No abstract

Research on the welfare state has devoted considerable attention to social policy expansion. However, little is known about why governments expand social policies serving groups with limited power on issues with low visibility. I call these “benevolent policies.” This class of social policies improves population well-being but produces minimal political gains for the governments enacting them. Why do governments expand benevolent policies if political incentives for reform are weak? I investigate this question by focusing on government responses to malnutrition. Drawing on nine months of fieldwork, including 71 interviews, I argue that the origins of policy expansion can be found in the government bureaucracy. Bureaucrats with technical expertise—technocrats—can play a defining role, deploying international pressure to court executive support and orchestrate policy change. Their actions help explain the Indonesian government’s unexpected expansion of nutrition policies, which serve low-income women and children and address micronutrient malnutrition.

Research on the welfare state often examines social policies in democratic regimes separately from social policies in authoritarian regimes. Two bodies of research have emerged, as the extant literature views these political systems as sufficiently distinct to merit the division of analysis. In this article, we challenge the existing approach by showing that differing regime types can indeed be analysed together. By looking for patterns of similarities, rather than differences, we bring the two literatures into conversation and show how a common factor can trigger social policy expansion in both regime types. Using case studies of India and China, the two most populous democratic and authoritarian regimes, this article illustrates how the expansion of policies that serve low-income groups – India’s Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee (NREGA) and China’s Minimum Livelihood Guarantee Scheme (dibao) – were both prompted by social mobilisation.