Decentralization and the Welfare State: Latin America

Social policies have the potential to improve the lives of the poor, but they do not reach everyone in need. This roundtable contribution examines how, why, and under what conditions regional and local elected officials make deliberate choices to intervene in the implementation of national social policies. Focusing on Argentina and Brazil, I show that mayors and governors in decentralized countries have incentives to block national policies that have clear attribution of responsibility, such as conditional cash transfers (CCTs), but not policies where attribution of responsibility is less clear, such as health care. This is because clear attribution of responsibility is necessary for voters to reward governments in elections. The presence of a strong state and positive policy legacies also influences implementation patterns. This work shifts the focus of welfare state analysis away from policy development and toward the political and institutional conditions under which social policies are successfully implemented. It is the first systematic look at subnational variation in social policy implementation in Latin America. It is based on 15 months of field research in two states/provinces and four municipalities each in Argentina and Brazil, which involved over two hundred in-depth interviews with political elites and social policy recipients. In addition, it includes statistical analysis based on an original dataset of the determinants of national social policy coverage in both countries between 1990 and 2015.