Varieties of Welfare Expansion: Citizenship, Collective Memory, and Fiscal Dilemmas in Mexico and Peru

Daniela Campos, University of Wisconsin-Madison

One of the most significant innovations in welfare in the last three decades has been the adoption of conditional cash transfers in dozens of countries in the Global South. The implementation of these policies is puzzling because these states face a series of constraints and a socioeconomic landscape remarkably distinct from those of other industrialized countries. How did policymakers justify welfare expansion? Through a close reading of the parliamentary debates that led to the implementation of the programs in Mexico (1997) and Peru (2005), I show that state actors mobilized narratives of nation-building to justify the historical debt to specific segments of the population, shared an ambivalence regarding the meaning of cash transfers between entitlements or logics of measurement, and acknowledged the precarity of the funding scheme and the incapacity to rely on taxes from the wealthiest citizens or to expand the tax base.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 141. Conceptualizing State-Making