http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2788-9909
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ABSTRACT
This introductory essay reviews the scholarship on the politics of social policy, and shows the contribution of the special issue to explaining expanded welfare commitments in Brazil, China, India and South Africa in the twenty-first century. Much literature on welfare expansion in lower- and middle-income contexts views it primarily as a policy corrective to the economic dislocations produced by global economic integration. This special issue focuses on the political factors that are critical to understanding the shape social policies have taken and their effectiveness in ameliorating poverty and inequality.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
ORCID
Louise Tillin http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2788-9909
Jane Duckett http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5401-5350
Notes
1 Barrientos (Citation2013, p. 13) defines ‘social assistance’ policies as direct transfer programmes that target poverty and vulnerability, whereas ‘social protection’ would typically be understood to include social insurance, social assistance and labour market policies. Under the umbrella of social assistance fall both direct income transfer programmes, as well as what Barrientos calls transfers combined with asset accumulation, designed to support human, financial and physical asset accumulation.
2 This view lies within a longer intellectual tradition of ‘embedded liberalism’ going back to Karl Polanyi, and with seminal texts by Cameron, Stephens, Katzenstein and Ruggie arguing that the expansion of the post-Second World War welfare state enabled governments to reduce the risks associated with greater international openness. See Swank Citation2005 for a succinct summary. Studies among non-OECD countries have found contradictory results about the impact of greater trade openness on social expenditure (Avelino et al., Citation2005; Kaufman & Segura-Ubiergo, Citation2001).
3 This is true both of conditional cash transfers which are designed to boost school and clinic attendance, as well as policies such as the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme in India.
4 In China, policies designed to reduce rural poverty were linked the desire to boost domestic consumption and reduce reliance on export-led growth (rather than to increase social investment) and they were also inspired by concerns that rising inequality might endanger ‘political stability’ – which makes the Chinese case somewhat different from the other three under examination, as we shall discuss below.
5 The role of the private sector within middle-income countries is also very important, although this is not a principal focus of the papers in this special issue.
6 Papers by the South Africa team have been published in a special issue of Transformation: Critical Perspectives on Southern Africa, Vol. 91 (2016), and are forthcoming by members of the other country teams.
7 Note however that it built on the macro-economic stabilisation achieved under President Cardoso’s preceding regime, and earlier experiments with conditional cash transfers (Melo et al., Citation2012).
8 These reforms built on experimentation and signals of a change in policy direction that preceded the Hu-Wen administration thus we should be careful to posit too sharp a discontinuity between particular leaders (see Duckett & Wang, Citation2017).
9 The programme was initially targeted toward the poorest districts, but later expanded to cover all rural households.
10 The literature on East Asian welfare states has usually excluded China, which provided social protection – pensions, medical cover – as well as housing and full employment to urban dwellers before the market reform period.
11 The debate is especially vigorous with regards to Bolsa Familia in Brazil. Scholars such as Hunter and Power (Citation2007) and Zucco (Citation2013) have argued that incumbents have seen electoral benefits from Bolsa Familia, but this has also been disputed (Bohn, Citation2011; Corrêa, Citation2015; Corrêa & Cheibub, Citation2016).
12 Although they state that they expect to see an even stronger relationship between quality of government and welfare state expansion in non-OECD countries where clientelism and corruption are greater problems.
13 This builds on earlier normative work by Rothstein (Citation1998) who argues that support for the welfare state in Northern Europe follows a moral logic dependent on citizens’ appraisal of the substantive justice (who are the deserving poor), procedural justice (can government deliver) and fairness of social policy. He argues that there is likely to be more disagreement about these issues in ‘liberal’ welfare states, where benefits are residual and targeted, than in universal welfare states.
14 Though there are exceptions such as Duckett (Citation2011).
15 In Latin America, structural adjustment in the 1980s led to the weakening of employment protection and social insurance models with a shift towards individual savings instruments offered by private providers (see, for instance, Madrid, Citation2003). But countries varied in the extent of reforms from the radical neoliberal reforms of the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile to the more moderate case of Brazil where greater opposition from Congress (especially from the PT) and unions helped to block reforms (Huber & Stephens, Citation2012, p. 157).