As illustrated in Chapter 2, local incumbents and bureaucrats engage in a range of behaviors that help make clientelism work as a political strategy. The breadth of these practices, and the difficulty of observing them directly, makes the task of developing a measure of clientelism a difficult one. To make measurement tractable, as well as because of its inherent importance, I measure and explain clientelism in the realm of social policy. In this chapter, I review the recent rise of new forms of social policy throughout Latin America and their relationship to clientelism, and I explain why Argentina is a particularly interesting case in this light. Next, I offer details about the social program on which I focus and explain a new and innovative measure of clientelism across municipalities. Finally, I present some initial evidence for the theory developed in Chapter 3.

SOCIAL POLICY AND THE RISE OF SAFETY NETS IN LATIN AMERICA

Any review of the history of the welfare state in Latin America focuses on two salient facts. First, in many countries in the region through the late 1970s, social spending was minimal, making it difficult to speak of a “welfare state” at all. Second, regardless of the size of the welfare state, social spending in Latin America has historically been quite regressive (Lindert et al., 2006).