Source: Latin American Perspectives | Published: 2026-07-06
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: bolsonaro, brazil, far-right, government, policy, politics, social policy
The relationship between right-wing populism and social welfare policy has become one of the defining analytical puzzles of contemporary political economy. Across the Global South and North alike, the rise of far-right governments has prompted urgent questions about the durability of redistributive programs that were built, often painstakingly, by center-left administrations over decades. Brazil under Jair Bolsonaro offers perhaps the most instructive and paradoxical case study of this dynamic. A president who campaigned on fiscal austerity, derided established welfare bureaucracies, and expressed open hostility to the Workers' Party's programmatic legacy nonetheless presided over the expansion — and eventual rebranding — of the very flagship cash transfer program he had rhetorically disdained. The article published in Latin American Perspectives by scholars examining the transformation of Bolsa Família into Auxílio Brasil under the Bolsonaro administration engages this paradox with analytical seriousness, situating it within the broader crisis conditions introduced by the COVID-19 pandemic. Understanding this transformation is not merely an exercise in Brazilian politics; it carries profound implications for how we theorize welfare state politics under conditions of democratic backsliding and acute social emergency.
Bolsa Família was, by the time Bolsonaro took office in January 2019, among the most globally celebrated conditional cash transfer programs in the development policy canon. Launched under Lula da Silva in 2003 through the consolidation of several earlier initiatives, the program tied modest but consequential income transfers to behavioral conditionalities in education and health, and it reached tens of millions of families in the lowest income quintiles. International development organizations — from the World Bank to the Inter-American Development Bank — held it up as a model of evidence-based poverty reduction, and it became a touchstone in global ODA discourse about the effectiveness of direct transfers over supply-side service delivery. Bolsonaro's ideological hostility to the PT's programmatic achievements and to what he characterized as dependency-creating welfarism created an expectation, among observers and opponents alike, that the new government would move quickly to restructure or dismantle the program. The central contribution of the Latin American Perspectives article is to interrogate whether what followed was active dismantling, political drift, or something more complex and politically calculated.
The COVID-19 pandemic injected a rupturing contingency into this dynamic. Beginning in mid-2020, the Bolsonaro government — under intense congressional pressure and facing the most severe public health crisis in a century — launched the Auxílio Emergencial, a dramatically expanded emergency cash transfer that ultimately reached approximately 67 million Brazilians, dwarfing the scope of Bolsa Família at its peak. The paradox here is acute: a government ideologically committed to fiscal orthodoxy and skeptical of the welfare state delivered one of the largest emergency income support programs in the developing world. Scholars working in the tradition of policy feedback theory and welfare state resilience would recognize this as a moment of forced policy expansion driven by crisis legitimacy and electoral calculation rather than ideological conversion. The article examines how this emergency moment set the conditions for the subsequent institutionalization of Auxílio Brasil, in which the program's coverage and benefit levels were elevated and its branding was stripped of the PT's symbolic legacy — a form of political reappropriation that served Bolsonaro's 2022 electoral ambitions while leaving the structural architecture of redistribution largely intact. The concept of policy drift, developed by Jacob Hacker to describe changes in policy effect without formal legislative transformation, finds a peculiar inversion here: rather than allowing a program to decay through inaction, the Bolsonaro government actively mutated its form while preserving much of its function, all while dramatically increasing its electoral visibility.
This case connects to broader patterns in Latin American social policy and global development politics. Across the region, the conditional cash transfer model — pioneered in Mexico and Brazil in the late 1990s and 2000s — has demonstrated remarkable institutional resilience even under hostile political conditions, in part because beneficiary constituencies have become politically significant and in part because the programs have been absorbed into international development frameworks as evidence of technical best practice. The ODA community's embrace of CCTs as a proven intervention has effectively created a form of external institutional lock-in that makes formal dismantling politically costly. At the same time, the Bolsonaro case illustrates how authoritarian-populist governments can exploit social transfer programs not merely as instruments of poverty reduction but as vehicles for political clientelism and electoral mobilization — a dynamic that raises serious questions for development practitioners about program governance, independence from executive manipulation, and the conditions under which evidence-based social policy can be converted into populist patronage infrastructure. The article's framing of the question as "dismantling or drifting" thus captures something analytically important: the relevant threat to well-designed social programs under right-wing populism may not be abolition but distortion, a hollowing out of programmatic integrity that preserves the fiscal transfer while subordinating it to short-term political utility.
From a research perspective, the article makes a contribution to a field that has too often analyzed welfare state politics in the Global South through frameworks derived from the European political economy tradition. Brazil's trajectory under Bolsonaro suggests the need for analytical categories that can account for the co-presence of ideological hostility and program expansion, for the role of crisis shocks in reshaping political constraints, and for the ways in which electoral calendars interact with social policy design in weakly institutionalized democracies. The distinction between retrenchment and recalibration, productive in European contexts, may be insufficient to capture dynamics in which a government simultaneously expands coverage, reduces administrative conditionality, and deploys a social program as a campaign tool in ways that may have lasting governance implications regardless of who wins subsequent elections.
Looking forward, the implications for researchers, policymakers, and development practitioners are significant. The Bolsonaro period — bookended as it now is by Lula's return to the presidency and the restoration of the Bolsa Família brand — should be studied not as an aberration but as a stress test that revealed both the resilience and the vulnerabilities of Brazil's social protection architecture. Practitioners in international development must grapple with the conditions under which major social programs can be captured for populist purposes and what safeguards — administrative, legal, and political — are necessary to protect program integrity across government transitions. For scholars of comparative politics and political economy, Brazil offers an exceptional natural experiment in the politics of welfare under democratic backsliding: a case where institutional continuity in social policy coexisted with democratic erosion, and where the expansion of cash transfers occurred not despite but partly because of a government hostile to the ideological tradition that created them. Future research would benefit from disaggregating the population-level effects of these transitions — examining whether coverage expansions under Auxílio Brasil translated into the kinds of human capital and poverty reduction outcomes documented under Bolsa Família, or whether the weakening of conditionality and administrative systems introduced new forms of program fragility. The story of Brazil's flagship cash transfer program under Bolsonaro is ultimately a story about the politics of social policy in an era of democratic uncertainty, and its lessons will remain relevant long after the specific actors have left the stage.