{"title":"Partisanship, Cross-Party Coalitions, and Social Policymaking in Brazil","authors":"Daniel H. Alves","doi":"10.1017/lar.2024.33","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"\n Brazil is among the few countries where income distribution has become fairer in recent decades. Its Gini coefficient fell significantly in the 2000s while the left-wing Workers’ Party government approved key equity-enhancing reforms in Congress. By analyzing hundreds of news pieces, legislative documents, and secondary sources, I show the strategies that incumbents from the left adopted to build and manage cross-party coalitions that allowed structural changes to materialize. This research is the first systematic effort to detail how three consequential redistributive policies in the areas of conditional cash-transfer programs, education, and minimum wages found their way through a fragmented legislature where the chief executive’s party was minoritarian. Findings add nuance to social policymaking and reveal that partisanship-based approaches to how inequality declined in Latin America require deeper complexification. In the Brazilian case, leftist presidents improved redistribution by investing in multiparty cooperative arrangements while ideology got diluted in the process.","PeriodicalId":47316,"journal":{"name":"Latin American Research Review","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7000,"publicationDate":"2024-05-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Latin American Research Review","FirstCategoryId":"90","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1017/lar.2024.33","RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q2","JCRName":"AREA STUDIES","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
Brazil is among the few countries where income distribution has become fairer in recent decades. Its Gini coefficient fell significantly in the 2000s while the left-wing Workers’ Party government approved key equity-enhancing reforms in Congress. By analyzing hundreds of news pieces, legislative documents, and secondary sources, I show the strategies that incumbents from the left adopted to build and manage cross-party coalitions that allowed structural changes to materialize. This research is the first systematic effort to detail how three consequential redistributive policies in the areas of conditional cash-transfer programs, education, and minimum wages found their way through a fragmented legislature where the chief executive’s party was minoritarian. Findings add nuance to social policymaking and reveal that partisanship-based approaches to how inequality declined in Latin America require deeper complexification. In the Brazilian case, leftist presidents improved redistribution by investing in multiparty cooperative arrangements while ideology got diluted in the process.
期刊介绍:
The Latin American Research Review is the premier interdisciplinary journal that publishes original research and surveys of current research on Latin America and the Caribbean. Interdisciplinary offerings reflect ahead-of-the-curve research, as well as new directions of knowledge creation in areas such as cultural studies, Latino issues and transnationalism, all of which increasingly intersect with Latin America in ways that are intellectually challenging and illuminating.