Suchergebnisse

This book is about the consolidation of different types of distributive strategies by left governments in Southern Europe and the Southern Cone of South America after thesimultaneous transition to democracy and the market economy –the dual transition. Some left governments have relied exclusively on redistribution through the welfare state while others have also relied in wage policy as an instrument. Distinguishing between strategies advancing distribution through the welfare state (social policy) from ones advancing distribution through labor markets (wage policy) and welfare states invites to revisit the political conflict of labor political inclusion in two regions with shared economic and political institutional roots (see Moore 1966; Stepan 1978). Three factors shape left governments choice: left unity, the historical recognition of labor as a political actor and the beliefs of policy makers with regard to the employmentwage trade-off. Left (dis)unity is the main factor shaping distributive strategies, in particular with regards to wages, factor that is linked backwards with by the historical recognition of labor as a legitimate political actor before the dual transition and political decisions made by left parties or sectors during the dual transition. Left (dis)unity is linked forward, for shaping distributive strategies in the presence of labor-mobilizing parties or sectors, with the ideational importance macroeconomic equilibriums aquired for policymakers in attempting to conciliate employment and wage egalitarianism goals vis-àvis the pre-transitional period may also generate disunity. I refer to this as the employmentsalaries dilemma.

Traditionally one of the countries with highest levels of social and human development in Latin America, Uruguay is a small and eminently urban country, with an extended welfare state and universal education. From the beginnings of the twentieth century, education has been one of its main tools for promoting nationality and citizenship. The region and Uruguay experimented with different economic development models, switching development models from an Import Substitution Model (ISM) to an exportoriented model. As a result, the second half of the twentieth century entailed a series of changes in the social structures of the country. Poverty and inequality indicators grew and the architecture of the welfare state gradually lost its capacity to respond to a changing structure of social risks (Filgueira et al., 2005). Education was not insulated from these changes. In 1995, there is a revolution in the educational public system caused by the reform initiated by the national government. This reform has concentrated most of its strategies on equity in resources (with compensatory emphasis) and has resulted in centralized models that combine focused and universal resources assignment. In primary educational level, Full-Time School model has been its main and more successful tool. Eleven years after the beginning of the reform, the educational system faces, in terms of its organization, a set of tensions between the traditional structure and the emerging model. The challenges are four: Teachers' stability in schools, degree of autonomy between the school and the central administration, cultural impoverishment of the underprivileged social sectors, and the necessity of basing the expansion of the new model on additional resources. This chapter provides an analysis of the educational system characteristics associated with these four tensions, and a discussion of the most important risks in terms of universalizing the emerging transformation.

Recent empirical research shows that if we look at the nature of party-society linkages the differences between cases in the "moderate" and the "radical" strands of the Latin American left are less stark than we initially thought. Uruguay's Frente Amplio (FA), for instance, has more in common with Bolivia's Movement Towards Socialism (MAS) than with Brazil's Workers' Party (PT)—particularly in its degree of openness and responsiveness to the party's social bases. In this article, we link this finding to broader macro political outcomes that are central in the study of Latin American political economy today. Bolivia and Uruguay are, in many ways, representative of broader regional trends of the early twenty-first century: both cases experienced a dramatic growth of the middle classes, the expansion of social programs benefiting large groups, notable declines in poverty as well as in social and economic inequalities, and the increased access of subordinate social groups to national decision-making. They have achieved, in short, significant progress advancing an agenda of incorporation, defined as the expansion of substantive citizenship rights. In this paper, we explain how party organizational attributes of the MAS and the FA, especially their strong societal linkages, have contributed to shaping such outcomes—which, despite similarities in their general tendency, vary in depth and scope across the two cases. We also trace how underlying socio-political pressures generated by each party's organized social bases have constrained progress in areas that are crucial to sustaining important advances made in the past decade, such as labor, tax, education, and health reforms. This article draws on data collected through extensive fieldwork in Uruguay and Bolivia.

Diverse studies of the political economy of tax composition across middleincome countries have found that Latin American economies tax upperincome groups much less than do other developing regions, such as East Asia and Eastern Europe (i.e. Di John 2006; Mahon, Chapter 8 in this volume). As the Introduction to this volume suggests, this finding is consistent with the relatively low redistributive capacity Latin American states display when compared to advanced capitalist societies. Sharp within-region differences remain even during periods of significant inequality reduction in the region, such as during the most recent decade (see Lustig and Pereira 2016). Against this backdrop, this chapter analyzes cross-national differences in how distributive preferences map onto class and political attitudes.