benefit levels, coverage, and civil society participation in implementation. The book draws on in-depth case studies of policy making in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Mexico over several administrations and across three policy areas: health care, pensions, and income support. Secondary case studies illustrate how the theory applies to other developing countries.

The early 2000s were a period of social policy expansion in Latin America. New programs were created in healthcare, pensions, and social assistance, and previously excluded groups were incorporated into existing policies. What was the character of this social policy expansion? Why did the region experience this transformation? Drawing on a large body of research, this Element shows that the social policy gains in the early 2000s remained segmented, exhibiting differences in access and benefit levels, gaps in service quality, and unevenness across policy sectors. It argues that this segmented expansion resulted from a combination of short and long-term characteristics of democracy, favorable economic conditions, and policy legacies. The analysis reveals that scholars of Latin American social policy have generated important new concepts and theories that advance our understanding of perennial questions of welfare state development and change.

This book explores the scope of reforms and changes in the social protection systems in Latin America that have started at the beginning of the 21st century. It describes how and to what extent changes in social protection systems and social policies have occurred in the region in recent decades. Taking a comparative approach, the volume identifies the triggers for the transformations and how such pressures are received by the welfare regime, or a specific policy sector, to finally yield a given type of reform. The analysis is characterized by the presence of certain factors that explain the development of social protection systems in Latin America, such as economic growth, the consolidation of democratic political regimes, and the region’s Left Turns. The book also examines to what extent common challenges and processes induced by international institutions have led to convergence among countries or welfare regimes, or whether each maintains its own identity.

Social protection serves as an important development tool, helping to alleviate deprivation, reduce social risks, raise household income and develop human capital. This book brings together an interdisciplinary team of international experts to analyse social protection systems and welfare regimes across contemporary Latin America. The book starts with a section tracking the expansion of social assistance and social insurance in Latin America through the state-led development era, the neoliberal era and the pink-tide. The second section explores the role played by local and external actors modelling social policy in the region. The third and final section addresses a variety of contemporary debates and challenges around social protection and welfare in the region, such as gender roles and the empowerment of CCT beneficiaries, and welfare provision for rural outsiders. The book touches on key topics such as conditional cash transfer programmes, trade union inclusionary strategies, transnational social policy, state-led versus market-led welfare provision, explanatory factors in the emerging dualism of social protection institutions, social citizenship rights as a consequence of changing social policy architecture and different poverty reduction strategies. This interdisciplinary volume will be of interest to economists, political scientists, sociologists, anthropologists and historians working on social protection in Latin America, or interested in welfare systems in the global south.

Explores the variation in welfare and other social assistance policies in Latin America.

This volume provides a wide-ranging analysis of social welfare reform in Latin America, examining in particular the politics involved in implementing difficult and controversial social policies that often pit the middle strata of society, represented by powerful stakeholders, against the poor.