Suchergebnisse

Housing represents a basic human need. Families can access housing through public policy, market mechanisms or by their own resources. This article adopts a welfare regime approach to analyse the housing sector in Mexico. The objective is to map the Mexican housing regime and to reveal its major outcomes. The study reveals the roles that public policy, markets and families have played for housing provision in the country's recent history. Findings show that whilst recent policy changes have enhanced the government's intervention in the housing sector, they have reproduced the unequal and fragmented nature of the country's social policy, and their design based on a market rationale has not resolved the housing needs for the majority of the population. The state and markets fail to provide adequate support for the majority of Mexican families, which continue to bear the heaviest responsibility for housing provision.

This article studies how and under what circumstances different socio-political formations are more likely to trigger and shape distinct modes of institutional reform and transform the structures of the state in greater or lesser degree. The focus is on health care reforms in the context of political liberalization: the Sistema Único de Saúde in Brazil and the Seguro Popular de Salud in Mexico. Both are part of the wave of welfare policy expansion observed in Latin America in recent decades and undertaken in the national contexts of transitions towards pluralistic democratic systems, but which at the same time represent opposite reform models: a universalistic model in Brazil and the layering of insurance programs in Mexico. Applying a comparative perspective, we seek to establish similarities and differences in the contexts under which the reform processes were undertaken and in the social and political arrangements that generated and drove them. Differences in the types of democratic transitions, the formation of cross-class coalitions and the institutional legacies from the populist regimes suggest that while in Brazil the process of democratization occurred together with the formation of an "initiative capacity," the absence of this in Mexico resulted in the reproduction of a segmented and unequal system.