Institutions and Emerging Welfare States: Social Assistance in South Africa and Brazil

Abstract

Recent decades have witnessed the profound proliferation of social assistance cash transfer programmes throughout numerous countries of the developing world. While scholars have subsequently paid a great deal of attention to the largely positive socioeconomic effects generated through the expansion of these redistributive interventions, the literature has neglected the fact of tremendous empirical variation regarding the ways in which div ergent countries have designed their social assistance policy regimes. The smattering of studies which have taken up the question have usually been content to regard fundamental diff erences in these patterns of welfare provision as the result of functional and ideational factors on the basis of conventional wisdom, rather than through rigorous analysis.

In the first study of its kind, this inquiry explicitly addresses this gap in the literature by resolutely focusing on the systemic variation in social assistance provision in the two benchmark emerging welfare states of South Africa and Brazil. Its central aim is to account for the disparity between the policy regimes instituted by the two countries. The fact that South Africa and Brazil have adopted very diff erent approaches regarding issues of coverage, conditionality and orientation results in the construction of distinct typologies which sees the South African system classified as 'productive' and the Brazilian approach as 'protective'. The description of this empirically observable divergence is followed by an account of its manifestation through the application of a historical institutionalist framework, operationalised by employing the analytical approach of Actor-Centred Institutionalism.

The resulting investigation into the comparative political economy of social assistance provision reveals that, while conventionally accepted functional and ideational hypotheses fail to explain the divergence across the cases, variation on the institutional dimension is able to convincingly account for the fact that South Africa and Brazil have adopted qualitatively different policy approaches. The study thereby provides the first explanatory account of the contemporary domestic emergence of programmes which have become centrally important in combating poverty and inequality throughout the countries of the developing world. In addition to making a significant and entirely novel explanatory contribution to the knowledge on the subject, the findings attest to the decisive practical importance of the role played by local institutional structures in shaping context appropriate policy interventions.