Layering versus Displacement

Theories of Gradual Institutional Change and Welfare Regime Transformation in Brazil and Mexico, 1980-2010

Abstract

This essay explores the long-term transformation of the welfare regimes--the complex of policies and institutions for social transfers and regulation spreading across health care, retirement security, social assistance, and labor markets--of Brazil and Mexico over the three-decade, 1980-2010 period through the lens of gradual institutional change (GIC) theory in comparative political economy.  Both had similar starting point of segmented, corporatist, partially inclusive regimes as of the crisis of import substition and moves more statist, protectionist economic policies to market- and outward-oriented models. It is argued that Brazil's evolution can best be seen through the ideal type of "institutional layering" from GIC theory, with the steady accumulation of programs, benefits, and policies over time, particularly from the new Constitution of 1988 and on through the Cardoso and particular Lula governments. On the other hand, Mexico's welfare regime transformation can best be understood through the GIC category of "displacement" of former programs and principles centered on the organized labor and peasantry and state-society-governing party linkage toward a residualist, market-oriented "asistencialismo," less generous, less inclusive, and more oriented toward the disorganized poor. GIC theory and its typology of forms of institutional change helps us understand and analyze long-range evolution as well as struggles that occur over the interpretation and enactment of insitutional norms and reforms in context such as these--"big-bang," fundamental, "all at once" reforms such as those expected by dominant currents in the literature were rare and instead piecemeal, incremental, cumulative changes were the predominant pattern.