Bolsa Família, a conditional cash transfer program begun in 2001 in Brazil, reached 11 million low-income household by 2006. Mexico’s Oportunidades program expanded income support to 5 million poor families with children between 2000 and 2004. Argentina’s universal child allowance, introduced in 2009, supported over 3.5 million families within 5 years. With some notable exceptions, Latin America’s middle-income democracies have expanded social policies and social policy coverage in recent decades. Whereas social policies in the region have benefited formal workers (labor-market “insiders”) since the first half of the twentieth century, recent interventions have expanded those benefits or created new programs to cover the 40–80% of the population working informally, or who are unemployed (labor-market “outsiders”).

The conventional wisdom about this expansion—often credited with reducing the region’s notoriously high inequality—is that it was driven by the combination of a regional turn toward leftist governments in the late 1990s and early 2000s and a commodity boom that began in 2003–2004. Flush with cash from export taxes, the argument goes, leftist governments used redistributive social policies to appeal to their core constituencies, expand their bases of electoral support, and secure reelection.

Candelaria Garay’s ambitious new book shows that this appealing narrative is far from accurate. Bolsa Família was adopted before the boom in Brazil’s commodities, Mexico’s Oportunidades was implemented by a right-wing president, and governments across the region in fact expanded social policies throughout the economic hardships of the 1980s and 1990s. A close look at the data reveals that the substantial expansions in social policy to “outsiders” are not simply the product of recent leftist governments.

Garay offers a more nuanced explanation for this phenomenon, one that downplays government ideology and financial resources in favor of electoral considerations. Incumbents, she argues, expand social policies either when they face stiff competition for the votes of outsiders or when large-scale social mobilizations by outsiders threaten their political survival. When challengers can credibly threaten to peel off outsider voters, incumbents use social policy to keep them in the fold. And when coalitions with the capacity to mobilize large groups of citizens impose pressure on behalf of outsiders, incumbents respond to avoid becoming unpopular or to stave off unrest.

Further, Garay thoughtfully asks why some new social policies provide small benefits to a limited pool of outsiders while others are more generous and more inclusive. Here, she argues, is where partisan politics comes in. When incumbents have to negotiate new social policies with congressional parties, the need to win over the conservatives who hold majorities in most legislative bodies in the region leads to more restrictive designs. When they instead have to negotiate with external coalitions like social movements representing outsiders, the resulting policies tend to be more inclusive to meet the group’s demands.

The evidence to support these arguments comes from an impressive mix of cross-country and longitudinal case comparisons. In Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Mexico, Garay traces the process of social policy adoption across every administration between the democratic transitions of the 1980s and 2010. Using evidence from primary documents, secondary accounts, content analysis of newspaper coverage, and extensive fieldwork interviewing key actors, she compares both the policymaking process in each administration and the long-term trajectories of each country. Ecological and survey data help Garay track electoral competition for outsiders over time. And for Argentina, she constructs detailed data on nearly 2,000 protest events. Finally, Garay also compares these cases to less detailed studies of Peru, Uruguay, Venezuela, and South Africa.

All of this diverse and layered evidence makes an exceptionally compelling case. And yet certain elements of the argument and the empirics might have been shored up. In an era of rising populism and zealous nationalism, the notion that governments need social policies to appeal to outsiders seems almost quaint. Surely they have other means of appealing to this constituency, including clientelism, populism, symbolic or non-economic issues, and valence considerations like performance. Why they instead choose social policy could use some further explanation.

In Brazil, for instance, most poor outsiders voted for conservative parties throughout the 1980s and 1990s, and not because these parties offered them social policies. Many poor outsiders also voted for Carlos Menem’s reelection in 1995 in Argentina, even though his administration had cut back social benefits and had done little to support the growing numbers of unemployed. In these cases, outsider voters seem to have been quite responsive to appeals that relied little upon expanding social policies.

Perhaps even more striking is the fact that when Brazil’s Fernando Henrique Cardoso, for instance, did expand social policies to outsiders, they nevertheless abandoned his center-right party for the leftist Workers’ Party. Similarly, Ernesto Zedillo’s famous conditional cash transfer program, PROGRESA, which reached nearly 2.5 million households by 2000, also seemed to do little to stem the outflow of outsider voters from his party. Outsider voters might have gambled that a challenger party might do even more for them (and they would have been right in both cases). But this undermines Garay’s claim that incumbents use social policy to shore up outsider support: social policy expansions might be more credible coming from some parties than from others.

One could also quibble with the assumption that term-limited incumbents would like to see their party reelected. In fact, term-limited presidents in the region regularly undermined their own successors, often with the hope of regaining the presidency after sitting out the required number of terms. This was notoriously evident in Venezuela in the 1980s and 1990s, but also in Argentina, when Menem refused to support, and may have even actively damaged, the candidacy of his own vice-president in 1999 (and then went on to contest the presidency again himself in 2003).

Still, none of this detracts from what is a masterful book. Its novel theoretical insights and empirical depth will make it required reading for students of Latin American political economy. Moreover, Garay’s book is not just about Latin American welfare states’ expansion from the near-exclusive focus on formal, middle-class workers to include the informal and the unemployed. Indeed, her own measures of outsiders frequently rely on (more readily available) data on household income or wealth rather than on direct measures of employment status and formality. Both theoretically and empirically, this is actually a much broader book that ties pro-poor redistribution with electoral motives in important new ways. It should be widely read by those interested in redistribution and pro-poor politics.