Source: Latin American Perspectives | Published: 2026-06-06
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: bolsonaro, brazil, far-right, government, policy, politics, social policy
The transformation of social policy under populist far-right governments has emerged as one of the defining questions in comparative political economy over the past decade. Brazil under Jair Bolsonaro offers perhaps the most instructive case study for scholars and practitioners alike, not because it followed a predictable ideological script, but precisely because it did not. The Bolsonaro administration's handling of Bolsa Família — Latin America's most celebrated conditional cash transfer program and a cornerstone of the Workers' Party's social legacy — reveals the complex, often contradictory nature of far-right governance when confronted with the dual pressures of ideological commitment and political survival. The article under review, published in Latin American Perspectives in March 2026, addresses this tension head-on, asking whether what occurred under Bolsonaro constituted a deliberate dismantling of a redistributive welfare architecture or a more ambiguous drift shaped by electoral calculation, institutional inertia, and crisis-induced improvisation.
The conceptual distinction between dismantling and drifting is analytically significant and deserves careful unpacking. Welfare state scholarship, particularly in the tradition of Paul Pierson and more recent work on retrenchment politics, has long distinguished between direct programmatic cuts — which generate visible losers and thus political backlash — and more subtle processes of erosion through non-decisions, administrative neglect, or symbolic reconfiguration that preserve the shell of a program while hollowing out its redistributive logic. The renaming of Bolsa Família as Auxílio Brasil in 2021, accompanied by a substantial, if temporary, benefit increase timed to the 2022 electoral cycle, fits neither cleanly into the category of dismantling nor of preservation. It is precisely this ambiguity that the article seeks to theorize. The Bolsonaro government inherited a program it had long denounced as clientelistic and dependency-inducing, yet it ultimately expanded its nominal reach — while simultaneously stripping away institutional elements such as the inter-sectoral coordination mechanisms, conditionality enforcement, and long-term budgetary protections that gave the original program its developmental coherence.
The COVID-19 pandemic introduced a critical juncture that accelerated and complicated this trajectory in ways that deserve sustained attention from development researchers. Brazil's pandemic-era emergency cash transfer — the Auxílio Emergencial — briefly became one of the largest social protection interventions in the country's history, temporarily lifting millions out of poverty and demonstrating the latent administrative capacity of the Brazilian state even under ideologically hostile leadership. Yet the article's contribution lies in showing how this emergency expansion was managed in ways that served to politically rebrand social protection rather than institutionalize it. The shift from Bolsa Família to Auxílio Brasil was not a technocratic reform but a deeply political act of renaming and reclaiming, designed to detach a successful program from its PT origins and affiliate it with the Bolsonaro brand ahead of the 2022 elections. The benefit increase was unfunded beyond the electoral window, creating a fiscal cliff that Lula's returning government would inherit. This instrumentalization of welfare policy for electoral purposes, rather than programmatic dismantling per se, is the article's core analytical contribution.
The Brazilian case connects to broader patterns visible across Latin America and beyond, where far-right and right-populist governments have had to navigate the tension between market-liberal economic orthodoxy and the electoral imperative of maintaining social constituencies that depend on redistributive programs. Similar dynamics played out, in different configurations, under Macri in Argentina and Piñera in Chile, where social policy became a terrain of symbolic contestation rather than straightforward retrenchment. What distinguishes Brazil is the scale of the program in question, the depth of its institutional embeddedness after nearly two decades of operation, and the unprecedented disruptive force of the pandemic, which made any attempt at direct cuts politically untenable even for an administration ideologically opposed to what Bolsonaro's allies called "PT welfarism." The result was a form of institutional drift dressed in the clothes of reform — a reconfiguration that preserved benefit flows while undermining the programmatic infrastructure that produced long-term social outcomes beyond income transfers alone.
For development practitioners and ODA-aligned researchers, the implications of this analysis reach well beyond Brazil. International development institutions including the World Bank, UN agencies, and bilateral donors have invested substantial resources in promoting conditional cash transfer models as scalable, evidence-based instruments of poverty reduction. Brazil's Bolsa Família was not merely a domestic program; it became a global template, exported to dozens of countries across Africa, Asia, and Latin America through South-South cooperation and multilateral technical assistance frameworks. The article implicitly raises the question of how robust these program designs are when they are politically captured, symbolically disowned, or administratively neglected by succeeding governments with different ideological orientations. Programmatic sustainability cannot be reduced to technical design features alone. It requires political coalitions, bureaucratic champions, and fiscal commitments that survive electoral transitions — conditions that are increasingly fragile in the current era of democratic backsliding and polarized electorates.
Looking forward, the Lula III government's decision to reconstitute Bolsa Família in 2023 — complete with the restored original name — underscores just how central the program's identity has become to Brazilian political contestation. But restoration of a name and even a funding baseline does not automatically restore the institutional ecology that made the program effective in its heyday. Researchers examining the longer arc of social policy in Brazil will need to assess whether the Bolsonaro years represent a recoverable interruption or a structural rupture in the capabilities and coalitions that sustained Bolsa Família's implementation. For the broader field of comparative social policy, the concept of drift — as distinct from dismantling — offers a productive framework for understanding how far-right governments manage welfare states they cannot easily destroy but are unwilling to defend on principled grounds. The politics of renaming, of unfunded expansion, and of electoral timing constitute a form of governance that is analytically distinct from either neoliberal retrenchment or progressive consolidation, and deserves its own theoretical vocabulary. This article makes a meaningful contribution toward developing that vocabulary, and its findings should inform both scholarly debates on welfare state resilience and practical assessments of how international social protection investments can be designed to withstand the turbulence of democratic alternation in polarized political environments.