Democracy and new ideas in Latin American social policy: the origins of conditional cash transfers in Brazil and Mexico

Abstract

Conditional cash transfers (CCTs) have become the main instrument to combat poverty in Latin America, they have been exported around the globe and are one of the most popular social policies of the twenty-first century. CCTs deliver cash transfers to poor families with conditionalities like attendance to school and health appointments. This article aims to explain the creation of CCTs. The research applies arguments from theories of social policy development to explain the formulation of the first two CCTs introduced in Brazil at the sub-national level and in Mexico at the national level during the mid-1990s. Findings show that the original formulation of CCTs can be explained by the emergence of a new policy paradigm based on a conceptualisation of the nature of poverty as lack of human capital among poor population, enabled by critical junctures created by the transitions to democratic regimes.

Brazil's Bolsa Família Programme: Aspirations and Realities of Poverty Reduction and Intergenerational Change

“…They are based in a particular understanding of poverty as stemming from low human capital, which creates poverty traps and reproduces poverty across generations. This in turn directly informs their design and goals as policy instruments (Valásquez Leyer, 2020): they aim to provide the resources (cash) and the incentives (educational conditionalities) to facilitate human capital development amongst poor children, with the aim of interrupting the intergenerational cycle of poverty (Roelen, 2014). The implicit logic of CCT programmes is illustrated in Figure 1.…”

The squeaky wheel gets the grease: Violent civil unrest and global social assistance provision

“…The third group in the publications on the determinants/causes of social addresses ideational factors—most importantly, the diffusion of ideas. They are interested in how professional norms and epistemic communities are created to shape social policy agenda, and how the bureaucrats and program implementers learn ideas that inform social policy-making in other geographies (Means and Smith, 1983 ; Sugiyama, 2011 ; Fenwick, 2013 ; Tomazini, 2019 ; Velázquez Leyer, 2020 ).…”

Reappraisal of the political approach on East Asian welfare state development: the case of childcare expansion in South Korea

“…Moreover, the above assumptions will be used as a loop to look at the Korean case, to analyse how the political convergence on universal childcare in Korea –either under the conservative or progressive regime–was driven by the combined factors of “the promotion of the idea by international actors and cognitive shortcuts taken by domestic policymakers under pressure from electoral competition” (Leyer, 2018, p. 4). Further analysis of this is explained in detail the next section.…”