Books
Poverty: The Divide That Matters
For much of the twentieth century, Argentines saw themselves as a middle-class society, with low levels of poverty and ample opportunities for upward mobility through work and education. That image no longer reflects reality: today, half of all children grow up in poverty, five million people live in informal settlements without access to basic services, and each crisis raises the poverty floor to a more alarming level than the last.
While public debate remains fixated on political polarization, this book sheds light on a deeper and more enduring divide: the one separating the Argentina that is integrated from the Argentina that is excluded. How did we get here, and why do we remain trapped in this reality?
To answer these questions, political scientist Andrés Schipani brings together leading economists, sociologists, and political scientists to examine how poverty has evolved in Argentina, the logic behind the expansion of social policies, and their impact on levels of exclusion. They also explore poverty’s less quantifiable dimensions: its intergenerational transmission, the challenges of educating children on an uneven playing field, young people trapped in a present with no future, and the ways in which the state engages with the world of the poor through social movements and political brokers.
The result is a rigorous assessment that dismantles some of the most deeply entrenched myths about poverty: that social policy has failed completely, or that poverty is solely an economic problem whose solution lies in larger income transfers or economic growth. Instead, the book shows that poverty is also shaped by a lack of prospects, fragile caregiving environments, and disrupted educational and employment trajectories. In this context, it argues that social policies have been essential in containing poverty, but far less effective as a springboard for social mobility. *Poverty: The Divide That Matters* is an urgent invitation to confront Argentina’s greatest problem. It is a tragedy we still have time to reverse, although the window for doing so will not remain open forever.
"The Politics of Social Protection in Latin America: Parties, Interest Groups and Social Policy during the Commodities Boom"
The book analyzes the different social policy models adopted in Latin America during the commodity boom of the 2000s. Departing from mainstream scholarship on the Welfare State, which proposes a unidimensional vision focused on income redistribution, my study presents a multidimensional conceptualization of redistribution that contemplates the different tools that governments have at their disposal to forge coalitions with the popular sectors. My book focuses on two types of policies: those that redistribute income towards individuals from the popular sectors (formal and informal workers), and those that redistribute economic and political power towards their organizations (unions and social movements).
This reconceptualization reveals three models of redistribution in Latin America that combine redistribution of income and power in different ways. The Poverty Alleviation model (Brazil and Chile) only redistributes income and only to those individuals in the lowest deciles of the population, without empowering unions or social movements. Under Left Populism (Argentina and Venezuela), governments redistribute income to broader segments of the popular sectors, and they also redistribute economic power, but not political power. The most redistributive model is the Social Democratic model (Uruguay and Bolivia), which combines high income redistribution with political and economic empowerment towards social organizations.
The book develops an argument that I call the "weak left paradox" to explain this variation: Leftist presidents adopt more generous redistributive policies when they have low control over leftist parties and popular sector organizations. Greater redistribution allows presidents to forge coalitions with these actors in order to consolidate their leadership over the left. This argument challenges the existing literature, which argues that countries with electorally strong presidents and centralized left movements are more likely to adopt more ambitious redistributive policies. The evidence for this argument comes from two years of fieldwork in Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay, where I conducted archival research and 267 in-depth interviews with public officials, social leaders, businessmen, and party leaders. In addition, I created an original database on the career paths of more than 1,500 left-wing officials, trade unionists and legislators from 1990 to 2015. This empirical evidence and the combination of methods (process-tracing and statistical analysis) allow me to explain changes in three types of welfare policies: income support programs, labor-market regulations and pension policies. To show that my argument is generalizable beyond my three main cases, I extend my research to Chile, Venezuela, and Bolivia.