Description
Poverty remains one of the world’s most intractable challenges. Although progress has been made in past decades, recent figures indicate a reversal in poverty trends previously in decline, particularly in the Global South. What political factors may account for this change in trajectory? The experience of South America sheds a powerful light on the politics behind variations in socioeconomic outcomes. While in the 2000s, a historical poverty reduction took hold across South American countries, by the mid-2010s, poverty indicators had either stagnated at elevated levels or, in some cases, even shot back up again. This article investigates how electoral and coalitional factors may facilitate or block poverty-alleviation policies, considering a comparative case study of two countries where impoverishment rates have recently risen (Argentina and Venezuela) and two other cases in which poverty has remained relatively trendless (Brazil and Peru). The article explores the following proposition. In Brazil and Peru, electoral competition for socially vulnerable voters and cross-party coalitions around anti-poverty initiatives tended to prevail. Contrastingly, Argentina would not feature durable coalitional arrangements, with presidents and Congress in constant confrontation, and Venezuela would come to lack both competitive elections and functional executive-legislative relations after it entered a full authocratisation process.
