Statecraft, Social Policy, and Governance in Latin America

The paper develops an analytical framework designed to examine social policy as a strategic approach to issues of state-society relations and the problem of governance in Latin America. The paper argues that in Latin America and particularly Brazil social protection policy flowed from initiating capacity concentrated originally in the state, and specifically in a technobureaucratic elite connected to a strong executive. The policy, however, produced structures wherein initiative capacity was dispersed into a multiple of intermediate points at the nexus between the state and civil society. This in turn led to an immobilized dissipation of initiative capacity in this specific policy area which was symptomatic of, and reinforcing to, a generalized immobilism or power implosion that periodically has gripped these sociopolitical formations, producing shifts from formally democratic to authoritarian regimes and vice versa.