How Do Equity-Enhancing Reforms Emerge? Evidence from Brazil

Latin America experienced a salient decline in poverty and inequality levels in recent decades, particularly between the 1990s and 2010s, while in most of the rest of the world, countries have seen income distributions become increasingly unequal. Several academic works associate successful policy interventions in areas such as macroeconomic stabilisation, public education, poverty reduction, and minimum wages with Latin America’s “inclusionary turn.” However, there is still a critical debate about how these equity-enhancing reforms emerged and which political mechanisms may have enabled them. To address these questions, I examine three prominent social science traditions about possible drivers of positive socioeconomic outcomes. One focuses on partisanship and strong left-wing parties, another stresses electoral competition for socially vulnerable voters, and a third strand highlights coalition-building and cross-party cooperation. Through a detailed qualitative study of how six equalising policies emerged in the crucial case of Brazil (1993-2011), I demonstrate that, by jointly attending to electoral and coalitional incentives, Brazilian presidents of varying ideological leanings promised and delivered inequality-reducing initiatives. Meanwhile, evidence about the strength of the political left as a redistributive policy enabler is found in relative absence. On the one side, data from interviews, Congress and newspaper archives, and secondary sources show incumbents promising the electorate that their policies would improve redistribution. Moreover, the minoritarian executive employed coalitional tools, like the distribution of cabinet appointments and favours, to cultivate cross-party coalitions that could push government-sponsored proposals through a fragmented legislature. On the other side, in opposition, the leftist bloc in Congress was often small and sometimes even divided, and social mobilisations were not activated against every policy. When in government, to approve key social policies, left-wing presidents sought the support of right-leaning parties and invested in cooperation, whilst ideology was diluted and (left)party-society linkages set aside.