Week 8

In this lecture, we will explore a longstanding theme in comparative politics: under what conditions do democracies extend social policy benefits to the poor? Why do some democracies provide more comprehensive social benefits for the poor than others? We will address these questions by focusing on the expansion of social policy benefits for informal-sector and unemployed workers in Latin America, a large population historically excluded from social protection. After reviewing the main theories and hypotheses in the literature, we will draw on a new dataset with original longitudinal measures of social policy coverage in eighteen Latin American countries from 1990, when expansion began, through the Covid-19 pandemic to assess the extent to which these theories account for the observed expansion of social policy. We will show that social protest and electoral competition are strongly associated with welfare expansion. Moreover, social protest and a higher share of left-wing legislators in Congress are linked to broader social policy coverage. These findings deepen our understanding of social policy expansion in Latin America and help us theorize about the factors leading democracies to deliver in the Global South, where countries exhibit large informal workforces and wide variation in social benefits.

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