Source: Latin American Perspectives | Published: 2026-05-24
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: bolsonaro, brazil, far-right, government, policy, politics, social policy
The ascent of far-right governments across Latin America over the past decade has generated intense scholarly debate about the fate of redistributive social programs built painstakingly during earlier periods of center-left governance. Brazil's experience under Jair Bolsonaro offers one of the most consequential and analytically complex cases in this regional story. The country had long been celebrated internationally for the Bolsa Família program, a conditional cash transfer scheme launched under Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in 2003 that became a global reference point for poverty reduction and social inclusion policy. When Bolsonaro took office in January 2019 with an explicitly anti-establishment, anti-redistributive rhetorical posture, observers across the political spectrum asked a pointed question: would a government ideologically hostile to the progressive welfare state dismantle the architecture of Brazil's social protection system, or would the political and institutional weight of an embedded program force a different outcome? The article published in Latin American Perspectives by Scheiring and colleagues addresses precisely this question, examining how the intersection of the COVID-19 pandemic and far-right executive politics reshaped the contours of Brazil's flagship transfer program from Bolsa Família into the renamed Auxílio Brasil.
The analytical contribution of this article lies in its careful parsing of what the authors appear to frame as the politics of ambiguity — a dynamic in which ideological hostility to welfare programs coexists with electoral and institutional pressures that compel their continuation, and even expansion, in modified form. The transformation from Bolsa Família to Auxílio Brasil was not, on its surface, a story of retrenchment. Indeed, the COVID-19 emergency led to a dramatic, if temporary, expansion of cash transfers under the Bolsonaro government through the Auxílio Emergencial program, which at its peak reached approximately 68 million Brazilians. The subsequent institutionalization of Auxílio Brasil appeared to signal a broadening of the transfer architecture. Yet the article's central insight, consistent with the scholarly literature on policy conversion and layering, is that programmatic continuity at the surface level can mask substantive transformation in targeting logic, administrative infrastructure, and political meaning. The renaming itself was not mere branding: it represented an effort to symbolically sever the program from its Workers' Party origins and reframe it within Bolsonaro's own political economy of patronage and electoral mobilization, particularly in the lead-up to the 2022 presidential election.
The article situates this transformation within broader theoretical debates about welfare state politics under right-wing populism. Standard retrenchment theory, rooted in Pierson's foundational work, would predict that the high electoral visibility of cash transfer programs creates powerful constituencies that constrain even ideologically opposed governments from cutting benefits. Brazil confirms this logic to a point — Bolsonaro did not abolish cash transfers. But the Latin American Perspectives article appears to advance a more nuanced argument that the relevant question is not simply whether programs survive but how their institutional character, beneficiary relationships, and political functions are reconfigured. In this respect, the Brazilian case resonates with comparative evidence from Hungary, Poland, and other contexts where far-right governments have redirected rather than dismantled welfare instruments, using them as tools for vertical loyalty mobilization rather than horizontal solidarity building. The shift from a needs-based, bureaucratically managed program with strong civil society and municipal government involvement — the hallmark of the original Bolsa Família design — toward a more centralized, executive-controlled, and electorally calibrated mechanism represents a qualitative change in the nature of social protection even when benefit levels nominally increase.
The COVID-19 dimension of this analysis carries particular weight for researchers and practitioners working at the intersection of crisis response and long-term social policy architecture. The pandemic created what can be understood as a critical juncture in Brazil's welfare trajectory: the sheer scale of economic devastation forced the Bolsonaro government to deploy cash transfers at a magnitude it had previously resisted on ideological grounds. This emergency expansion demonstrated both the irreplaceable centrality of direct income support in crisis conditions and the political dividends it could generate for a government otherwise struggling with its pandemic management record. The authors' analysis of how emergency necessity intersected with electoral calculation to produce policy outcomes that neither pure ideological logic nor pure institutional inertia would have predicted represents a methodologically important contribution to the study of social policy under conditions of compound crisis — a framework increasingly relevant across the Global South as governments navigate overlapping shocks of pandemic, climate, and economic instability.
From a policy standpoint, the implications of this article extend well beyond Brazil. For international development actors and ODA institutions engaged with social protection programming, the Brazilian case raises uncomfortable questions about the durability of program design achievements when political transitions bring governments hostile to the values embedded in those designs. Bolsa Família was not simply a cash transfer mechanism; it was an institutional architecture that integrated health and education conditionalities, municipal service delivery, civil registry functions, and participatory monitoring structures developed over more than a decade of iterative reform. The conversion of this architecture into Auxílio Brasil stripped away many of these interlocking components, producing a program that delivers benefits while hollowing out the broader social investment logic. For donors and technical assistance providers who invest heavily in institutional capacity building within social protection systems, this pattern should prompt serious reflection on what forms of institutional design are most resilient to political reversal, and how program structures can be embedded in ways that make their degradation politically costly even for unsympathetic governments.
The broader regional context amplifies the significance of these findings. Brazil's experience under Bolsonaro was not isolated: the same years saw Mauricio Macri's austerity agenda in Argentina partially erode social protection gains, Nayib Bukele's technocratic authoritarianism reshape El Salvador's welfare institutions, and ongoing debates in Colombia and Peru about the sustainability of expanded transfer programs established during the pandemic emergency. Across Latin America, the post-COVID political landscape has been characterized by intense contestation over which emergency social expansions should be made permanent and in what form. The question of whether populist and far-right governments will deploy welfare instruments for democratic inclusion or for clientelist capture is now one of the defining issues of regional political economy. The Bolsa Família to Auxílio Brasil trajectory — subsequently reversed again by the returning Lula administration through the Bolsa Família relaunch of 2023 — illustrates both the reversibility of these programmatic reconfigurations and the institutional costs of oscillation, as repeated renaming and restructuring erode administrative continuity and beneficiary trust.
For researchers, the article's framework of "dismantling or drifting" offers a productive analytical vocabulary for studying a class of policy outcomes that sits between the poles of wholesale retrenchment and full programmatic continuity. The concept of drift — in which programs nominally persist but their institutional substance and political function shift in ways that undermine their original purpose — is particularly germane to an era in which outright welfare state dismantlement is politically prohibitive but incremental erosion through administrative neglect, conditionality manipulation, and symbolic rebranding remains entirely feasible. Future research would benefit from extending this framework to comparable cases across Sub-Saharan Africa and South and Southeast Asia, where conditional cash transfer programs modeled partly on the Bolsa Família experience are now embedded in national social protection systems and face analogous political pressures as electoral landscapes shift. The Latin American Perspectives article makes a timely and methodologically sophisticated contribution to a literature that must grapple not only with whether social protection programs survive political transitions but with what kind of social contract they embody when they do.