Table Of Content(RE-) SHAPING THE POLITICAL ARENA? A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF
WELFARE REGIME REFORMS IN LATIN AMERICA, 1980-2010
by
Javier Vázquez-D’Elía
BS in International Studies, Universidad ORT Uruguay, 1997
MA in Political Science, University of Pittsburgh, 2005
Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the
Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences in partial fulfillment
of the requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy in Political Science
University of Pittsburgh
2014
UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH
DIETRICH SCHOOL OF ARTS AND SCIENCES
This dissertation was presented
by
Javier Vázquez-D’Elía
It was defended on
January 31, 2014
and approved by
Barry Ames, PhD, Andrew W. Mellon Professor, University of Pittsburgh
John Markoff, PhD, Distinguished University Professor, University of Pittsburgh
Committee Co-chairs: Scott Morgenstern, PhD, Associate Professor, University of Pittsburgh
B. Guy Peters, PhD, Maurice Falk Professor of Government, University of Pittsburgh
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Copyright © by Javier Vázquez-D’Elía
2014
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(RE-) SHAPING THE POLITICAL ARENA? A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF
WELFARE REGIME REFORMS IN LATIN AMERICA, 1980-2010
Javier Vázquez-D’Elía, PhD
University of Pittsburgh, 2014
This dissertation examines the processes and outcomes of welfare regimes reforms in eleven
Latin American countries, between 1980 and 2010. It theorizes the reforms by comparing
pensions, health care, and social assistance policies. In so doing, it confronts three theoretical
goals. First, it provides an explanation of recent transformations of welfare regimes as resulting
from the combined effects of gradual institutional change and exogenous socioeconomic
transformations. Second, it explores the potentialities and limitations of historical
institutionalism. Third, it identifies emerging patterns of governance.
Mismatches between institutions and social problems trigger reforms, but do not determine the
options that policy makers finally choose. Frictions caused by emerging social risks interact with
difficulties of established welfare regimes to cope with old risks to facilitate access to public
agendas for reformist projects. Ultimately, however, reforms depend on the construction of pro-
and anti-reform coalitions, shaped by two main forces: 1) lines of discrimination in the
distribution of benefits by existing welfare regimes; 2) strategies of parties, interest groups, and
bureaucracies, competing to activate those cleavages according to their interests.
Socioeconomic change, fiscal strain, and transnational factors, interact to make the expansion of
social protection contingent upon redistributions of burdens and benefits guaranteed to trigger
resistance from groups privileged by existing schemes. The strategic challenge for reformist
politicians is the crafting of formulas aimed at simultaneously neutralizing potential veto
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coalitions and mobilizing unprotected populations. This requires combining strategies of blame-
avoidance and credit-claiming that variably mix persuasion, exclusion, and division targeting
potential opposition. Selective pay-offs to appease privileged groups constitute the most direct
determinants of the architecture of reforms.
In explaining the reforms, I discuss endogenous institutional change and how this results in
fragmented social protection policies. However, exogenous shocks may facilitate changes away
from expected paths. Certain institutional configurations are also found to block the
consolidation of structural reforms entailing drastic institutional discontinuity, leading to
situations of chronic instability and serial institutional replacement.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
PREFACE .............................................................................................................................. XVIII
1.0 INTRODUCTION ........................................................................................................ 1
1.1 GENERAL OVERVIEW .................................................................................... 1
1.2 THE ARGUMENT .............................................................................................. 6
1.3 RESEARCH DESIGN ....................................................................................... 11
1.4 ORGANIZATION ............................................................................................. 13
2.0 THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK ........................................................................... 17
2.1 INTRODUCTION ............................................................................................. 17
2.2 DEFINING AND COMPARING WELFARE REGIMES ............................ 23
2.2.1 Introducing the concept of welfare regime .................................................. 23
2.2.2 Classifying welfare regimes .......................................................................... 26
2.2.2.1 Esping-Andersen’s OECD-based typology ....................................... 26
2.2.2.2 Main critiques to Esping-Andersen’s typology ................................ 29
2.2.3 The endogenous dynamics of welfare regimes ............................................ 32
2.3 ANALYZING AND CLASSIFYING WELFARE REGIME CHANGE ..... 36
2.3.1 Conceptualizing outcomes of welfare regime reforms ............................... 36
2.3.2 Conceptualizing welfare regime change as modes of institutional
transformation ............................................................................................................ 38
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2.4 EXPLAINING PATTERNS OF WELFARE REGIME CHANGE ............. 42
2.4.1 Parametric retrenchment .............................................................................. 43
2.4.2 Structural retrenchment through institutional displacement ................... 45
2.4.2.1 Authoritarian interregna .................................................................... 45
2.4.2.2 Financial crises .................................................................................... 46
2.4.3 Blockage and segmentation of structural retrenchment ............................ 48
2.4.4 Structural expansion ..................................................................................... 50
2.4.5 Reversion of structural retrenchment ......................................................... 56
3.0 RESEARCH DESIGN ............................................................................................... 60
3.1 CASE-SELECTION AND LEVELS OF ANALYSIS .................................... 61
3.2 MEASUREMENT OF WELFARE REGIME CHANGE ............................. 64
3.2.1 Measurement of outcomes of reform ........................................................... 64
3.2.1.1 Social security systems ........................................................................ 64
3.2.1.2 Health care systems ............................................................................. 65
3.2.2 Post-reform cross-national variation of regime types ................................ 67
3.2.3 Classification of reforms ............................................................................... 67
3.3 TESTING OF MULTI-CAUSAL HYPOTHESES......................................... 68
3.4 EXPLANATION ................................................................................................ 69
3.5 MODAL TYPES OF INSTITUTIONAL CHANGE ...................................... 69
3.6 IDENTIFICATION AND DESCRIPTION OF PATTERNS OF
GOVERNANCE ................................................................................................................. 70
4.0 AN EXPANDED CLASSIFICATION OF MODES OF POLITICAL
INCORPORATION .................................................................................................................... 71
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4.1 INTRODUCTION ............................................................................................. 71
4.2 BOLIVIA ............................................................................................................ 73
4.3 COSTA RICA .................................................................................................... 84
4.4 ECUADOR ......................................................................................................... 90
4.5 CONCLUSIONS ................................................................................................ 96
5.0 WELFARE REGIMES IN CONTEMPORARY LATIN AMERICA .................. 98
5.1 WELFARE REGIMES IN LATIN AMERICA: DISCUSSION OF
TYPOLOGIES .................................................................................................................... 99
5.1.1 General overview ........................................................................................... 99
5.1.2 Armando Barrientos’ “conservative/informal” model ............................ 102
5.2 THE CONFIGURATION OF PRE-REFORM WELFARE REGIMES IN
LATIN AMERICA ........................................................................................................... 105
5.2.1 When quantitative differences become qualitative: the problem of
truncation .................................................................................................................. 105
5.2.2 An alternative typology ............................................................................... 108
5.2.3 Welfare regimes and political incorporation ............................................ 112
5.3 STRUCTURAL CHANGE AND THE EMERGENT DISJUNCTURE
BETWEEN RISKS AND PROTECTION ..................................................................... 114
5.4 THE PRODUCTION OF WELFARE AFTER THIRTY YEARS OF
REFORMS ........................................................................................................................ 116
5.4.1 Regional trends of welfare regime change ................................................ 117
5.4.2 A diagnosis of aggregated impacts ............................................................. 118
5.4.3 A critique ...................................................................................................... 119
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5.4.3.1 The conservative components of social policy did not “fall away” –
or, at least, they did not everywhere .............................................................. 119
5.4.3.2 The labor market remains a powerful stratification device; what
has happened is that further truncation has brutally simplified the lines of
stratification, and turned them rather into lines of fracture ....................... 121
5.4.3.3 The “productivist” orientation of the last wave of social assistance
programs is at least debatable –in any case, it cannot be assumed based on
declarations of intentions, and it is probably too soon for a serious
evaluation of durable impacts......................................................................... 122
5.5 A TYPOLOGY OF POST-REFORM WELFARE REGIMES .................. 123
5.5.1 Multiple directions of change ..................................................................... 123
5.5.2 Continuity and change in welfare regimes ................................................ 126
5.5.3 An alternative typology ............................................................................... 134
5.5.3.1 Exclusionary/Assistential.................................................................. 135
5.5.3.2 Conservative/assistential .................................................................. 135
5.5.3.3 Liberal/Assistential ........................................................................... 135
5.5.3.4 Segmented Universalism ................................................................... 137
5.5.3.5 Incomplete Universalism .................................................................. 137
5.6 CONCLUSIONS .............................................................................................. 137
6.0 ASSESSMENT OF CAUSAL CONFIGURATIONS ........................................... 140
6.1 DESCRIPTIVE ANALYSIS OF VARIABLES ............................................ 140
6.1.1 Causal conditions ......................................................................................... 140
6.1.2 A quick glance at aggregated outcomes ..................................................... 143
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6.2 ANALYSIS OF TRUTH TABLES ................................................................. 146
6.2.1 Necessary conditions for structural replacement ..................................... 146
6.2.2 Sufficient conditions for the blockage of structural reform .................... 149
6.2.3 Sufficient conditions for emergence of mixed systems (partial structural
reform) ...................................................................................................................... 152
6.2.3.1 Cases of corporatist legacy ............................................................... 153
6.2.3.2 Cases of pluralist or discontinued populist legacy ......................... 157
6.2.4 Necessary conditions for structural expansion ......................................... 159
6.2.5 Sufficient conditions for reversibility of structural reforms ................... 164
6.3 DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONS ........................................................... 170
7.0 TRACING PROCESSES OF WELFARE REFORM .......................................... 175
7.1 INTRODUCTION ........................................................................................... 175
7.2 PARTY, STATE AND PRESSURE GROUPS IN THE CONTEXT OF
CORPORATIST LEGACIES ......................................................................................... 177
7.2.1 The Mexican pension reform (1990-1995) ................................................. 177
7.2.2 Pension reform in Argentina (1992-1994) ................................................. 187
7.3 THE POLITICS OF STRUCTURAL EXPANSION ................................... 193
7.3.1 Healthcare reform in Costa Rica (1988 – 1998) ........................................ 193
7.3.2 Healthcare reform in Uruguay (2005 – 2007) ........................................... 201
7.3.3 Healthcare reform in Brazil ........................................................................ 212
7.4 A QUICK GLANCE AT SOME ANCILLARY CASES ............................. 225
7.4.1 Pension reform in Uruguay ........................................................................ 225
7.4.2 Pension reform in Costa Rica ..................................................................... 230
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Description:A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF and anti-reform coalitions, shaped by two main forces: 1) lines of discrimination The strategic challenge for reformist.
