A economia política dos Estados de bem-estar tardios sob a globalização: uma comparação entre América Latina e Leste Asiático

Abstract

This thesis conducts a descriptive and causal analysis on the expansion of late welfare states during the 1990s and 2000s, focusing on Latin American and East Asian countries. Based on Polanyi’s dual movement theory, power resource theory, and the efficiency hypothesis, it is proposed that this process occurred on a global scale as a response to the instability of the market as an instance of social provision in the face of recurring financial crises amidst deepening globalization. At the same time, it is suggested that the magnitude of the expansion of late welfare states derives from the power balance conformed by political institutions and “extended coalitions” involving political parties and their relations with national elites, internationalized elites, trade unions, and civil society organizations. To empirically evaluate these propositions, I apply the comparative historical method, the quantitative time-series cross-sectional method, and a large set of data on social spending and coverage in the following social policy sectors: education, health, social security and social assistance, active labor market policies, and work-family reconciliation policies. Overall, the evidence is consistent with the propositions: a) all the countries analyzed demonstrated advances in social policies, although in different directions (chapter 2 and 3); b) the cases, with greater expansion of social spending and that carried out reforms with an universalist bias, combined political openness with the advent of left-wing governments linked to strong civil society organizations and with less economic dependence on the international market; on the other hand, the countries that developed residual reforms and maintained individualistic social protection systems are dominated by political and economic elites associated with internationalized sectors, given the strong dependence on the global market (chapter 4 and 5). Based on these results, the thesis concludes that the process of expansion of social policies was the product of the interaction of exogenous and endogenous factors. Contrary to the usual explanatory argument in the literature on welfare states, circumscribed to the institutional arena, it is found that the interaction between institutional insiders (parties and governments) with outsiders (elites and civil society organizations) provides the ability to exercise redistribution.