Latin American social policies pose many conundrums for researchers. How is such a degree of social inequality possible when levels of spending on health, education and cash transfers are substantially higher than in other regions? Why are Latin America's cash transfer programmes feted as international models of best practice, while the region's more expensive and highly regressive welfare schemes remain largely unobserved and undisturbed? Why have welfare reforms progressed quite differently in Latin American countries whose governments broadly share the same left-of-centre political ideologies? Jennifer Pribble's important new book addresses this last particular puzzle. Drawing on an impressive set of data, including over 100 interviews with key informants, she compares the experiences of Chile's Concertación governments and Uruguay's Frente Amplio (Broad Front). These national experiences are put into a wider regional context, supplemented with more limited case studies of Argentina under Menem and Venezuela under Chávez.
Pribble lays out a set of systematic criteria for assessing welfare reform, including universality of coverage, transparency of administration, quality of services and equity/sustainability of financing. Social policy experts might have some quibbles with these categories – for example, it is questionable whether equity and sustainability can be neatly bundled into the same category. Likewise, the book does not go into detail about what is meant by service quality, which is a contentious and important issue, particularly in the context of the health sector. Such issues do not represent a serious flaw, however, since it becomes clear that Pribble's main interest is in the first of these criteria: the extent to which, and the means by which, different regimes pursue genuinely universal provision.
Pribble sets out a new theoretical framework to explain the politics of welfare reform, identifying a number of effects that have been neglected in other studies. Some of these effects are relatively predictable. For example, she observes that stronger electoral competition can incentivise left-of-centre parties to universalise social policies. Similarly, she notes that reform processes are highly path-dependent, with the policy legacies of earlier regimes framing the reform agendas and the distribution of power across interest groups such as labour unions and private sector interests.
The most interesting and original theoretical contribution is Pribble's insight about how the internal organisation of political parties and the mechanisms linking them to wider society influence welfare reforms. Applying these criteria, she identifies four categories of left-wing regimes. In ‘electoral-professional regimes’, characterised by Chile's Concertación, links between party and society are largely mediated through electoral competition and ideological differentiation between competing parties. Once elected into office, technical elites are somewhat insulated from grassroots pressure and can pursue top-down welfare reforms. By contrast, in ‘constituency-coordinating regimes’, such as Uruguay's Frente Amplio, there are stronger and more direct links between the party and its power base. Consequently, policy-makers are less insulated from societal interest groups and reforms require a messier, more complex process of negotiation and alliance-building. Inevitably, this process is more challenging than the Chilean one and, in the case of education reforms, may prove untenable. When successful, however, this bottom-up approach can generate a strong public consensus for inclusive reforms. For example, Pribble contends that the universal guarantees embedded in Uruguay's health reforms went significantly further than those achieved by Chile, where the private sector was a more united and influential policy actor.
Pribble identifies two other categories, conforming respectively to Venezuela under Chávez and Argentina under Menem. Like the Frente Amplio, ‘charismatic movements’ are characterised by close relations between the party and society, but these are based on non-programmatic linkages. This limits the prospects of universal welfare reforms. For example, in Venezuela the Chávez regime's priority was to bolster the leader's paternalistic appeal, through the establishment of parallel sets of welfare programmes directly associated with the president. To complete the set, ‘non-programmatic electoral’ regimes are characterised by weaker ties to society and non-programmatic linkage mechanisms. For example, the Menem administration's close corporatist ties with labour unions, supplemented by superficial clientelistic interventions for the poor, entrenched existing patterns of welfare segmentation. Universalism was also hindered by weak electoral competition and, during the 1990s, the lack of a coherent Peronist ideology.
Overall, Pribble's book combines systematic and original theoretical insights with robust empirical evidence. It is a commendable achievement and should become an essential reference point in the complex academic and political debates on policy processes, social inclusion and welfare reform in Latin America. The analytical framework could and should potentially be applied to other countries, both within Latin America (most notably Brazil) and beyond it, as well as to other aspects of public policy. It could also be extended to compare the nature and policies of right-of-centre regimes.
