Description
While inequality has increased in most countries worldwide, income distribution across Latin America has become fairer in recent decades in both left- and right-leaning administrations. Yet, research remains incipient on how equity-enhancing initiatives sometimes emerged during centre-right governments. To narrow this gap, this article checks which mechanisms enabled a consequential education reform and the federalisation of cash-transfer programmes as proposed by the PSDB-led governing coalition in Brazil (1995-2002), considering hypotheses about electoral competition, left-wing legislative strength, social mobilisation capacity, and coalition dynamics. By combining multiple data sources, it is possible to observe the president signalling to voters that education and cash-transfer policies represented a material benefit. Meanwhile, the executive cultivated a large multiparty alliance that paved the way for the government’s success before a fragmented legislature. Whilst electoral competition and coalition dynamics appear throughout policy processes, the leftist bloc remained relatively weak in Congress, and bottom-up pressures were almost non-existent. For analytical generalisation, I propose new case studies to investigate whether competitive elections and cross-party cooperation would be relevant explanations for the persistence of the two redistributive policies in education and cash transfers during the subsequent governments of the left-wing Workers’ Party (2003-2016) and the far-right Jair Bolsonaro (2019-2022).
