Expansion Of Social Programs Research Articles

Resource Nationalism and the Violation of Indigenous Rights in Mexico’s Oil Industry: The Case of a Chontal Community in Tabasco

For decades, Indigenous communities living in Mexico’s oil-producing state of Tabasco suffered violence, environmental contamination, and the destruction of their traditional livelihood. The administration of Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) taking office in 2018 promised to govern for the poorest people in Mexico, emphasizing the wellbeing of Indigenous peoples. However, as part of his nationalist agenda AMLO is pursuing aggressive exploitation of hydrocarbons upon the lead of state-owned company Pemex. This article argues that the Mexican government still denies Indigenous peoples living nearby oil reserves the right to self-determination. We examine this phenomenon through the Chontal community of Oxiacaque in the state of Tabasco suffering environmental contamination and health problems caused by the oil industry. We emphasize the government’s use of resource nationalism to legitimize violence against Indigenous communities and their natural environments. Further, the expansion of social programs and infrastructure building serves to obtain Indigenous compliance with the unsustainable fossil fuel industry.

Brazil in Transition: Beliefs, Leadership, and Institutional Change

The title of Stefan Zweig's 1941 book Brazil: A Land of the Future captured an age-old Brazilian notion with roots in the colonial period. The country's vast land mass and bountiful resources, so the widely held belief goes, portend a propitious future for the continent-sized country. Cynics, however, like to quip that “Brazil is the land of the future, and it always will be.” This important volume on recent political and economic transformations in Brazil rejects that pessimistic prediction and forcefully insists that despite bumps in the road, the country is, indeed, on the way to sustainable development that will take full advantage of the nation's riches to offer greater prosperity for all.Analysts, including the authors of this collection, have argued that the center-right government of Fernando Henrique Cardoso (1995–2003), and that of his center-left successor, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (2003–10), set Brazil on a course toward economic and political development. Many have insisted that there was more continuity than change in the programs and policies of the two administrations and that it was merely the scale of the different social benefit safety nets and Lula's charisma and communication skills that explain his popularity, in spite of early scandals such as the mensalão vote-buying affair. The export commodities boom of the last decade, many posit, also contributed significantly to Lula's record-breaking approval rating. However, the authors of this volume contend that it is actually the widespread belief in politics of social inclusion coupled with sound orthodox fiscal and economic policies that are the crucial factors in the recent optimistic assessment of the country's future potential.According to this perspective, nationalist developmentalism, which was the hallmark of economic policies during the military dictatorship (1964–85) and relied on state-run industrialization based on foreign indebtedness, failed in its goals. The withdrawal of support by industrial and banking sectors marked the demise of the regime. During the process of democratization, policies of social inclusion coupled with the sharp rise in inflation initially provoked a political crisis that was overcome with Cardoso's economic stabilization plan and an expansion of social programs that were based on solid economic and fiscal policies, which continued when Lula came to the presidency in 2003. While acknowledging the possibilities that ideology, conjunctural economic opportunities, interest group pressure, or Lula's personality might explain the noted shift to lower levels of inequality and higher redistribution rates, the authors insist that a societal shift toward supporting policies of social inclusion, which have become institutionalized and embraced by the middle classes, is the foundation for sustainable development.This book was published on the eve of President Dilma Rousseff's impeachment. Therefore, it cannot be faulted for being unable to predict the new policies and actions of Michel Temer's presidency. Yet recent events will inevitably lead the reader to wonder if the authors' model still holds. Social scientists disagree about the nature of the 2013 mobilizations. Protests articulated diverse demands ranging from a call to fulfill and expand the social services promises (health, education, and transportation) of the Lula-Dilma governments to demands for the end of the Workers' Party's time in power. By 2015, the mass street demonstrations took on another character. The outcry against the Petrobras kickback and corruption schemes and a systematic campaign for the impeachment of the president seemed to dovetail with upper-middle-class repudiation of the social inclusion programs that the authors of this volume insist are at the core of Brazil's new belief consensus. At the time the anti-Rousseff protests were seen as a particularly Brazilian phenomenon. However, the worldwide wave of right-wing movements coming to power this last year casts a new shadow on our understanding of those events. Is the Temer government a momentary shift to the right, or does it reflect an international trend with Brazilian manifestations?Minor errors, such as placing President Artur da Costa e Silva's stroke and the transition to the Emílio Garrastazú Médici presidency in 1968 rather than in 1969 and asserting that “strikes by workers [and] student protests” were a result of Institutional Act No. 5 rather than among the many triggers of the December 1968 decree, notwithstanding, the volume's historical summary of the military regime's economic policies is laudable (p. 63). The authors develop a much more variegated analysis of the authoritarian period that goes beyond the moderate / hard line binary, which has oversimplified many analyses about the dynamics of different political forces battling among the ruling generals. Whether the authors' predictions hold up about the sustainability of a new belief system that continues to favor social inclusion remains to be seen.

Profits and votes: Entrepreneurs and the government in Brazilian housing policy

ABSTRACTAfter more than twenty years of low housing construction output, the housing policy recovered its momentum in the country with the ascent of the Partido dos Trabalhadores (Workers' Party, PT) to the seat of the federal government. This article demonstrates - through the analysis of documents, interviews and research conducted with businessmen - that the impetus of such a state policy is a part of the PT electoral strategy, which is based on economic growth and the expansion of social programs. The research analyses the dovetailing of interests between the Lula (the Brazilian President from 2003 to 2010) administration and the civil construction business - the latter concerned with expanding its business, and the former with increasing the supply of jobs and the level of economic activity. This process culminated in the launching of the largest social housing program to be implemented in the country. Minha Casa, Minha Vida (My House, My Life), is a project in whose planning building companies played a key role, performing feasibility studies and carrying out social housing projects.

Illusory Debates

Emergent social assistance programmes in developing countries are either considered to possibly signal the transition to a post-neoliberal era, or are taken to constitute a move towards neoliberal welfare governance. By examining the making of a social assistance-based welfare regime in Turkey, I argue that the expansion of social programmes are the product of the neoliberalism-plus conjuncture which takes market inequality as a given. Specifically, this article analyses the similarity of nominally opposed concepts of welfare in the Turkish debate between conservative Islamists and secular Kemalists. By examining the “sadaka culture” debate and the constitutive rights vs. belief binary, the following analysis illustrates that although these two political groups appear to disagree about welfare governance, in reality this on-going debate actually masks the consolidation of social assistance as a welfare norm. I argue that social assistance operates as a bio-political strategy that transforms state power, restructures welfare governance and generates new understandings of poverty, need and aid in the neoliberalism-plus conjuncture.

Daniel Bell e lo Stato post-industriale: percorsi di "assemblaggio" dello Stato americano

Discusses Daniel Bell’s reflections on the American State between World War II and the political, economic and social crisis of the 1970s. The A. rejects the traditional image of US as a stateless society and shows how Bell’s sociological approach permits rethinking the American State, pointing out how the coming of post-industrial society brings about a new political organization, which draws on the interplay between public, private and hybrid governmental structures. This fluid and polycentric political organization - the post-industrial State - is presumed to reduce the increasing administrative overload, fueled by the expansion of social programs, and to defuse social unrest. Bell calls for a privatization of some social functions of the State, foreshadowing the contemporary transition from government to governance.

Effects of Colombia's Social Protection System on Workers' Choice between Formal and Informal Employment

We examine whether the Colombian government's expansion of social programs in the early 1990s, particularly the publicly provided health insurance, discouraged formal employment. Using household survey data and variation across municipalities in the onset of interviews for the SISBEN, the instrument used to identify beneficiaries for public health insurance, we find robust and consistent estimates of an increase in informal employment of approximately 4 percentage points. We find similar results using an alternative dataset, consisting of a panel of individuals interviewed for the first and second SISBEN. Our findings suggest that marginal individuals optimized when deciding whether to participate in the formal sector.

Business and Welfare State Development: Why Did Employers Accept Social Reforms?

In recent years, employer-centered explanations of welfare state development have begun to challenge conventional labor-centered and state-centered explanations. These new explanations suggest that sector-specific business interests and cross-class alliances propelled the adoption and expansion of social programs (the business interests thesis). This article presents a novel explanation of differences in business support for welfare state expansion based on a diachronic analysis of the German case and shadow case studies of Sweden and the United States. The article suggests that when looking at changes in employers’ positions across time rather than across sectors, political constraints turn out to be the central factor explaining variation in employers’ support for social reforms (the political accommodation thesis). The article identifies two goals of business intervention in welfare state development: pacification and containment. In the case of pacification, business interests propel social policy expansion; in the case of containment, they constrain it. Business chooses pacification when revolutionary forces challenge capitalism and political stabilization thus becomes a priority. Business chooses containment when reformist forces appear likely to succeed in expanding social protection and no revolutionary challenge exists. The article shows that changes over time in the type of political challenges that business interests confront best explain the variation in business support for labor-friendly social reforms.

To What Extent Did the Financial Crisis Intensify the Pressure to Reform the Welfare State?

AbstractIf ever there was momentum to roll back the welfare state, it is the (aftermath) of the financial crisis of 2008–09. All theoretical perspectives within comparative welfare state research predict radical reform in this circumstance, but does it also happen? Our data indicate that – at least so far – it does not. Focusing on a selection of advanced welfare states (the UK, the USA, Germany, the Netherlands, Denmark and Sweden), we find that these countries face similar problems and that their initial response to these problems is also similar. The latter is surprising because, theoretically, we would expect varying responses across welfare state regime types. Rather than retrenchment, we observe a first phase of emergency capital injections in the banking sector and a second of Keynesian demand management and labour market protection, including the (temporary) expansion of social programmes. Continuing public support for the welfare state was a main precondition for this lack of immediate radical retrenchment. However, the contours of a third phase have become apparent now that budgetary constraints are forcing political actors to make tough choices and introduce austerity policies. As a result, the question of who pays what, when, and how will likely give rise to increasingly sharp distributional conflicts.

Effects of Colombia's Social Protection System on Workers' Choice between Formal and Informal Employment

This paper examines whether the Colombian government's expansion of social programs in the early 1990s, particularly the publicly provided health insurance, discouraged formal employment. Using household survey data and variation across municipalities in the onset of interviews for the SISBEN, the instrument used to identify beneficiaries for public health insurance, it shows robust and consistent estimates of an increase in informal employment of approximately 4 percentage points. Similar results are obtained using an alternative dataset, consisting of a panel of individuals interviewed for the first and second SISBEN. The findings suggest that marginal individuals optimized when deciding whether to participate in the formal sector.

Globalization and the Future of the Welfare State

Globalization and the Future of the Welfare State. Edited by Miguel Glatzer and Dietrich Rueschemeyer. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005. 288p. $29.95.Is globalization a causal factor in the development of welfare states? If globalization does matter, does it constrain or facilitate the creation and expansion of social programs? If globalization has a positive effect on welfare states, which conditions prevent or enable increases in social spending and broadening of coverage? These questions are the focus of Miguel Glatzer and Dietrich Rueschemeyer's edited volume. These editors, who coauthored the introduction and conclusion, carefully selected studies by a group of scholars who are all both experts in the study of welfare states and masters of a specific geographic region or country. The studies include Western Europe (by John D. Stephens), Eastern Europe (Mitchell A. Orenstein and Martine R. Haas), Southern Europe (Miguel Glatzer), Latin America (Evelyne Huber), Russia (Linda J. Cook), and South Korea (Ho Keun Song and Kyung Zoon Hong). In addition to these regional or country case studies, there is a variable-oriented chapter by Geoffrey Garrett and David Nickerson that explores correlations between globalization and social spending across a large number of countries. Since they provided the authors with a limited common framework, giving them sufficient room to explore their own ideas, the editors achieved a good balance between coherence and diversity. All the chapters are of high quality, and each provides a particular insight into the relationship between globalization and welfare state development.

Patterns and variations in the relationship between infant mortality and socioeconomic status.

This study utilizes an ecological approach based on census tracts of residence to examine the relationship between infant mortality and socioeconomic status in metropolitan Ohio, US, at 2 two points in time (1959-1961 and 1969-1971). The data presented clearly indicate that the infant mortality rate continues to exhibit a pronounced inverse association with a wide variety of socioeconomic variables. Although there were some notable exceptions and variations from the general patterns, a basic inverse relationship was characteristic of both neonatal and postneonatal components of infant mortality, for both males and females, and for both major exogenous and endogenous causes of death. Of all the variables examined, the 1 factor that emerged as the strongest and most consistent determinant of census tract variations in infant mortality was the proportion of low income families. Thus, the overriding conclusion suggested by this study is that in spite of such things as continued advances in medicine and public health, the expansion of social programs during the 1960s, and the recent resumption of a downward trend in the infant mortality rate, there has been little if any progress in achieving more equitable life chances for the economically deprived segments of our population.