Power, Alliances, and Redistribution: The Politics of Social Protection for Low-Income Earners in Argentina, 1943–2015 by Carl Friedrich Bossert

1 
Introduction 
Without any doubt, the proliferation and expansion of social policies over the 
last hundred years has been a macro-political phenomenon of enormous social, 
economic, and political importance for Latin American societies. But while the 
rapid growth of social programs in industrialized countries received growing 
scientific attention from the 1970s on, similar processes in Latin America were 
subject to a comparatively limited number of studies until the early 2000s.
When in the late 1970s Ian Gough (1979, 1) went as far as to say of the indus-
trialized countries that the “twentieth century, and in particular the period since 
the Second World War, can fairly be described as the era of the welfare state,” 
several Latin American countries could look back at over seven decades of 
social insurance development and even surpassed the United States and other 
industrialized countries in programs such as health-maternity insurance and 
family allowances (Mesa-Lago 1989, XV). When Esping-Andersen ([1990] 
1998,) observed for the industrialized countries that what “once were night-
watchman states, law-and-order states, militarist states, or even repressive or-
gans of totalitarian rule, are now institutions predominantly preoccupied with 
the production and distribution of social well-being,” many Latin American 
states devoted about 40% of their expenditures to social policies and in some 
countries, such as Argentina, Uruguay, and Costa Rica, this number even as-
cended to 50% or 60% (Segura-Ubiergo 2007, 14). The importance of the 
expansion of social policies, however, not only rested on the devotion of sig-
nificant resources to providing such elemental things as access to health care, 
education, food, and income security. It rested as much on shaping the social 
stratification of the society, family and gender relations, the distribution of po-
litical power and the basic dynamics and rules of the economy (e.g., Barrientos 
2004; Esping-Andersen [1990] 1998; Filgueira 2005; Huber and Stephens 
2001; Lewis 1992; Martnez Franzoni 2008; Orloff 1996). 
Already towards the end of the 20th century, Carmelo Mesa-Lago (1989, 
XV) had concluded that “in terms of social security […] Latin America is a 
leader in the Third World.”

A Latin American Paradox: Significant Social Expenditure Without 
Significant Redistribution 
In the context of high world market prices for Latin American commodity ex-
ports, high economic growth rates and the election of left-of-center govern-
ments in a significant proportion of the region, social policy expansion re-
ceived another decisive push during the first one and a half decades of the 21st 
century. Many of the reform initiatives during this period, such as the expan-
sion of social services, universal cash transfers, targeted social assistance pro-
grams, and the easing of access criteria for social insurance benefits, had a 
clearly redistributive orientation (Barrientos and Santib iez 2009;  
Cruz-Martnez 2019; Lustig 2015; Lustig, Pessino and Scott 2014). In 2015, 
the average public social expenditure in the region reached 14.6% of GDP and 
was hence not far from the 19.0% average spent by OECD countries. Some 
countries, such as Argentina, Brazil, and Costa Rica, even spent over 23% of 
their GDP and surpassed, in relative terms, highly developed welfare states, 
such as the Netherlands, the United Kingdom or Iceland (OECD 2019; CEPAL 
2017a, 123). 
However, despite this stunning expansion of social policies and the pro-
gressive character of the recent reform cycle, Latin America is still character-
ized by extreme inequalities. These concern not only the distribution of in-
comes but pervade nearly every aspect of social and economic life, such as 
access to health care, education, labor markets, land, housing, and sewage 
treatment (Burchardt 2012; Ferranti et al. 2004; Peters 2013; Tittor 2012). In-
equality expert Nora Lustig (2015, 14) recently pointed out that while Latin 
America is home to about “5 percent of the world’s billionaires, the poor are 
strikingly poor. Infant mortality and malnutrition in rural areas and shanty-
towns, and among disadvantaged groups in Latin American middle-income 
countries, are much the same as in notably poorer nations.” Hence, there is a 
pressing question: How can Latin America be at the same time leader in the 
Third World in terms of social policy and in terms of inequality? 
An important part of the answer lies in the way social policy systems 
evolved in Latin America. While social policy transfers and taxes in OECD 
countries reduced income inequalities measured with the Gini coefficient by 
an estimated average of 36% during the early 2010s, they did so by a meager 

Power, Alliances, and Redistribution: The Politics of Social Protection for Low-Income Earners in Argentina, 1943–2015 by Carl Friedrich Bossert