Source: Latin American Perspectives | Published: 2026-05-20
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: bolsonaro, brazil, far-right, government, policy, politics, social policy
The transformation of social protection systems under far-right governments represents one of the most consequential and contested policy dynamics of the contemporary era. Across Latin America and beyond, the rise of populist right-wing administrations has forced scholars and practitioners to revisit long-standing assumptions about welfare state durability, programmatic continuity, and the political economy of redistribution. Brazil under Jair Bolsonaro offered perhaps the most instructive laboratory for this inquiry, combining a deeply embedded flagship transfer program — Bolsa Família — with a government ideologically disposed against the redistributive state, all against the backdrop of a once-in-a-generation public health emergency. The article published in Latin American Perspectives (Volume 53, Issue 2, March 2026), titled "Dismantling or Drifting? The Politics of Bolsa Família's Transformation under Brazil's Far-Right Government," engages precisely this tension, asking whether the rebranding of Bolsa Família into Auxílio Brasil under the Bolsonaro administration constituted a genuine structural dismantlement of Brazil's social contract or a more ambiguous, politically opportunistic drift shaped by crisis conditions. The question carries weight not only for students of Brazilian politics but for the broader global debate about welfare resilience in the age of authoritarian populism.
The conceptual framing of "dismantling versus drifting" draws on a well-developed literature in comparative welfare state analysis that distinguishes between active retrenchment — deliberate, programmatic rollback of entitlements — and passive or layered erosion, in which programs are nominally preserved but hollowed out through administrative neglect, eligibility manipulation, or institutional redesign that subtly realigns incentives and coverage. The Bolsonaro administration's treatment of Bolsa Família fits uneasily into either category. On the one hand, the program was formally abolished and replaced with Auxílio Brasil in 2021, a move that carried unmistakable political symbolism. Bolsa Família had been so thoroughly associated with the Workers' Party (PT) governments of Lula and Dilma that dismantling it carried rhetorical value for a government that had built its electoral identity in explicit opposition to PT-era policies. On the other hand, Auxílio Brasil was not simply a punitive reduction of benefits — it was in fact initially structured with higher nominal transfer values, particularly as the 2022 electoral cycle approached. The article's central contribution appears to lie in its careful parsing of this paradox: a program simultaneously rebranded to discredit its predecessor and expanded to secure electoral viability, revealing the tensions internal to far-right governance when ideological hostility to redistribution collides with mass electoral dependency on that very redistribution.
The COVID-19 crisis added a structural layer of exceptional complexity to this dynamic. The pandemic generated a massive emergency cash transfer — Auxílio Emergencial — that at its peak reached over 68 million Brazilians and temporarily reduced poverty indicators to historic lows despite an otherwise dismal public health response. This emergency intervention, born partly of congressional pressure and political necessity rather than executive initiative, created an awkward policy legacy for a government that was ideologically skeptical of state-led redistribution. The article's examination of how the pandemic reconfigured the politics of Bolsa Família's transformation is particularly significant: it suggests that COVID-19 did not merely interrupt normal political trajectories but actively reshaped the terrain on which social policy contestation occurred. The Bolsonaro government found itself presiding over an enormous expansion of cash transfers while simultaneously undermining the institutional architecture — oversight mechanisms, targeting infrastructure, social work networks — that had made Bolsa Família effective. This is the essence of what the article appears to characterize as drift rather than clean dismantlement: the form of transfer policy was preserved and even expanded in electoral periods, but the substantive logic and institutional coherence of the program were eroded.
These findings carry important implications for the comparative study of social policy durability. The Brazilian case complicates the "electoral insurance" thesis, which holds that large-scale transfer programs become politically self-sustaining because the constituencies they create resist rollback. In Brazil, this logic held in part — Bolsonaro could not afford to simply eliminate cash transfers in a society where tens of millions depend on them — but it was also instrumentalized in ways that distorted program integrity. The renaming strategy, the pre-electoral expansion of benefits in 2022, and the weakening of conditionality frameworks all suggest that far-right governments need not choose between ideological hostility to redistribution and short-term electoral exploitation of welfare dependency. They can pursue both simultaneously, with consequences that are diffuse, hard to litigate politically, and damaging to long-term program effectiveness. For ODA practitioners and development researchers, this pattern has analogues across multiple low- and middle-income country contexts where conditional cash transfer programs built with international support face politically motivated administrative interference that preserves optics while eroding function.
From a broader regional perspective, Brazil's experience under Bolsonaro is not an isolated anomaly but a variant of a wider phenomenon in Latin American political economy: the instrumentalization of social protection by governments that simultaneously reject its ideological foundations. In countries from El Salvador to Ecuador, politically motivated interventions in cash transfer architecture — changing eligibility criteria, redirecting administrative resources, weaponizing beneficiary lists — have become a tool of political control rather than social development. The return of Lula to the presidency in 2023, and his subsequent reconstitution of Bolsa Família, provides a natural before-and-after comparative moment that future research will productively mine. But the article's focus on the Bolsonaro period itself is valuable for precisely what it reveals about the mechanics of institutional erosion under conditions where outright dismantlement is politically unviable. The lesson is methodologically significant: researchers studying welfare state politics under right-wing populism must look beyond headline transfer values and formal program structures to the administrative, targeting, and conditionality frameworks that determine whether transfers translate into effective poverty reduction.
Looking forward, the theoretical and empirical questions opened by this research should animate a sustained research agenda at the intersection of political science, development economics, and public administration. As far-right and authoritarian-populist governments proliferate globally, the question of how they navigate inherited welfare infrastructure will be a defining feature of social policy evolution in the coming decade. Brazil's experience suggests that the categories of "expansion" and "retrenchment" are insufficient — what we may be witnessing is the emergence of a distinct far-right welfare modality characterized by nominal continuity, electoral opportunism, and institutional degradation. For practitioners working in development cooperation and social protection design, this carries a direct operational message: program sustainability cannot be assessed solely by the survival of a program's name or formal budgetary allocation. The institutional depth, administrative integrity, and political insulation of targeting and delivery systems matter at least as much. The durability of Bolsa Família's legacy — and the damage done to it between 2019 and 2022 — will continue to be debated as Brazil reconstructs its social policy architecture, making this article a timely and necessary contribution to a conversation that is far from over.