Studying the state through the lens of Bolsa Família: policy preservation under adverse circumstances in Brazil

In the 1990s and early 2000s, countries across Latin America embarked on a new era of social policy. Turning away from a model of “truncated” welfare states where social protection was tied to formal employment, governments began to expand the reach of social safety nets to new groups. Conditional cash transfers programs (CCTs) targeted to low-income households were a hallmark of this new approach and have since proliferated rapidly across the region and the world. In many countries, CCTs represented the first time that certain marginalized groups were direct beneficiaries of programmatic state-led social protection efforts. In this context, cash transfer programs represented not only a technical policy solution for poverty reduction, but also sought to push towards a deeper reimagining of state’s relationship with poor citizens. However, several decades on, the institutional environment in Latin America has changed dramatically. In recent years, it has been shaped by rising right-wing countermovements, shifting economic winds, and overlapping global crises. While there is an extensive body of research studying cash transfer programs during the earlier period of welfare state expansion, more contemporary research is needed to understand the political economy of how these policies have evolved in the face of adverse circumstances and to unpack their implications for the dynamic and contingent relationship between states and their citizens. This thesis uses the paradigmatic case of the Bolsa Família program as a prism for studying the Brazilian state and explores the political economy of social policy in moments of transition. Drawing on original qualitative research, including interviews with strategically placed bureaucrats involved in the program’s design and implementation over time, it traces the historical trajectory of the program and considers how the state’s relationship with poor citizens is made, remade, and unmade during various periods of welfare state expansion and retrenchment. Specifically, it explores the evolution of this relationship across three different dimensions of the state (considering the state as law, the state as a set of bureaucracies, and the state as a focus of collective identity) over three stylized periods of time (“The Expansion,” “The Backlash,” and “The Crisis”). Respectively, these periods refer to the introduction and scale up of the program under the administrations of Cardoso, Lula, and Dilma, the economic and political pressures on the program under the administrations of Temer and Bolsonaro, and the renewed debate over cash transfers in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. It argues that the Expansion can be read as a period of inclusion without equity, the Backlash as a period of backlash without backsliding, and the Crisis as a period of opportunity without change. Taken together, these findings reveal a surprising pattern of policy preservation under adverse circumstances, driven in large part by the continuity of the state itself. While Bolsa Família was never legally codified as a “right,” it has proven surprisingly durable over time. The analysis in this thesis suggests that this is not only due to the difficult politics involved in taking benefits away from voters, but also in large part due to the continuity of technocratic actors (and their broader epistemic community) over time that acted as “protective constituency” for the program. However, these findings also underscore the fundamental limitations of this outcome. Without the parallel preservation of the broader intersectoral network of public services and social benefits in which the program is embedded, Bolsa Família risks becoming simply a transfer of cash rather than a mechanism to link the Brazilian state with poor citizens and advance more universal goals of social protection and public service provision. While this thesis focuses on the singular case of Bolsa Família in Brazil, its findings point to broader lessons on the links between targeted social assistance, state transformation, and long-term social policy trajectories in unequal societies. In contexts of high inequality, it is important to remember that policies to expand inclusion may likely prompt a reactionary politics of resistance. Lessons from the case of Bolsa Família reveals the importance of policy design that can balance dynamic flexibility with long-term commitment, policy implementation that is robustly integrated across sectors, and policy framing that can bridge the social divide between target and non-target populations.

Keywords: social policy
politics of public policy
Bolsa Família
welfare state
state-society relations
cash transfers
Brazil