Are welfare regimes a useful category? The cross-sectoral variation in social policy in Latin America at the end of the commodity boom

Abstract

The literature on welfare and social policy regimes often assumes that countries perform consistently across policy sectors. Is this assumption correct, particularly in the global South? Do countries that do well in a given policy sector do also well in others? This article examines the matter by contrasting pensions with health care in Latin America, clustering countries based on their degree of segmentation in policy outputs. As a region, Latin America is an interesting case to study because of its comparatively high levels of social spending, long history of welfare systems, significant policy transformation in the first decade of the twenty-first century and extensive body of research. Findings show that while some countries do consistently well or poorly across sectors, others report an uneven performance. Questioning overarching generalizations based on the notion of the regime, the paper calls for further comparative analysis on the political economy behind the sectoral change.

Keywords

• social policy
• segmentation
• health care
• old-age pensions
• welfare regimes
• latin america