I am grateful to William Ascher for his thoughtful review of my book. Ascher’s skepticism of the book’s claim that “more permissive [CCT] programs reflect a rights-based ideology” is warranted. As he notes, “CCTs per se, at less than one half of one percent of GDP, are hardly revolutionary.” It is true that even the region’s most permissive CCTs are, at best, “a rather modest incremental shift toward rights-based economic justice.” Such was the state of social policy in this primarily middle-income region in the early 1990s that these modest programs could make significant contributions to reducing poverty and even inequality. Nevertheless, what is most revolutionary about CCTs is that they actually reach the poor, which the region’s long-standing and relatively generous contributory social programs do not. That is why the book seeks to explain the politics behind their design, adoption, and diffusion.

I will, however, push back against the review’s excessive focus on Brazil and Mexico at the expense of the book’s regional scope. First, Ascher questions my claim that the left initially opposed CCTs. Indeed, it is “unsurprising” that, while in opposition, the Mexican and Brazilian left opposed their respective governments’ CCTs. However, as chapter 3 details, Lula also de-emphasized Brazil’s CCTs once in power. Only once his own more ambitious policies failed did he embrace CCTs. Furthermore, as chapter 2 shows, the election of left-wing leaders in Venezuela and Nicaragua led to the cancellation of CCT initiatives. In Argentina and Bolivia, where left presidents adopted CCTs, they were responding to and coopting proposals from the right and center. Further still, across the Atlantic, the South African left was also initially critical of cash transfers.

Second, Ascher posits alternative, non-ideological, explanations for the differing permissiveness of Brazilian and Mexican CCTs. The unique national factors that Ascher mentions may well have mattered but do not explain the cross-national patterns in CCT design presented in chapter 5. Further, as an analysis of program decrees shows, Costa Rica’s program, enacted by a centrist, was justified as a means of tackling secondary school desertion, while the programs enacted by the Argentine and Bolivian left were presented as poverty alleviation tools. Additionally, as chapter 7 details, Bolivia’s president rejected a World Bank proposal for a targeted and conditional program in favor of his own universal and essentially unconditional program. In contrast, Costa Rica’s highly targeted and conditional program benefited from Inter-American Development Bank assistance.

Finally, I fully agree with Ascher’s suggestion that future research should “explore other types of programs that could move Latin American countries toward rights-based economic policies and programs.” A broad, comparative book length study on the politics of non-contributory pensions would be welcomed. Such unconditional programs are much more generous than CCTs. On the policy front, researchers should explore the prospects for employment guarantee programs akin to India’s, though past workfare schemes in the region were highly clientelistic and failed to reach the poorest.