(re-) Shaping the Political Arena? a Comparative Study of Welfare Regime Reforms in Latin America, 1980-2010
Year: 2014
Type: article
Abstract: This dissertation examines the processes and outcomes of welfare regimes reforms in eleven Latin American countries, between 1980 and 2010. It theorizes the reforms by comparing pensions, health care, and social assistance policies. In so doing, it confronts three theoretical goals. First, it provides an explanation of recent transformations of welfare regimes as resulting from the combined effects of gradual institutional change and exogenous socioeconomic transformations. Second, it explores the potentialities and limitations of historical institutionalism. Third, it identifies emerging patterns of governance. Mismatches between institutions and social problems trigger reforms, but do not determine the options that policy makers finally choose. Frictions caused by emerging social risks interact with difficulties of established welfare regimes to cope with old risks to facilitate access to public agendas for reformist projects. Ultimately, however, reforms depend on the construction of pro-and anti-reform coalitions, shaped by two main forces: 1) lines of discrimination in the distribution of benefits by existing welfare regimes; 2) strategies of parties, interest groups, and bureaucracies, competing to activate those cleavages according to their interests. Socioeconomic change, fiscal strain, and transnational factors, interact to make the expansion of social protection contingent upon redistributions of burdens and benefits guaranteed to trigger resistance from groups privileged by existing schemes. The strategic challenge for reformist politicians is the crafting of formulas aimed at simultaneously neutralizing potential veto coalitions and mobilizing unprotected populations. This requires combining strategies of blame-avoidance and credit-claiming that variably mix persuasion, exclusion, and division targeting potential opposition. Selective pay-offs to appease privileged groups constitute the most direct determinants of the architecture of reforms. In explaining the reforms, I discuss endogenous institutional change and how this results in fragmented social protection policies. However, exogenous shocks may facilitate changes away from expected paths. Certain institutional configurations are also found to block the consolidation of structural reforms entailing drastic institutional discontinuity, leading to situations of chronic instability and serial institutional replacement.
Author: Javier Vázquez-D’Elía
Language: English
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W561670524