Cross-class Alliances Research Articles

The concept of “popular royalism” in the latest historiography of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Era: pro and contra

In recent years, the concept of “popular royalism” has gained popularity in the historiography of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. The author of the article analyses the main tenets and criticisms of this concept based on the writings of the three main theorists, Paul Choplin, Álvaro Paris, and Andoni Artola. The term “popular royalism” appeared as a result of an incomplete discussion about the essence of counter-revolution in European countries in the late 18th – early 19th centuries. According to the authors of the concept, royalist and counter-revolutionary movements were not retrograde in nature and met the actual demands of different layers of society in the situation of civil war. The counter-revolution gave rise to an alternative way of politicization of the masses and contributed to the emergence of new models of their political participation. The royalists monopolised old sources of political legitimacy and adapted familiar discourses and images to new challenges. Drawing on the idea of legitimacy, they put forward a wide range of demands that were not only conservative but also innovative. Nevertheless, specific regional casess, especially from Italian history, show that the cross-class alliances led by the royalists were temporary and unsustainable. These alliances contributed to the Restoration, but only with foreign military intervention. Yet, since the national historiographical traditions are still very stable, the proposed new concept of popular royalist movements requires substantial clarifications, taking into account the specifics of the historical development of different countries and regions.

Geographies of entitled anger: Revanchist populism in Brazil and beyond

In an age of resurgent populism, emotional geographies play an underexamined yet pivotal role in explaining cross-class alliances that have enabled particularly angry forms of revanchist politics across world regions. This essay delineates the notion of “revanchist populism” and its grounding in “entitled anger,” as well as self-righteous geographical imaginations more broadly, to shed new light on the Brazilian case in recent years, which is further explored in this special issue. Beyond Brazil, we suggest how this approach can be used to bring a more geographical perspective to related iterations of revanchist populism elsewhere in the world and across the political spectrum, from Venezuela to Turkey, and Argentina to India.

Podemos, Sumar and the return of Eurocommunism: the real, the radical and the populist left

Is it possible to create a majoritarian left without lapsing into reformism? Given that Eurocommunism was marked by serious limitations in the past, why is it still relevant to think about it? This article argues that Eurocommunism represented an attempt to create and own the necessary political space to advance socialism in liberal democracies, and to search for ways of building a counterhegemonic project within civil society (which would imply cross-class alliances and a subject of change larger than the working class). The approach adopted by the Spanish left in a number of specific moments in its past reflects the difficulties of a project to shape a political space to the left of social democrac y in modern liberal democracies. This is why Eurocommunism continually resurfaces in contemporary left debate and serially reproduces confrontational positions between reformists and ‘real’ leftists or revolutionaries. What began as a preliminary attempt to re-assess the positions of the left during the transition to liberal democracy returned to debate after 2010, at a time when several fractions and political leaderships were competing to define the way to develop left politics. First the Spanish Communist Party (PCE), and then Izquierda Unida (United Left, IU), Podemos and Sumar have been drawn into debates on how to construct a counter-hegemonic project or build a democratic majority; positions on these questions have been a way of defining their parties, an d the basis for splits inside them This article discusses the PCE, IU, Podemos, Unidas Podemos and Sumar in the light of these recurring themes. Eurocommunism typically figures in these battles as a stand-in for reformism. The problem, however, is not these disagreements per se, but an apparent inability to find a way to widen the space of the left to accommodate pluralism. It is difficult to imagine how positions can be consolidated given the perpetual conflicts in the left bl oc. Regardless of whether the goal is democratic socialism, and the subject the people as a whole or the workers, attempts to expand the political space of the left, in a representative and participatory sense, will not be achieved through narrowing the internal space of organisation and debate. The left is more likely to be able to shape its narrative for thinking about the past and dealing with the future by learning from past successes and mistakes. Eurocommunism functions as a reminder of the challenges of forging a left project aiming to govern and become hegemonic. Reproducing the logics that create enemies within the left has not been an efficient strategy for expanding the political space.

Laying Down The Principles: How Local Socialist Achievements Spurred National Bourgeois Support for Noncontributory Pensions

abstract: The authors develop a perspective of locally embedded welfare state development to explain how relatively weak national political actors can, nonetheless, shape national policy over time by pursuing local reforms. Empirically, the authors assess their argument by using municipality-level representative shares, data on noncontributory pension reforms, roll-call votes from parliament, and archival material from early twentieth-century Norway, in which several local governments introduced noncontributory old-age pensions before Norway adopted a national scheme. The authors show, first, how nationally underrepresented but highly institutionalized socialist parties with geographically concentrated support introduced local pensions. Over time, these parties thus shaped the possibility space for national reform, effectively locking the national policy agenda into a pension system preferred by the socialists—namely, noncontributory pensions. Citing high municipality-debt pressures in their constituencies, bourgeois politicians from districts with local pensions eventually supported and promoted national-level pension reform. This support, in turn, spurred the cross-class alliance required to establish a national noncontributory pension system.

Cross-class alliances and urban middle classes with peasant characteristics: a historical-spatial approach to agency in territory-based rural mobilisations in Turkey

ABSTRACT This article explores the complexities of agency in contemporary territory-based mobilisations in the countryside by focusing on water struggles in Turkey. Using a historical-spatial approach, it combines agrarian political economy analysis with human-nature interactions. Through an analysis of cash crop production and urban-rural interactions, this contribution argues that capitalist agrarian transformation in Turkey led to the emergence of an ‘urban middle class with peasant characteristics’, with a strong capacity for mobilisation and alliance-building. It also argues that this group enabled abstraction, place-framing and aestheticised resistance, common elements we observe in contemporary territorial mobilisations.

The New Class and Right-Wing Populism: The Case of Wisconsin

ABSTRACT While previous scholarship highlights the importance of cross-class alliances between intellectuals and workers in past social-democratic and labor movements, the growth of right-wing populism may signal the breakdown of this political alignment today. We investigate the extent to which intellectuals and workers remain politically aligned through a case study of political developments in the state of Wisconsin, which pioneered social-democratic reforms in the US in the early twentieth century and then turned toward right-wing populism in the twenty-first century. We draw on Alvin Gouldner and Pierre Bourdieu to theorize intellectual-worker alliances. We then present historical evidence that an intellectual-worker alliance played an important role in the earlier period. Logistic regression analysis with survey data shows continued political antagonism between the state’s wealthiest and most highly educated citizens in the later period, as well as an enduring political alignment of highly educated and working-class Wisconsinites. Our results demonstrate that right-wing populism prevailed in Wisconsin despite an intellectual-worker alliance, not because the alliance broke down. We conclude with a discussion of what these findings imply about contemporary right-wing populism beyond Wisconsin.

Cross-class alliances and the rise of electric vehicles in Dublin

The role of transportation in producing greenhouse gas emissions and other harmful pollutants has led governments across the globe to incorporate electric vehicles (EVs) at the centre of their climate action strategies. In turn, critical geographers have directed attention to the role of EVs in driving resource extractivism in geographies outside of the city and in enclosing urban space at the expense of infrastructures such as bus lanes, cycleways and walkable spaces. Less well charted, however, is the odd structure of class relations involved in the formation of new accumulation strategies, spaces and fixes capable of holding together, for a time at least, some of the tensions emerging from the chaotic unfolding of EVs and associated infrastructures in cities. In the following paper, I shine a light on the role of EV users in Dublin, Ireland, who pursue and forge novel cross-class alliances with automobile firms in an effort to promote EVs and cement private and commercial automobility as the core of the decarbonization agenda. I argue for the need to conceptualise the decarbonizing action of EV users as part of a wider class project intended to enrol wealthier users in a push to alter the city and produce uneven pathways of decarbonization.

African American Workers and the Appalachian Coal Industry

African American Workers and the Appalachian Coal Industry

Social Policy Development Revisited: The Interplay between Push and Pull Factors in the Indonesian Healthcare Expansion

Established theories of social policy development, such as industrialisation and power resources, have been extensively used to explain the expansion of social policy, predominantly in developed economies. We argue that they may not always be applicable in the Global South. Our article examines multiple factors at play in Indonesia’s healthcare policy expansion using qualitative content analysis of historical sources, literature, and nine interviews with key policy architects. Using the pull-and-push factor model, we examined the interactions between policy entrepreneurs and centre-right political parties in creating national healthcare policy architecture and expansion. Our findings confirm that the window of opportunity for expansion was augmented when the political party of the ruling government experienced a decline in public trust, while clientelistic motives among elites facilitated the reform process. Drawing the lesson from Indonesia, we contend push prevails over the pull factors (labour movement and cross-class alliances) in social policy development.

Islamic Populism in Rural Indonesia: An Agrarian Change Approach

A massive demonstration in Jakarta called “Aksi Bela Islam” (Action to Defend Islam) marks a continuity of the Islamist currents in post-New Order Indonesia. Many observers called it “Islamic populism”, a populist, cross-class alliance on behalf of the Islamic masses or “ummah” against capitalist development that has marginalized Muslims in the struggle for access to economic and political resources. However, despite this refreshing approach, many studies on Islamic populism still concentrate on the state (instead of capital) and the urban areas in explaining the development of Islamic populism. This article, therefore, offers a different approach to analyzing Islamic populism through the understanding of capitalism as a social relation and shifts to the countryside as its empirical basis by focusing on the case study of Bulak village in West Java. By combining insights from the literature on agrarian change and populism as a political strategy and adopting qualitative methods namely in-depth interviews (including oral history) and field observation, this article found that contemporary Islamic populism in Indonesia is a result of the specific development of capitalist relations in the context of rural agrarian change. In addition, it also found that Islamic populism is not a phenomenon confined to the urban areas, since it also spreads to the countryside. Moreover, Islamic populism in the countryside has distinctiveness, related to context, social background, and the ways it is mobilized.

“Heirs to What Had Been Accomplished”: D. N. Aidit, the PKI, and Maoism, 1950–1965

AbstractWhy did the Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI) pursue a nonviolent, collaborative, and parliamentary path to power? How did it secure major electoral successes? The answers to both queries have much to do with the PKI's adaptation of Maoism. Although scholars recognize that Maoism was influential on PKI theory and praxis, they have hitherto underevaluated the extent to which PKI leaders, notably Dipa Nusantara Aidit and Muhammad Hatta Lukman, engaged with Mao's ideas and how such ideas informed policy. Through textual exegesis of PKI leaders’ writings and speeches, our article argues that the PKI's “Indonesianization” of Marxism–Leninism drew from several Maoist texts, but differed in its composition in a number of important ways. “Indonesianization” entailed cross-class alliances, the political agency of the peasantry, willingness to cooperate with parties across the political spectrum, and, most innovatively, a nonviolent agenda. The PKI also demonstrated an adaptive willingness to learn from all, while remaining beholden to none. Our goal is to show how PKI leaders spoke back in their dialectical engagement with Maoism, as Maoism, for them, did not constitute a static, orthodox, or monolithic “thing.” Instead, Maoism was for Aidit and Lukman an ideological system within which lay an ideological discourse, critical interpretive paradigm, historical revolutionary experience, military strategy, and blueprint to socialist development against which to juxtapose their ideas and grand visions.

The Origins of the Swedish Wage Bargaining Model

AbstractThis paper revisits the development of the canonical Swedish wage bargaining model, from the 1930s to the 1950s. The question at the core of the debate is: how did Sweden achieve “good” wage bargaining institutions -- good, in the sense of facilitating investment, employment, and controlled inflation? The conventional account focuses on the actions of employers and trade unions in export industry, and a cross-class alliance between the two. This paper questions this account. The paper builds on archival sources in the Swedish Labour Movement's Archives and Library in Stockholm: the minutes from the main trade union confederation's yearly wage policy discussions, in preparation for bargaining rounds. In total, some 1,500 pages of wage policy discussion. I find that the export sector cross-class alliance played a very small role, and that macro-corporatist concerns, that the labour movement had to take responsibility of all of society and pursue a planned wage policy, was much more important. This has theoretical implications for the analysis of wage bargaining institutions in general and the Swedish model in particular.

Green New Deals: What Shapes Green and Deal?

ABSTRACT In the US and UK, Green New Deal (GND) agendas have gained significant support as means to reconcile environmental sustainability with a socially fairer economy. Their transformative vision has stimulated proposals such as more public goods, workers’ cooperatives, eco-localisation and caring activities. When seeking support from major political parties, however, GND agendas have undergone pressure to accept decarbonisation technofixes, as promoted by carbon-intensive industries in alliance with their trade unions. Such promises have provided an investment imperative for dubious low-carbon remedies, or an alibi to await their feasibility, or both at once. These agendas imagine the nation as a unitary economic space needing technoscientific advance for a global competitive advantage. Divergences within the labour movement express rival sociotechnical imaginaries of a low-carbon future. This conflictual process has shaped what counts as Green and Deal for a GND. Similar tensions will arise around any low-carbon transition, given the wider capitalist frameworks of Green Keynesianism and Green Growth. To go beyond them will depend on political struggles to disrupt the hegemonic cross-class alliance, to create different alliances and to gain state support for their agendas.

The genealogy of social and political mobilization in Lebanon under a neoliberal sectarian regime (2009–2019)

ABSTRACT This article adopts a structural, class-based and a political economy approach to the October 17 2019 Revolution in Lebanon inspired by David Harvey’s reading of neoliberalism, class struggles and class alliances. Starting from the re-emergence of a class-based discourse in the streets, and the widespread popular mobilization that crossed social classes, sectarian and regional divides, the article sets out to show that neoliberal sectarianism in Lebanon polarized society between those who control political power and rent seeking capital, and Lebanon’s discontented middle class, and a dispossessed working class. It sets out to argue that the structural effects of neoliberal sectarianism on social classes ushered in the wave of mobilization setting the stage for the 2019 protests. The article also offers preliminary reflections on post 2019 organizing and the challenges to cross-class alliance formation that are needed to shift the balance of class power away from the powerful elites.

Rich kids of Europe? Social basis and strategic choices in the climate activism of Fridays for Future

AbstractIn 2018, Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg began a school strike that quickly spread across the globe. After a ritual strike every Friday by school pupils to call for urgent action against climate change had gone on for several months, what had become Fridays for Future (FFF) called for various global days of action throughout 2019, bringing millions of people out onto the streets in the largest climate protests in world history. Drawing on unique protest survey data on FFF events across European cities in 2019, this article explores the structural bases of organized collective mobilization for climate justice. Nuancing narratives that focus on either the privileged background of climate justice protesters or the environmentalism of the poor, our results show the heterogeneity of the social composition of the protests, suggesting the need for cross-class alliances for mass mobilizations. Moreover, our analysis reveals that the social background of protesters shaped their attitudes regarding what institutions and approaches can be relied upon to tackle climate and environmental challenges. This suggests an important and under-studied connection between social background and the strategic choices of environmental movements.

The prospects of cross-class alliances in former bureaucratic development societies: comparing Taiwan and Burkina Faso

This article examines cross-class alliances in former ‘bureaucratic development societies’. We look at middle-class mobilisational efforts aimed at the lower classes in Taiwan and Burkina Faso. In particular, we analyse their capacity for challenging the socio-political dominance of the remnants of post-colonial state classes and hypothesise that the transformative potential of such class alliances depends on the development of the productive forces. Specifically, we argue that the formation of competitive middle-class-led political parties with a mass base independent of the clientelist networks of post-colonial state classes hinges on an early empowerment of labour. We test the validity of our argument using a ‘diverse selection’ comparison of Taiwan and Burkina Faso.

Ladina Social Activism in Guatemala City, 1871–1954

In her beautifully researched Ladina Social Activism in Guatemala City, 1871–1954, historian Patricia Harms opens the windows wide on the world of ladina women's organizations from the outset of the Liberal Party's consolidation of power to the overthrow of the October Revolution's reformist government. The book is primarily an analytical narrative that restores to the historical record the ideas and actions of urban, mainly middle-class ladina women who created maternalist feminist circles. The book, in its introduction, seven chapters, epilogue, informative notes, and useful appendixes with brief biographies of the largely unknown women who formed the core of the women's movement, looks at Guatemala City's ladina women–centered literary circles, journals, and organizations. Above all, Harms examines the intense dynamics of ladina women's mobilizations and ideologies during the period of the reformist October Revolution, from 1944 to 1954. In her introduction, Harms underscores that knowledge of women's history—making visible the invisible—is a prerequisite to, not a substitute for, gender analysis.Harms looks at three broad periods: the development of the Liberal Party and its discourses of progress, order, and secularism between 1871 and 1930; the Jorge Ubico dictatorship between 1930 and 1944; and the ten years of the October Revolution, from 1944 to 1954. The first of these periods saw the birth of a protofeminist consciousness that was articulated in two journals, La Voz de la Mujer and El Ideal, directed to literate urban ladina women and edited by the Lappara sisters, two fascinating women from a poor ladino family in Quetzaltenango. They advocated for a reimagined Liberal Party modernization that included women, poor people, and Catholic workers, and they created a space in which women intellectuals were legitimized to speak and write about civic issues. This important legacy surfaced after the fall of the Manuel Estrada Cabrera dictatorship, when in the 1920s women formed an overtly feminist group, the Sociedad Gabriela Mistral. Although gender roles were not challenged and maternalism remained the unquestioned avenue for women's roles outside the home in moral education and social welfare, the 1920s had many dynamics. Alberto Masferrer's social justice Vitalism and Mistral-inspired theosophy joined in the ideological crucible of maternalism, Catholicism, and liberalism. Out of this came women educators such the remarkable and prolific Luz Valle, who even under the Ubico dictatorship pushed maternal feminist thought to make materialist critiques of social and economic structures.The bulk of the book is devoted to the intense reform years of the October Revolution. The male leadership of the revolution marginalized women, and so has most literature on this period. Harms's important intervention demonstrates women's centrality in the trajectories of both reformism and its opposition. On the progressive side, gains that women made were largely the result of their own activism. They created communal kitchens and day-care centers vital to women workers even before Juan José Arévalo's election, they advocated for and won suffrage for literate women, and in 1947 they organized the first Inter-American Congress of Women, which drew the US State Department's direct attention because of its outspoken opposition to Cold War politics. Harms fascinatingly casts new light on the initiatives of the Alianza Femenina Guatemalteca, known primarily as a women's group formed in 1951 by socialist-leaning urban ladina professionals and artists who supported the revolution. Harms shows that the Alianza Femenina Guatemalteca tried to radicalize the revolution in ways that other progressive groups did not. The group initiated a cross-class alliance that came to include thousands of mainly poor rural and working-class women. Its members sought—without success—to extend suffrage to illiterate Guatemalans, amend the 1947 Labor Code to include domestic workers and pieceworkers, alter the 1952 land reform in the interest of landless rural workers, and arm themselves against the 1954 coup. The Alianza Femenina Guatemalteca stands as a tribute to what could have happened.Sidelining women was the Achilles' heel of reformism, and the absence of a feminist challenge to gender roles left maternal feminism vulnerable to the opposition. The counterrevolutionary movement, and especially the Catholic Church hierarchy, paid close attention to urban women and sought their support as a key part in its strategy. The movement animated a conservative maternalism by claiming that under communism the state would replace the family and the church. Its unmatched hymn was the protection of the traditional woman and of God.Ladina Social Activism in Guatemala City, 1871–1954 is an important book full of exciting information. What Harms leaves unexplored are the serious implications of her observation that ladina feminists turned a blind eye to ethnicity. Throughout these over six decades Mayas formed the demographic majority in Guatemala, the discourse of “el problema del indio” was current, and Mayas worked in the city. Urban ladinas no doubt saw Maya women who worked as maids everyday. Harms's work invites us to consider how feminism can square with racism.

The Fight for Scottish Democracy: Rebellion and Reform in 1820. By Murray Armstrong (London, Pluto Press, 2020) 296 pp. $99.00 cloth $19.95 paper

On April 1, 1820, a self-styled “provisional government” issued a proclamation from Glasgow, imploring the “inhabitants of Great Britain and Ireland” to take up arms. This was no April Fools’ day joke. Striking weavers in the city and surrounding industrial towns, numbering 60,000, provided the insurgents with hope, but the rebellion soon petered out following a botched armed rising. Its leaders were arrested, and at summer’s end, three met their ends in public execution. Armstrong’s engaging account of 1820 begins where his last work on late eighteenth-century radicalism—The Liberty Tree: The Stirring Story of Thomas Muir And Scotland’s Fight for Democracy (Edinburgh, 2014)—ended. It centers on the experience of Scottish weavers, the skilled craftsmen who provided both the industrial strength and dense political organization that made the 1820 rising possible. Their secret societies and oath taking spooked the British state as it recovered from the Napoleonic wars and faced intermittent famines and the crushing effects of industrial business cycles.Armstrong is tactful in his discussion of the complexities that shaped reforming politics, effectively developing biographies to tell the story from the point of view of radicals and bourgeois “volunteer” soldiers alike. Less expectedly, he details weavers’ relationship with the Whig lawyers who repeatedly defended them in the courts. This cross-class alliance harked back to the 1790s but was visible again in 1812 when Francis Jeffrey implored courts to impose wage rates on employers attempting to use slack labor-market conditions to their advantage. These relationships challenge conventional models of the moral economy inspired by Thompson, which assume that liberals were the arch opponents of paternalism. However, political distinctions ultimately crystallized along class lines.1 Jeffrey represented the men who took part in the rising, but he viewed their actions as immature. The radical cause was separated from the liberal one after 1820, becoming more clearly imbued with confrontational class politics. Liberalism, however, became associated with the compromises that led to the limited suffrage extension of 1832.The Fight for Scottish Democracy begins with John Wilson’s family digging up the veteran revolutionary’s body after his execution. In fourteen short chapters, Armstrong runs through the 1812 weavers’ strike, another dispute in 1817, the outbreak of typhus fever in 1819, and the rising. The analysis draws from the radical press, court records, and government archives; together they detail paranoia among government ministers and the turning of Alexander Richmond, the fugitive weavers’ leader who became an informant. Armstrong’s eye for detail is one of the book’s key strengths. He authoritatively concludes that the widespread view of the rising as the work of spies is misplaced. The rising failed because Britain’s “manufacturing districts” were isolated from one another, despite attempts to maintain contact between London, the Midlands, Northern England, and West-Central Scotland. Armstrong’s caution regarding Scottish nationalist assessments of the rising are bolstered when he notes that bands at radical demonstrations played “Rule Britannia” alongside “Scots Wha Hae.” The investigation of songs and poetry written by the uprising’s supporters also reveals their international inspiration and sympathies for abolitionism.The book, however, betrays a lack of analytical depth. Despite its title, it pays insufficient attention to the role that Scottish national consciousness played in the rising and in shaping its memory. The blurb claims that the rebellion is a “little-known chapter of Scottish history.” In 2020 alone, however, Craig and MacAskill have released popular histories of 1820, and a landmark conference on the subject at the University of Glasgow was canceled only because of the coronavirus lockdown.2 Armstrong briefly recognizes the influence of the rising on both the labor movement and Scottish nationalist politics toward the end of the book, detailing that the rising was commemorated as early as the 1840s, but Pentland’s monograph presents a more thorough assessment of the rising’s longer-term impact.3 Nevertheless, Armstrong’s book is a significant contribution to our understanding of 1820. It demonstrates the value of micro-histories constructed through biography and the utility of combining the press and state archives with memoirs, songs, and poetry.

A corporate-centred conservative welfare regime: three-layered protection in Japan

ABSTRACT The Japanese welfare model is identified by the unified typology method of welfare and production regime (Schröder 2013) as the corporate-centred conservative welfare regime (CCWR), a subgroup of the conservative welfare regime. The major company cross-class alliance (Ito, 1988) has played a pivotal role in constructing the CCWR under the group-based coordinate market economy (Hall & Soskice, 2001, 2007). It encompasses the following key characteristics: a male breadwinner-based social insurance with status-dependent programs and a greater role of occupational welfare. Therefore, it fragments social protection into a three-layered structure where regular employees of major enterprises, especially men, enjoy the most generous benefits from their company and government, followed by permanent labourers of small- to medium-sized firms who are provided for relatively modestly, while only minimum governmental benefit is allocated to non-regular employees.

Tackling segmentation to advance universal health coverage: analysis of policy architectures of health care in Chile and Uruguay

BackgroundWith the turn of the century, most countries in Latin America witnessed an increased concern with universalism and redistribution. In the health sector, this translated into a wide range of reforms to advance Universal Health Coverage (UHC) that, however, have had to cope with health systems that stratified the population since their foundation and the further segmentation inherited by market-oriented policies in the 1980s and 1990s.Studies on social welfare stress the relevance of cross-class alliances between the middle and working classes to reach universal and sustainable social benefits. Consequently, the endurance of separate health schemes across groups of the population in most countries in Latin America may seriously hamper the efforts towards UHC.AimThis article addresses the potential of current policy architectures of health care to tackle segmentation between social classes in access to health services in two of the best performers of health coverage in the region, namely Chile and Uruguay.MethodsThe article is a comparative case study based on a literature review and applies an analytical framework that links universal outputs to the policy architectures of health care. The study assesses universal outputs in terms of coverage, generosity and financial protection, identifying equity gaps in each of these dimensions across groups of the population.FindingsLatest processes of reform for UHC in Chile and Uruguay perform highly regarding population coverage. Nevertheless, equity gaps in access to quality services and financial protection remain. In both countries, such gaps relate to the eligibility criteria. In Chile, segmentation is reinforced by the persistence of separated pools of resources that hinder solidarity. Besides, the significant role of private actors and differences in quality between public and private service providers continue to push middle and upper-middle classes to private options. Uruguay’s health reform reinforced the public system and promoted financial solidarity by pooling and progressively allocating resources. Despite this, fragmentation in service provision continues the segmentation of access to health care.ConclusionsThe study shows differences in the options of reforms for UHC in Chile and Uruguay and the relevance of policy architectures to reverse, or conversely deepen, segmentation across groups of the population.