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Abstract

One of the most significant innovations in welfare policies in the past three decades has been the adoption of conditional cash transfers in dozens of countries in the Global South. The policies are puzzling, as they deviate from contributory social policy that privileges formal workers and were implemented during democratization and Washington Consensus reforms. How did policy makers justify welfare expansion? The author conducts an analysis of the parliamentary debates that resulted in the implementation of these programs in Mexico (1997) and Peru (2005). By examining the policy makers’ reasoning behind these programs, the author aims to explore the relationship between new forms of social rights and citizenship. The findings 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 investments, and acknowledged the precarity of the funding scheme.

Keywords

citizenship neoliberalism poverty welfare nation-building Latin America

One of the most remarkable innovations in welfare in the past three decades has been the adoption of conditional cash transfers (CCTs) 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, places that have been extensively studied. Contrary to the trend of overturning solidary welfare regimes into market-driven safety nets, following the lead of Mexico and Brazil in 1997, Latin American and other countries implemented nationwide CCTs in a context of democratization and adoption or deepening of Washington Consensus reforms. These programs are designed to reduce the intensity of poverty and promote human capital by providing cash transfers to families to fulfill conditions such as regular school attendance, health visits, and nutrition support. In 2017, 20 countries in the region had 30 active cash transfer programs, reaching 20.7 percent of the total population or 71.3 percent of households in poverty (Abramo, Cecchini, and Morales 2019:53–57).

Previous research that explored the politics involved in the implementation of CCTs highlights how factors such as economic crises, political competition, emulation and learning from early adopters, and the role of international organizations have contributed to the adoption and diffusion of these programs across the region and beyond. However, despite external factors’ playing a crucial role, domestic politics have been a significant factor in shaping the adoption and design of these policies. Studies show that countries with divided governments are more likely to adopt these policies (Brooks 2015), whereas governments with an adversarial legislature tend to create policies with stringent operational rules that limit political discretion (De la O 2015). Additionally, countries where social movements were involved in policy design, resulted in policies with more generous benefits to a large pool of beneficiaries, whereas those with less input from social movements and more institutional power from conservatives implemented policies with smaller benefits and a more limited pool of beneficiaries (Garay 2016). The aim of this study is to contribute to the literature on CCT adoption by exploring policymakers’ reasoning behind it. The study emphasizes the importance of local politics in this context and explores how these narratives inform the relationship between novel forms of social rights and citizenship.

Social scientists have identified various mechanisms that contribute to the acceptability and diffusion of new policies, such as foreign pressures, symbolic imitation, and learning from early adopters. Moreover, ideas and culture have also been emphasized as central factors in this process (Dobbin, Simmons, and Garrett 2007; Weyland 2005), particularly in the context of social welfare policies (Guetzkow 2010). Scholarship has highlighted the struggle over belonging that these policies entail. They are shaped by and also shape dominant notions of citizenship, work, and the “deserving poor” (Fraser 2013; Goldberg 2007; Marshall [1951] 1998; Somers and Block 2005). Such notions are often mobilized along gendered and racialized lines to stigmatize the target population. This mobilization has occurred through narratives of the corrosive effects of welfare on poor people—what Somers and Block (2005) termed the “perversity thesis”—and has served to justify welfare retrenchment. Given this context, the question arises: how did policy makers in the Global South justify welfare expansion?

Through a close reading of the congressional debates that led to the implementation of the CCT programs in two countries—Mexico (1997), an early adopter, and Peru (2005), a follower—in this article I examine the narratives mobilized by legislators and members of the executive branch during the deliberations. At first sight, these are exceptional cases (Ermakoff 2014:228) because they represent unlikely scenarios to implement policies of this type: after a wave of prodemocratic reforms, Mexico and Peru implemented the programs under a center-right, technocratic government in a context of neoliberalism and without social mobilization from below (Garay 2016; Yaschine and Orozco 2010). Additionally, these countries have had one of the most stratified welfare systems in Latin America (Mesa-Lago 1978). Social protection has traditionally had limited coverage and has been dependent on formal waged status, which is an exception in the labor force (Haggard and Kaufman 2008; Oxhorn 2011). In comparison with other major economies in Latin America, these countries have the largest population of individuals who identify as indigenous (ECLAC 2014b; INEI 2017). This is significant for two reasons. First, historically marginalized groups have been excluded from formal education and the job market (ECLAC 2014a), and policies that benefit them represent a departure from traditional social policies that have favored middle and upper-class formal workers (Brooks 2015). Second, these policies are designed to address issues of social exclusion, particularly in rural areas where most indigenous people are located, which have been used in the past to justify cutting welfare benefits. In these cases, however, they are being used to promote expansion of the welfare system.

Three narratives emerge in the debates that highlight how structural constraints, logics of investments in human capital, and local legacies shape the processes of meaning-making of the social welfare policy, complicating our understanding of the link between welfare and citizenship in the context of neoliberalism. First, state actors engage in ambiguous interactions whereby they try to balance the meaning of the policy between entitlements or investments. Second, policy makers mobilize narratives of nation-building and collective memory to legitimize the policy with shared cultural references, which align with and preserve national identity narratives. In the case of Mexico, the Mexican Revolution was the main object of reference in a multifaceted manner. While for some, it represented the basis to justify the social policy, for others, it represented the failed promise of a more just and inclusive nation. In the case of Peru, it was said that the program would be used to heal the “open wound” of the terrorist violence that took place between the 1980s and early 2000s that deepened rural poverty for indigenous families. Taken these two narratives together, findings complicate our understanding of citizenship by showing that policies of this type achieve a repertoire of things, even within the frame of technocratic governments. Finally, state actors mobilize narratives of the inevitability of globalization and incapacity to go against prevailing ideologies and constraints of austerity, narratives that open a series of questions regarding how these policies are limited in what they can accomplish in terms of extending the social rights of citizenship.

These narratives speak to several debates around welfare and citizenship that have usually been studied separately and with a particular empirical focus on the Global North. Original formulations of social citizenship and the role of welfare following the works of T. H. Marshall and Polanyi have stressed the dual commitments to protecting citizens from the vicissitudes of the market and as equalizers of status. However, much less has been conceptualized regarding how these commitments can be sustained in the neoliberal era and what form they take in highly unequal societies, such as postcolonial countries. In the next section, I begin by providing a framework for understanding the multiple linkages between welfare and citizenship under the context of neoliberalism. I then describe the cases, the comparative strategy, the sources, and the method of analysis. I next present evidence for how policy makers think about the role of the state regarding how to address the problem of poverty. Then, I present the narratives on the contentions about rendering the meaning of the policy as entitlements or framed under logics of measurement. Next, I contrast the similarities and differences of the role of collective memory in the discussions in Peru and Mexico. Finally, the dilemmas around the sources of funding are presented.

Welfare Policies and Citizenship

The Logics of Entitlements and Investments

The concept of “double movement” introduced by Polanyi ([1944] 2001) established social welfare policies as measures taken against marketization or decommodification, as later called by Esping-Andersen (1990). Marshall ([1951] 1998) conceptualized social citizenship as a minimum level of material enjoyment and aimed at equalizing status. Thus, social welfare policies have twofold commitments: protection of individuals from market forces and equalization of status on the basis of citizenship entitlements. Polanyi’s insights have recently regained attention because of the shift toward neoliberalism in the 1980s. In the context of Washington Consensus reforms, some have speculated that the emergence of social policies, and CCTs in particular, in many countries in the Global South represents a turn of the pendulum (Harris and Scully 2015). As a matter of fact, the emergence of CCTs highlights the role of the state and its responsibility in addressing the problem of poverty, which goes against pure neoliberal notions of the state. This point is further discussed in the section “The Role of Government.”

There is a scholarly tradition that follows the ideas of Polanyi and Marshall, which views social rights as a way to protect people from the forces of the market. It proposes strategies of basic income guarantees as central objectives of future welfare systems, although they are justified by a variety of reasons. Van Parijs (2006) advocated for a radical rethinking of paid work as a less central element than it is now. This is because fighting exploitation of workers through improved regulations or experimenting with work-sharing arrangements is at odds with fighting exclusion. Instead, he proposed a minimum guaranteed and unconditional income. Esping-Andersen (2006) reconceptualized social rights as both a guarantee of life chances and a way to maximize citizens’ productive resources. He focused on enhancing income maintenance but did not seek to alter social inequalities along lines such as gender. In contrast, Somers (2008) took a different approach. She defined citizenship as a matter of social recognition that should be on the basis of the principle of the right to have rights, independent of individual capabilities, capacity for participation, or measures of moral worth. This led Somers to call for a basic income right that provides a right to livelihood for those who can or cannot participate in income-generating activity.

There is a debate about whether CCTs should be considered social rights (Stephens 2010). Indeed, they are not intended to discourage people from working or to significantly increase reservation wages. This is mainly because the amount of cash transfers is low, and the programs are designed to promote productivity and human capital. CCTs are similar to social insurance in being nondiscretionary but differ in being targeted (Díaz-Cayeros and Magaloni 2009). They are also not considered entitlements, and their continuation and expansion depend on budget approval (De la O 2015). However, according to a reading of Marshall’s classical text by Stephens (2010), the definition of social rights was broad and did not exclude means-tested benefits or income.

CCTs are a form of welfare expansion detached from contributions. In the context of state retreat, they construct a particular form of citizenship, which is further influenced by the conditions associated with the cash transfers (see Cookson 2018 for a feminist critique of these conditions and how they lead to the unpaid labor for poor women). Neoliberalism reconfigures the relationship between governing and the governed by recasting activities or policies as “nonpolitical and nonideological problems that need technical solutions” (Ong 2006:3; see also Fraser 2013:57). However, this “technology of governing” is not uniform and nations, communities, and citizens respond to constraints differently, drawing upon specific cultural and institutional frames and resources (Fourcade-Gourinchas and Babb 2002; Hall and Lamont 2013). Ong (2006) distinguished neoliberalism as exception and exceptions to neoliberalism. On the one hand, the neoliberal exception creates room for calculations and positions the self-governing subject as the preferred citizen, which is different from the Marshallian conception of social rights that aimed to equalize status. On the other hand, exceptions to neoliberalism are also made to except specific segments of the population from neoliberal criteria. The exception creates a liminal space in which entitlements and the logics of self-governance are part of ongoing negotiations and moral interpretations (Jenson and Levi 2013). As the analysis will show, the distinction between welfare policies grounded in a rights-based status or an investment’s view is somewhat muddled. Furthermore, this dichotomy becomes more complex when governments use welfare policies to achieve other objectives, which I discuss next.

Social Policy as an Instrument of Nation-Building

A second, related stream of literature that connects welfare and citizenship has paid attention to how these policies have been sites of struggle over belonging: they are shaped by and helped shape dominant notions of who is a citizen, a worker, or a “deserving poor” (Fraser 2013; Goldberg 2007; Marshall [1951] 1998; Somers and Block 2005). Feminist critiques have shown that the terms citizenship and dependency carry political baggage. Citizenship has been linked to independence, which is based on masculine attributes. Women’s participation in paid employment has not promoted recognition as legitimate workers or citizens (Pateman 2006). Social benefits seeking to decommodify labor are not gender neutral, as women and men participate in both paid and unpaid labor in distinctive ways (Kessler-Harris 2001; Orloff 1993). The term dependency in welfare originally meant to gain one’s livelihood by working for someone else, but its use carries ideological and demoralizing connotations to characterize those excluded from waged labor (see Fraser and Gordon in Fraser 2013).

At the core of this critique is the idea that by defining the beneficiaries and conditions to receive the policy, the state is doing something more than protecting people against market forces that is not status neutral: it can serve as an instrument of exclusion or inclusion, depending on how it is framed. Welfare policies, then, are shaped by local legacies and political baggage of what it means to be a citizen. In the particular cases I study—two postcolonial societies with large indigenous populations undergoing a process of honing of democracies—it becomes clear that local legacies matter in shaping the form and narratives used to continue developing an idea of a nation. Relatedly, discussions in other former settler colonial states, such as Australia, note how in these cases, issues of redistribution and rightful shares are better framed as a matter of reparations for indigenous peoples (Fouksman and Klein 2019).

Citizenship at the Core of Fiscal and Social Policy

Fiscal policy and citizenship have a less explored connection, especially regarding social welfare policies under neoliberalism. The inability to generate enough taxes and the nature of social spending reflects the weak relations between the state, workers, and firms. In democratic states under neoliberalism, fiscal policy plays a crucial role in mediating the relationship between citizens and the state (Martin and Prasad 2014; Santiso and Zoido 2011). Citizenship is defined fundamentally as belonging to a political community (Anderson [1983] 2006; Nakano Glenn 2011; Yuval-Davis 2011), while fiscal policy can also create feelings of social inclusion and worth achieved through consumption patterns (see, e.g., Sykes et al. 2015).

The discussion highlights a significant difference in analyzing welfare between industrialized and less industrialized nations. The latter have limited resources and revenue-raising capacity, especially in light of the market opening and the prevailing austerity ideology (Stiglitz 2003). As a result, these countries have to balance between consolidating democracies through fiscal spending and avoiding increasing debt. Research has shown that welfare development in Latin America is determined by the combination of democratic strength and government revenue capabilities, rather than partisanship (Cruz-Martínez 2021; Ewig 2016; Huber, Mustillo, and Stephens 2008). In this article I pay special attention to policy makers’ rhetoric and narratives in filtering globalization pressures during debates (Brady, Beckfield, and Zhao 2007) and the policies’ potential in extending social rights of citizenship.

In the case of Latin America (see Livingston 2019 and Ferguson 2015 for debates in Southern Africa), the implementation of these social policies could be seen as an accomplishment, as it represents an unprecedented shift in welfare that has historically privileged the middle class and formal urban workers. Nevertheless, the funding nature of the programs raises concerns about the possibility of granting social rights to citizens when the programs are precariously funded. The structural constraints of those who manage the state apparatus to extend rights and ensure codependency as the foundations of full citizenship must be recognized, such as preserving business confidence that limits the capacity to adopt progressive policies or being reliant on revenues from the extraction of natural resources (Block 2020). The international position of these states within the world system certainly hinders their possibility of autonomy. These countries were not only implementing these policies after being subjected to the lash of the structural adjustment programs and their accompanying conditions, as well as prioritizing the service of external debt but were also dependent on the almost unforeseeable cycle of commodity prices and the finite gifts of nature.

Another relevant dimension of state autonomy is evaluating whether the state’s ends are antagonistic to the internal dominant class interests (Hamilton 1982). This point is crucial as it reflects the limits to full citizenship grounded on mutual dependence, especially in highly unequal societies such as former settler colonial states. When reflecting on the program’s inception, Levy (2006), one of the architects of the program PROGRESA (Programa de Educación, Salud y Alimentación), wrote, “the absence of explicit tax increases or large-scale and abrupt reduction of benefits was a critical element in making the program-induced income redistribution politically sustainable” (p. 88) The low capacity to collect tax revenues beyond custom or consumption revenues has been a challenge to efforts in nation-making in Latin America since these countries were instituted as republics (Centeno and Ferraro 2013). The continuing reliance of the state’s coffers on primary export growth and preservation of class and status hierarchies is what others have called “redistribution without structural change” (Ponce and Vos 2012).

Cases, Data, and Method¹

I evaluate the argument using case studies of the CCT programs in Mexico (PROGRESA)² and Peru (Juntos). The rationale is as follows. Despite several socioeconomic and political differences, the programs were implemented in all the largest economies in Latin America; the most extensive programs in terms of coverage are Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, and Peru (Cecchini and Atuesta 2017). Among these countries, Peru and Mexico share many similarities in their history of social rights and the context in which the programs were implemented. Yet, they differ in their narratives of nation-state formation and efforts to integrate indigenous people (Mallon 2002).

After the economic crisis in Latin America during the 1980s, countries implemented various economic, labor, and social policy reforms. Social policy systems differ in the extent to which they offer individualistic or solidaristic programs, but they all maintain the separation between social insurance and social assistance, which is further complicated by the large size of the informal sector (Ferreira and Robalino 2011; Huber 1996; Vos 2011). By the late 1990s, there was an increase in investment in human capital and the proliferation of cash transfer programs. In terms of income distribution, the policy of industrialization by substitution of imports from previous decades did not significantly improve income distribution, which worsened during the economic crisis of the 1980s. The improvement in the twenty-first century has also failed to reverse the decline in distribution. Instead, there has been a shift toward human development with increased job and economic insecurity, which is coupled with the decline in social security coverage (Bértola and Ocampo 2013).

As neoliberalism gained momentum, politicians and technocrats sought to reconcile the need for greater fiscal discipline with the necessity of addressing the needs of marginalized groups (Haggard and Kaufman 2008). At the time of implementation, about half of the population in both Mexico and Peru lived in poverty. Over time, the coverage of social programs increased significantly. In Mexico, the program went from covering 1.5 percent of the population in 1997 to 24 percent in 2014, while the monthly ceiling of transfers increased from U.S. $69 to U.S. $185. In Peru, the program expanded coverage from 0.5 percent of the population in 2005 to 11 percent in 2018, and the maximum amount of the transfers grew from a bimonthly payment of U.S. $30 in 2005 to U.S. $60 in 2018. Although the cash amounts may seem small, the average monthly transfers represent around 20 percent and 13 percent of total monthly household consumption for the beneficiary families in Mexico and Peru, respectively. Both programs primarily benefit rural communities.³

Mexico and Peru implemented policies in the period following market reforms and democracy honing.⁴ These policies were implemented under the wing of a technocratic, center-right government and faced resistance from opposition parties (De la O 2015). Although it is impressive that governments with different ideologies have adopted these policies, government ideology remains a crucial factor in determining policy character. According to Borges (2022), right-wing or center governments have developed a “human capital” model. This model emphasizes conditionality, strict enforcement of the conditions, and more precise identification of the poor (de Souza Leão 2022). This model is different from the one promoted by leftist governments, which enforced conditions less rigorously and saw these programs as stepping stones toward universal policies. However, these two cases under a “human capital” model support the argument that even countries following a similar model create locally and historically based meanings.

In terms of social rights, both countries have historically had the most inegalitarian welfare systems in the region by several indicators.⁵ For example, Mesa-Lago (1978:264–69) showed that in 1969 (the latest year available), Mexico and Peru had the largest proportions of the uninsured population (77.2 percent and 87.7 percent, respectively). Furthermore, there is a significant time gap between the occupations covered by legal protections. For instance, in Chile, domestic workers were granted legal protections 40 years after civil servants were covered, while in Peru and Mexico, the extension of coverage to domestic workers came 180 years after civil servants were legally protected. In addition, these two countries have the largest indigenous populations in Latin America: 17 million in Mexico (15 percent of the total population) and 7 million in Peru (24 percent of the total population) (ECLAC 2014b; INEI 2017), groups that have historically been excluded from formal employment and, therefore, social insurance.

However, both nations differ in their narratives of the inclusion of indigenous communities in their imagined communities and, therefore, in the process of nation-building. At the beginning of the postcolonial period, Mexico and Peru were roughly comparable as they were the hearts of Spanish America, had the most prosperous mines, the wealthiest elites, and the largest indigenous populations. Their trajectories diverged dramatically by the end of the nineteenth century, partly because of the states’ ability to incorporate popular political cultures into the nation-state (Kyriazi and vom Hau 2020; Mallon 1995). Whereas in Peru, historians shared the view of a dualistic nation organized along spatial and racial lines and the failure to integrate indigenous peoples into the construction of national society, in Mexico, the 1910 Revolution and postrevolutionary state prompted historiography that shared a narrative of the success of nation-building by remaking a pluralistic Mexican nation that put more efforts into including indigenous people (Mallon 2002).⁶ As will be shown, the nineteenth-century narratives that shaped options for the next century continue to persist today.

Empirically, the analysis is based on transcripts of all relevant congressional debates in the Senate and House of Representatives (in Mexico, both chambers; Peru has a unicameral legislature), committee hearings, and addresses to the nation by the President. The methodological focus on speech warrants further explanation. One of the contributions of economic sociologists to the study of economic phenomena has been to situate them as outcomes of both cultural and economic processes. Institutional arrangements are perpetuated through shared understandings, a notion that is in line with the proposition that culture enters action as a blueprint for shaping the form of collective activities (Jepperson and Swidler 1994; Swidler 1986). However, as Glaeser (2011) put it, as important as understandings are in giving social action and institutions a particular shape, action is also determined by material resources and time. What is equally important is how actors share understandings of their material constraints. Moreover, these discourses in the context of deliberation, particularly in the parliament—“an acclamatory organ” (Glaeser 2011:28)—provide a form of validation of understandings and thereby contribute to forming a shared way of ordering the world (Glaeser 2011; Toft 2010).

To identify the periods of analysis, I used secondary sources, newspaper articles, and executive decrees and traced the process of the program conception, discussion, and implementation. The process of locating newspaper articles consisted of Factiva searches of the original-language editions of newspapers in Mexico and Peru. For the case of Mexico, I searched for “PROGRESA” from January 1997 to January 1998 and got 68 hits. For the case of Peru, I searched for “Juntos” from January 2005 to January 2006. As expected, as the word juntos in Spanish means “together,” I got a larger number of hits: 389. I relied on a perusal of the headlines to identify the suitable articles instead of searching for a combination of keywords that could have omitted articles of interest. The articles come from a diversity of newspapers, but one third of the hits come from the most important general interest newspapers in both countries: El Universal in Mexico and El Comercio in Peru.

From this process, I selected hearings in two contentious periods in the initial stage of the program: the debates following the program’s official launch by the executive to the legislature (September 1997 in Mexico, February to July 2005 in Peru) and the budget approval and modification (November and December 1997 in Mexico, June and November 2005 in Peru). The hearings lasted an average of four hours each. All the debates were conducted in Spanish; the translations are mine. Following a deductive approach, I examined the social meanings and assumptions incorporated in social policy. I originally intended to study how themes of paid work influenced constructions of citizenship or “deservingness,” which is how welfare studies have investigated social policy outlines (Guetzkow 2010). However, when I started closely reading the transcripts, I noticed the salience of race, gender, and collective memory with which legislators argued for or against the policy. Then, I began an inductive process consisting of an iterative relationship between theory and data analysis and between cases.

The Role of Government

The debates reveal a belief among policy makers that the state has a role to play in addressing the problem of poverty. Actors in Mexico and Peru were very aware of the structural causes of poverty and stressed a moral imperative to reverse the trend. Some have argued that implementing these programs marks a shift to a general recognition of the need to reduce poverty through large-scale public policies (Lavinas 2013). Nobody could dispute that poverty was a problem and that something must be done about it: “No one can deny that in a country like Peru, social spending by the Government is fair and necessary.”⁷ Similarly, as Mexican president Zedillo claimed,

There is in our country a group made up of several million Mexican men and women who for generations have inherited nothing but lags and deficiencies [carencias], who live with the strength of their dignity and with the breath of a bit of hope. They are the poorest in Mexico, who fight to free themselves from the vicious circle of malnutrition, unhealthiness, disease, and ignorance; [it is] a human, moral, and justice duty of our generations to support those millions of Mexicans in their struggle. If we do not want more Mexicans trapped in this vicious cycle of extreme poverty in the twenty-first century, we must act now. And we must do it with programs that correct backlogs [atrasos] and effectively solve deficiencies. (Mexican Congress, President Zedillo, September 1, 1997, pp. 48–50)

Although the awareness of the problems of structural poverty already shows a fundamentally different argument from myths regarding the role of the state in neoliberal times, some common concerns emerged. In particular, the fear that social policy may increase people’s dependency on the state and may not effectively eradicate poverty. In this sense, “[denying welfare] is not cruel but compassionate, as it restores their morally necessary autonomy” (Block and Somers 2014:157). As one Mexican parliamentarian put it,

Do you think then that with this bribe [dádiva] from PROGRESA, the nutritional conditions of poor families, particularly children and their mothers, will substantially improve, as the president of the Republic points out in his third report? This confirms our appreciation that the state turns more Mexicans into beggars every day and public spending and social development institutions into mere check dispensers. Sedesol [the Secretariat of Social Development] is a bureaucratic institution that distributes crumbs, and you, Mr. Secretary, have become the great administrator of poverty in Mexico. (Mexican Congress, Deputy Brugada Molina, Partido de la Revolución Democrática, September 12, 1997, pp. 246–248)

This quotation exemplifies two concerns that were broadly discussed and were shared among parliamentarians in both Mexico and Peru: (1) how to stop the policy from being instrumentalized to get votes (2) and how best to tackle the problem of poverty. Regarding the first concern, one peculiarity that must be understood in the Mexican case is that, for the first time, in 1997, the Institutional Revolutionary Party lost the absolute majority in both chambers of the congress, and this legislature expressed suspicion of any policy with populist overtones proposed by this party. Policymakers raised a similar set of suspicions in Peru. During the debates and in the newspapers, it became clear that the main contention was around legitimizing the policy to the parliament, and specifically, to the opposition. The suspicions were reasonable, as in both cases, the programs were debated, with elections approaching in the following months. Newspapers in Mexico published interviews with the opposition, who showed their openness to debate and their doubts that the program intended to solve the problem of poverty and sought to establish a legislative regulation that avoids patronage.⁸ Similarly, newspapers in Peru wrote, “But it is not the benefits of the project—which have been widely publicized—that have generated criticism, but rather the opportunity in which said plan is put into operation and possible use for electoral purposes.”⁹

To implement the policy, governments in both Mexico and Peru implemented a series of measures to lock the policy away from populist intentions (see also De la O 2015). In Mexico, the government waited until after the elections to start the program. They also increased transparency, forms of accountability, and reduced discretion in the execution of the funds through legal provisions. In Peru, government officials also emphasized transparency in the use of resources and brought other institutions to oversee the implementation of the policy, among them the Catholic Church, which was particularly vocal during this process. They also invited the director of PROGRESA, who ruled out that the program had been used as a campaign banner; this is part of a process of “transnational technocratic learning” (Sugiyama 2011). Although these measures alleviated concerns about the instrumental use of the policy for the parties’ benefits, there were still contentions regarding how best to tackle the problem of poverty. I turn to this discussion now.

Between Entitlements and Investments

Many policymakers found almost insulting the intention of addressing extreme poverty with meager cash transfers. A senator declared that “three pesos a day do not lead to social justice, far from it are the solution” (Mexican Senate, Senator Hernández Gerónimo, Partido de la Revolución Democrática, September 18, 1997, p. 11). Similarly, a congresswoman explained,

This social policy of neoliberalism is distinguished . . . by allocating extremely limited resources to face a problem the size of half of Mexico. . . . A policy like this cannot solve the severe problems of poverty and marginalization, but it barely scratches the surface because of its own purely assistentialist foundations. We have to say that not even the most vulgar populist ever imagined increasing and utilizing government charity, as we now see it under the presumptuous name of PROGRESA! The poor are not beggars but the product of clearly exclusionary policies! (Mexican Congress, Deputy Maciel Ortiz, Partido del Trabajo, September 12, 1997, pp. 222–24)

Quotations such as this exemplify the ambiguity regarding what is to be done to address the “severe problems” surrounding poverty and how the subject/citizen is constituted both as a result of these severe problems and in the process of determining what they deserve. Poor people do not deserve to receive charity; then, what do they deserve? A chorus of voices declared that the solution lay in shifting vision,

The programs to fight poverty must support the strengthening of abilities. . . . This would distinguish an assistance [asistencialista] project from one that generates sustainable well-being in practice. . . . We would prefer to see proposals that allow the population to access government support not only because they are poor but also because they are struggling to get out of that poverty. And that mechanisms be implemented so that, instead of taking time to collect social assistance, they can allocate it to work on permanent, sustainable development projects. (Mexican Senate, Senator Herrero Arandia, Partido Acción Nacional, September 18, 1997, p. 12)

This statement is very representative of the intertwining of the moral and economic character of the policy: it should be efficient, and it should safeguard the dignity of the person. Dignity signifies being respectable: worthy of the state’s help and being independent and productive citizens. This discussion is reminiscent of Marshall ([1951] 1998) and subsequent studies of deservingness in social welfare discussions. In Peru, the narratives were strikingly similar. Most parliamentarians alluded to economic inclusion as the real problem and the step that would convert poor people into “active agents”:

Being poor means being excluded from services, what is more important, from decisions; that is, the poor are not builders of their future and are excluded from the production economy in markets. So, we have a massive contingent in Latin America and Peru that does not exercise their freedoms and rights. . . . Then there is the basis for why I have declared that if we want to solve the problems of the poor, it is about creating economic opportunities, and while they are created, we must protect their lives. . . . So, it is much more dignifying for the person to receive an input that makes him a creator of his future than to become a passive actor in history. That is the conversion of a spectator into a protagonist. (Peruvian Congress, Congressman Solari de la Fuente, Perú Posible, February 25, 2005, p. 34)

This intervention shows the equating of dignity with economic opportunities, a clear example of the “teach a man to fish” developmental ethos, which assumes that the problem of poverty is fundamentally a problem of production (Ferguson 2015). There are no moral claims of distributing as a right; in fact, the opposite is observed: “then, we must implement it quickly, when we well know that once people are given aid, they think that it is for life, it is a right, and it cannot be changed” (Peruvian Congress, Congressman Cruz Loyola, Perú Posible, February 25, 2005, p. 27).

To be sure, this type of argument that aims at subsuming the “Indian question” under an economic logic is not new. For example, in the 1930s in Peru, the project of industrialization emerged as a cultural aspiration to transform the “backward” indigenous peoples into white or mestizos, a project shared in both Peru and Mexico, by combining “a cultural exaltation of indigenous cultures . . . with policies aimed at ‘redeeming’ the indigenous by increasing access to education and public health” (Drinot 2011:36). Not surprisingly, the conditions attached to the cash transfers are medical visits and school enrollment. As labor and social policy were seen as a technical solution to the Indian question in the 1930s and were fundamental for nation-state formation, social policy in the early 2000s suggests a similar logic, although the tools to legitimize the policy differ (see the next section).

The voices that offered some pushback by making claims to citizenship-based rights or the urgency of providing cash, without the intent of making it “productive” but rather as a survival matter, were a rarity. For example, in Peru, a parliamentarian sustained that “when we speak not of poverty but extreme poverty, we no longer talk of secondary needs but survival, and there you need gestures” (Peruvian Congress, Congressman Pease García, Perú Posible, June 23, 2005, p. 3107). Similarly, policymakers evaded the question of rights in Mexico and statements that claimed citizenship-based rights were infrequent. As one congresswoman—not surprisingly, an indigenous woman—put it,

What are the requirements to qualify for this benefit? I understood that it was enough to be Mexican and need it because for the indigenous population and for many other groups that live in extreme poverty, there are no more requirements than the need to survive. For which I emphasize article 4 in the Constitution, this is a right for the people and an obligation for the government! And let it be understood that you are not doing any favors; you would be fulfilling an obligation! . . . And that is why today I come to defend our position and demand our place and our rights, so that once and for all, you all erase that image that has been imposed on us of submissive and ignorant people and for which we have been subjected to humiliation, contempt, and abuses by the authorities. Let my voice be heard! (Mexican Congress, Deputy Bazán López, Partido Verde Ecologista de México, September 18, 1997, pp. 311–13)

Even those that were sympathetic to a policy geared toward providing cash and not necessarily toward productive investment raised technical reasons to do so:

Always in the administrations, not only in Peru but also in any other place, where there have been economic limitations, there has been the dilemma of allocating scarce resources to infrastructure or social programs. . . . I also want to tell those who want to surprise us with these statements that national production grows in two ways: investment, which can be in infrastructure; and consumption. (Peruvian Congress, Congressman Alvarado Hidalgo, Perú Posible, June 23, 2005, p. 3118)

The technical arguments were the least controversial, and all justifications to introduce the program raised arguments of this type, “it should be noted that in the successive stages of PROGRESA, both the selection of states and localities will continue to be carried out based on indicators that objectively reflect where the problem of poverty is primarily located” (Mexican Congress, Secretary of Finance and Public Credit Ortiz Martínez, September 11, 1997, pp. 208–10). Moreover, it is worth mentioning that any references to the cash component of the program were usually mentioned at the end of lengthy statements.

The Politics of Memory

In both Mexico and Peru, collective memory occupied a central position in establishing a new project of nation-building to legitimize the policy at the crossroads of globalization and democratization, narratives that have been used widely over time and space in what is called the politics of memory (Zubrzycki and Woźny 2020). State actors used the shared cultural meanings of historical episodes in malleable ways. In the case of Mexico, the Mexican Revolution was the main object of reference in a multifaceted manner. Although for some, it represented the basis to justify the social policy, for others, it represented the failed promise of a more just and inclusive nation. Arguments in favor of the policy remarked on the role of social policy in constructing citizenship, a role that was instituted since the Mexican Revolution and tried to preserve the narrative of Mexico as a pluricultural nation (Mallon 2002). As Mexican president Zedillo expressed,

Social policy is the means available to the state to protect social rights . . . and, therefore, fight poverty. Since the Mexican Revolution, the state has always had a strong social policy. . . . Social exclusion goes beyond a lack of resources to meet essential needs or the absence of opportunities. It is also reflected in cultural issues, identity, and recognition of our idiosyncrasy. . . . Therefore, it is necessary to build, together, a new social agreement, a new living and active relationship of the government with society . . . to give way to one of the fundamental issues that are pending on the national agenda: the strength of the national identity not only as an expression of the collective effort in the construction of the state and its institutions but also as a synthesis of our history and multiethnic and multicultural reality. (Mexican Congress September 1, 1997, pp. 42–44)

Of particular importance are mentions of the economic lag of indigenous peoples and the moral imperative to do something about it. In this sense, parliamentarians and members of the executive branch called for a new “relation between the State and the indigenous communities,” a new relation that vindicates the historical, social pact and the just demands of the communities and indigenous peoples. In this sense, the secretary of what was then the Secretariat of Social Development explained,

[the relationship of society and the government with indigenous communities] is a fundamental part of the identity of Mexicans and the integration of Mexico as a nation. . . . The debate around the indigenous question has clarified the dimension and complexity of the problem and the historical responsibility that all Mexicans have in the face of the need to establish adequate legal institutions to better respond to the demands for justice and development of indigenous communities. . . . We have ready, Senator, the policy for overcoming poverty. . . . In this way, social policy is and must continue to be more and more an instrument for the vindication of the just demands of indigenous communities and peoples. (Mexican Senate, September 18, 1997, p. 25)

Arguments against the program also mobilized the social contract born in the Mexican Revolution but as a disillusion. State actors argued that the social contract was abandoned when neoliberalism was adopted, “[this has meant for Mexico] the abandonment and betrayal of principles of the Mexican Revolution; under the pretext of globalization, openness and free competition, any revolutionary principle is obsolete and nostalgic” (Mexican Congress, Deputy Solares Chávez, Partido de la Revolución Democrática, November 19, 1997, p. 7);

from a deliberate and redistributive social policy, it has moved to the logic of individual effort, where the social action of the State has been significantly reduced . . . the search for social justice, the elimination of inequalities, the abatement of backwardness and the eradication of poverty, were the objective of thousands of wills that led to the radical transformation of our country in the first decades of the century. (Mexican Congress, Deputy Hernández Mendoza, Partido de la Revolución Democrática, September 12, 1997, pp. 228–30)

In Peru, there were also narratives associated with social policy as an instrument of nation-building.

So, colleagues, let us not be mean and try to limit or defer the discussion of the fund allocations for the Juntos Program because this will allow a direct connection with the poorest. . . . In this way, we will be contributing to the development of an integrated society that includes all Peruvians. (Peruvian Congress, Congressman Alvarado Hidalgo, Perú Posible, June 23, 2005, p. 3119)

However, nation-building efforts mobilized different cultural frames for achieving citizenship. First, it attempted to build citizenship on a more fundamental level: the program’s stated goal was to use it to provide identification to people who did not have legal documentation as citizens. Second, and this was also a stated goal, to use the program to heal the “open wound” of the terrorist violence committed by the Shining Path that took place between the 1980s and early 2000s and deepened rural poverty for indigenous families.

Contrary to the Mexican case, Peruvian actors mobilized a period of pain that was part of recent history, instead of referencing past attempts to incorporate indigenous populations on the basis of their class position during the 1960s and 1970s (Kyriazi and vom Hau 2020). I argue these frames are in line with the failed project of nation-building that has been a constant in its history and with the inability to articulate local discourses to a national-level polity (Mallon 1995, 2002). In 2005, the program was announced during the annual presidential message to the nation:

Today I formalize the launch of the social program “Juntos” as a program of conditional subsidies, which will bring Peruvians living in extreme poverty closer to health, education, nutrition, and identification services, through the allocation of monetary incentives. You all know that in the poorest areas of Peru, where terror has deepened, there is a large proportion of Peruvians who are not recognized, who do not have birth certificates, and who are not citizens. This program’s first step is to incorporate them into citizenship with an identification. It is a right. (Peruvian Congress July 28, 2005, p. 73)

This quotation exemplifies very clearly two aspects. First, adopting political, civil, and social rights in the Latin American context is not a linear and straightforward process, which is one common critique of Marshall’s conceptualization of linear and progressive rights (see, e.g., Nakano Glenn 2011; Oxhorn 2011; Roberts 2005). Indeed, as former president Toledo argued, one of the goals of this program was to identify citizens, especially those from some regions of the Andes and the Amazon, and the allocation of cash transfers is a medium to do so. Second, the appeals to nation-building were weaker than those in Mexico; they only referred to recent history and brought a sense of restorative justice rather than envisioning a nation-building project. The political framework of the program is constituted by, among others, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission report, published in 2003, which indicates that what must be repaired primarily is a seriously wounded collective soul in the Andes and the Amazon. Furthermore, the village where the program was first implemented, Chuschi, has a symbolic relevance, given that the Shining Path guerrillas began there the dark period of violence by burning ballot boxes in 1980.¹⁰ For most Chuschi habitants, this would have been their first opportunity to exercise their political rights, as the majority could not read or write. In Peru, in 1979 the universal vote was implemented. In other words, social citizenship was a symbolic way to restore the political citizenship taken out of them when the period of terror began.

Fiscal Dilemmas

The last set of narratives mobilized by state actors was related to the sources of funding for the program. These narratives reflected a discourse that revealed the inevitability of globalization, the imperative of keeping balance sheets in balance, and the little room for maneuver for these countries but also revealed the program’s limit to extend the project of citizenship. As the Mexican secretary of finance and public credit argued, “there is a great agreement on the need to increase the social action of the State to reduce inequalities, without jeopardizing the balance of our economy” (Mexican Congress, November 18, 1997, p. 33). In this sense, for example, raising taxes on the general population was out of the question—a limit to extending codependency and reciprocity among citizens, which explains why these programs were not framed as entitlements (De la O 2015)—and raising taxes to corporations was also out of the question because then the countries would lose competitivity:

We must work on expanding the tax base in the country, we certainly must incorporate a high percentage of the informal economy that still does not contribute to the financing of public spending, but we also must be very aware that one of the few obligations that the Constitution establishes is that citizens contribute to public expenditure. . . . Raising taxes disproportionately even can be justified economically and morally, requiring that those who have the most income contribute predominantly to the financing of public spending. We all know that if taxes are increased beyond a specific rate, it will be challenging to control . . . that there is no leakage of these taxes to other countries, to other economies, where incentives [facilidades] are given precisely so that fewer taxes are paid there. (Mexican Congress, Secretary of Finance and Public Credit Ortiz Martínez, September 11, 1997, pp. 187–89)

To implement these programs, governments relied on indirect taxes on consumption, which are regressive (Lavinas 2013). They also took advantage of the commodity boom in the early 2000s, when the CCT programs proliferated all over Latin America. The funding mechanisms have caused controversy as they reproduce the natural resource dependency dynamics that have historically characterized the region. Moreover, these precariously funded social policies have relied on ecological exploitation and dispossession and repression of indigenous communities (Riggirozzi 2020). This topic was salient in the debates. In Mexico, the discussion focused around petroleum: “Every year Mexico consumes its oil wealth to cover its operating expenses instead of dedicating the resources to creating a productive platform capable of generating permanent income for the population. We cannot continue to eat our children’s future today” (Mexican Congress, Deputy Barnés García, Partido Revolucionario Institucional, November 19, 1997, p. 45). In contrast, in Peru, the discussion revolved around mining:

This program does not, in my opinion, have financial sustainability either. As it is based on the higher income produced by the rise in the value of minerals, it means that it depends on extraordinary income. A program of this nature cannot be based on extraordinary income because it must necessarily be sustainable over time for generations. (Peruvian Congress, Congressman Valencia-Dongo Cárdenas, Concertación Parlamentaria, June 23, 2005, p. 3104)

Conclusion

In the past three decades, many low- and middle-income countries, where fiscal austerity and the opening of markets have exposed fragile economies to the global economy, have adopted and expanded social assistance programs for the country’s poor. Such is the case of CCTs. However, the implementation of these policies, primarily led by the government, is puzzling because these states face a series of constraints and a socioeconomic landscape remarkably distinct from those of other industrialized countries, places that have been extensively studied. In this study, I have analyzed the narratives used in two cases: Mexico and Peru, to provide insights into how policymakers engage in the processes of meaning-making of these social policies. The debates show that state actors engage in ambiguous interactions whereby they try to balance the meaning of the policy between entitlements or investments. They also mobilize frames of nation-building and collective memory to legitimize the policy with shared cultural references, which align with and preserve national identity narratives. Finally, the debates also highlight the precarity of the funding scheme and the limits to extending codependency among citizens through social policy. The contribution of this analysis to existing literature is twofold.

First, although some of the narratives mobilized in previous debates in the Global North are similar, such as the spectrum of the “perversity thesis” and focus on investments in human capital, there are complexities in postcolonial societies that are grappling with their legacies of exclusion. These societies have a significant portion of their population excluded from existing arrangements inherited from an authoritarian past and face extremely high levels of income inequality (Díaz-Cayeros and Magaloni 2009). As a result, the connection between deservingness and social rights is complicated by the framing of these policies as reparations or compensation, and the recognition of the limits of labor markets as a means of inclusion (or assimilation). Such ideas are not confined to Latin America, as they resemble debates in certain parts of southern Africa, where the push is for a “rightful share” framing of cash transfers instead of government grants (Ferguson 2015). In Australia, some argue that a “reparations” framing better captures the dispossession of indigenous labor and land (Fouksman and Klein 2019). Similar demands are being made in the United States by Black organizations that ask for reparations in the form of a “guaranteed liveable income” (Movement for Black Lives 2016:8).

Second, analysis of these cases—especially of these exceptional cases, where we would less expect it—reveals that politicians discussed policy in ways that were unique and grounded in historically based cultural meanings, which differed from the purely “human capital” framework promoted by international organizations, such as the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, and the International Food Policy Research Institute (Brooks 2015; Heimo and Syväterä 2022; Sugiyama 2011). The narratives also demonstrate how policy makers attach localized meanings to the policy, which works in tandem with learning from the experiences of neighboring countries (Dobbin et al. 2007). State actors’ use of shared understandings to discuss the meaning of social policy is in line with the proposition that culture enters action as a blueprint for shaping the form of collective activities (Pattillo-McCoy 1998; Swidler 1986). The embedding of cultural and political baggage with economic policy aligns with orientations in economic sociology that suggest the economy reflects and is shaped by the polity (Dobbin 2001), reflecting how nations, communities, and citizens have responded to constraints very differently over time and space, drawing upon specific cultural and institutional frames and resources (Fourcade-Gourinchas and Babb 2002; Hall and Lamont 2013).

Regarding the consequences of the adoption of CCTs, research in economics and public policy has produced numerous studies that measure the impact and limitations of the adoption of CCTs on outcomes such as health, schooling, and gender relations (see, e.g., Abramo et al. 2019; Adato and Hoddinott 2010; Valencia Lomelí 2008). Additionally, political scientists have debated the short-term electoral gains associated with the adoption and expansion of these programs (Hunter and Power 2007; Zucco 2008, 2013). In this vein, future research can systematize the sparse published findings related to how these novel forms of social policy contribute to the construction of social citizenship. Although CCT policies do not fulfill the expectations of full citizenship or a countermovement à la Polanyi, they could still be seen as an accomplishment within the framework, as they move states toward the partial inclusion of groups that have historically been marginalized.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I received valuable feedback on my ideas and several draft versions by Gay Seidman, Chad Alan Goldberg, Fabien Accominotti, Max Besbris, Lauren McCarthy, Jose Atiles, Sarah E. Farr, Sara Trongone, Youbin Kang, Kurt Kuehne, Janaina Saad, the fellows in the Law and Society Graduate Program, as well as participants in the seminar on sociology of culture and in the Social Science History Association conference and the conference on new directions in law and society.

ORCID iD

Daniela Campos Ugaz

Notes

Author Biography

Daniela Campos Ugaz is a PhD Candidate in sociology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Her research interests lie at the intersection of labor studies, economic sociology, global and transnational sociology, law and society, and cultural sociology. Currently, Daniela is working on her dissertation project, which explores the institutions that shape how global labor is governed in sectors of capital expansion. Her research focuses on case studies of skilled labor migration programs in Germany and the United States, as well as foreign direct investment in Costa Rica and Ireland. She holds an MS in sociology from the University of Wisconsin–Madison and an undergraduate degree in economics from Universidad del Pacífico.

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

Abstract

Keywords

Welfare Policies and Citizenship

The Logics of Entitlements and Investments

Social Policy as an Instrument of Nation-Building

Citizenship at the Core of Fiscal and Social Policy

Cases, Data, and Method 1

The Role of Government

Between Entitlements and Investments

The Politics of Memory

Fiscal Dilemmas

Conclusion

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

ORCID iD

Notes

Author Biography

References

Cases, Data, and Method¹