Political Coalitions and Social Policy Design: The Overlooked Role of the Brazilian Congress in Shaping the Bolsa Família Program
As a consequence of democratization and inclusive social policies, poverty and social inequalities steadily declined in Latin America since the end of the 1990’s, when an agenda of social assistance reforms emerged with the aim to break a long-standing dichotomy between insiders and outsiders of the Welfare State. Cash Transfer Policies were a main issue of this agenda and quickly became the broadest social policy in most Latin-American countries. One of the most prominent examples in the region is the Brazilian Bolsa Família Program. Since its implementation in 2004, numerous studies have focused on the Executive power as the primary arena of policymaking of Bolsa Família. However, researchers overlook the decisive role of the Legislative in shaping important features of the policy design. Therefore, this paper aims to show how Brazilian left wing and conservative congressmen acted together for the approval of bills concerning the design of the Bolsa Família Program and the reform of social assistance institutions. Specifically, I improve the hypothesis given by the literature and argue that only conservative deputies elected in constituencies with higher levels of poverty tended to ally with the left wing parties in order to expand the coverage and the spending of the Program. For the data analysis, I classified over two thousand legislative bills on their effects over the target public, conditions, transfers and financing of the Program. I ran a logit model to explain how party and constituency affiliations explain the inclusiveness of bills. I found that left wing deputies of all constituencies, as well as conservatives of the North and Northeast regions have higher chances of proposing bills to expand inclusiveness and spending of Bolsa Família. On the contrary, deputies of liberal parties of all constituencies, as well as conservatives of the South and Southeast regions have higher chances of proposing bills to impose budget limits to the Executive and transfer conditions to the families. In sum, this paper proposes a new insight into the role that political coalitions play within the Legislative in designing social policies not only in Brazil, but also in other Latin-American countries.