Source: Latin American Perspectives | Published: 2026-07-07
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: bolsonaro, brazil, far-right, government, policy, politics, social policy
The relationship between far-right populism and social policy remains one of the most contested and consequential questions in contemporary political economy. Across Latin America, Europe, and beyond, scholars have debated whether authoritarian-populist governments dismantle redistributive programs outright, co-opt them for electoral gain, or allow them to erode through institutional neglect. Brazil under Jair Bolsonaro offered a particularly revealing laboratory for this question, given the country's globally recognized conditional cash transfer architecture and the extraordinary stress imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic. The article published in Latin American Perspectives by Olivia Giles and colleagues confronts this question directly, asking not simply what happened to Bolsa Família under Bolsonaro's government, but why — and what the answer reveals about the political logic of social policy in the age of right-wing populism.
Bolsa Família, established under Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in 2003 and consolidated through subsequent administrations, was not merely a welfare program. It became a symbol of Brazil's developmental state capacity, a model for international development institutions including the World Bank, and a cornerstone of what scholars have called the "Pink Tide" social contract across Latin America. The program combined direct income transfers to poor households with conditionalities around health checkups and school attendance, effectively linking social protection to state-building and human capital investment. Its success in reducing poverty and inequality earned it international prestige and served as a template for cash transfer programs from Mexico to Indonesia. When Bolsonaro — who had long dismissed social programs as mechanisms of political clientelism and dependency — assumed the presidency in January 2019, observers and practitioners alike watched closely to see whether this institutional heritage would survive the ideological turn.
The article's central analytical contribution lies in its application of the distinction between "dismantling" and "drifting" to explain what actually transpired. Rather than abolishing Bolsa Família through legislative repeal or budgetary starvation, the Bolsonaro administration pursued what the authors characterize as a complex and contradictory process of programmatic transformation. The COVID-19 crisis proved pivotal. Facing catastrophic unemployment and income loss among the very constituencies that Bolsonaro sought to cultivate, the government was compelled in 2020 to introduce the Auxílio Emergencial — an emergency cash transfer far more generous than Bolsa Família had ever been, briefly reaching approximately 68 million Brazilians. This represented a remarkable episode in which ideological commitments yielded to political necessity and public health reality. When the emergency payments were wound down in 2021, however, the administration did not restore Bolsa Família; instead, it rebranded and reconfigured the program as Auxílio Brasil, raising nominal benefit levels ahead of the 2022 presidential election while simultaneously weakening the institutional conditionalities, targeting mechanisms, and administrative infrastructure that had made the original program effective. The article thus identifies a pattern of electoral manipulation masquerading as social protection — a politics of visibility over sustainability.
This finding speaks directly to broader debates within development studies and ODA practice about the resilience of social protection systems under hostile political conditions. The concept of policy drift, drawn from the historical institutionalism of scholars like Paul Pierson and Jacob Hacker, helps explain how programs can be formally maintained while their substantive character and effectiveness are systematically eroded. In Brazil's case, the expansion of nominal transfers without attendant investment in administrative capacity, monitoring systems, or conditionality enforcement meant that Auxílio Brasil lacked the developmental architecture that had distinguished Bolsa Família as a poverty-reduction instrument rather than simple income supplementation. For international development practitioners and ODA donors who have invested heavily in conditional cash transfer models across the Global South, this episode raises uncomfortable questions about institutional durability. Programs that appear robust in terms of budget lines and beneficiary numbers may be hollowed out in ways that standard metrics fail to capture, particularly when political actors have incentives to maintain the appearance of social generosity while dismantling its substance.
The regional and global significance of the Brazilian case extends well beyond its borders. Latin America has witnessed a broader contestation of the social contracts forged during the commodity boom years of the 2000s and early 2010s, with right-wing and far-right governments in Argentina, Ecuador, and Chile at various moments challenging redistributive institutions built by center-left predecessors. What distinguishes the Bolsonaro episode, as this article illuminates, is the particular role of a global health crisis in accelerating and complicating these dynamics. The pandemic forced even ideologically hostile governments to expand state intervention in ways that created new political dependencies, beneficiary expectations, and institutional legacies. The subsequent attempt to manage those legacies for electoral purposes — expanding benefits just before an election while avoiding structural commitments — reflects a mode of political calculation that scholars of populism have theorized but that the COVID era made newly acute. The fact that Bolsonaro ultimately lost the 2022 election to Lula, in part because of dissatisfaction among low-income voters, suggests that the instrumentalization of social programs has its limits as an electoral strategy when economic distress is severe and sustained.
For researchers and practitioners in civil society studies and development policy, the article carries several important methodological and substantive lessons. Analytically, it reinforces the value of process-tracing and attention to institutional detail over aggregate outcome measurement: the story of Bolsa Família's transformation would be partially obscured by looking only at transfer amounts or beneficiary counts, both of which could suggest continuity or even expansion. The deeper story, visible only through examination of administrative architecture, conditionality enforcement, and targeting criteria, is one of programmatic degradation beneath a veneer of generosity. Substantively, the article raises important questions about what makes social protection systems resilient to political disruption — whether the relevant factors are institutional design, civil society monitoring capacity, international norm diffusion, or some combination. These questions are particularly pressing given that Lula's restoration of Bolsa Família following his 2022 electoral victory itself required significant institutional reconstruction, suggesting that the damage wrought by four years of drift was more than cosmetic.
Looking forward, the Brazilian case will likely become a touchstone in debates about the political economy of social protection in emerging democracies. As democratic backsliding and right-wing populism continue to shape governance across multiple regions, the question of how redistributive programs survive — or fail to survive — hostile administrations will become increasingly central to development practice. The findings reported in Latin American Perspectives suggest that researchers and practitioners should attend not only to the fiscal dimensions of social policy, but to the political, administrative, and institutional dimensions that determine whether programs actually deliver what their budgetary existence implies. The reconstruction challenge that Lula faced upon returning to power in 2023 is a vivid illustration of the costs of institutional erosion, costs that fall most heavily on the populations such programs are designed to protect. For scholars of civil society and development, and for international actors engaged in supporting social protection architectures in the Global South, this article provides both empirical grounding and analytical vocabulary for understanding a challenge that shows no signs of diminishing in the years ahead.