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Introduction
Sara Niedzwiecki is an assistant professor of Politics at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She received her PhD in Political Science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She studies the process through which social policies are formed and implemented as well as the territorial structure of government in Latin America.
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Publications
Publications (48)
Los primeros años del siglo XXI fueron un período de expansión de la política social en América Latina. Se crearon nuevos programas en salud, jubilaciones y pensiones, y asistencia social, y se incorporaron grupos previamente excluidos de las políticas existentes. ¿Cuál fue el carácter de esta expansión de la política social? ¿Por qué experimentó l...
This handbook surveys knowledge from all six of the planet’s continuously inhabited continents to understand how governments and related institutions have attempted to advance human development and improve social outcomes over the past several decades. The current state of knowledge about the social welfare sphere is robust, but explorers of its tw...
The literature on social policy expansion and retrenchment in Latin America is vast, but scholars differ in how they explain outcomes, arriving at different conclusions about the role of democracy, left parties, favorable economic conditions, and social movements. What can welfare state developments since the end of the commodity boom teach us abou...
The Subnational Research (SNR) and Multilevel Governance (MLG) research programs have tackled some of the crucial questions in comparative politics. Despite their shared principle that actors and institutions located at one territorial level are shaped by and shape other levels of government, each tradition has developed its own set of concepts and...
This paper explains the incidence of language regions and their effect on regional authority. It conjectures a chain of mechanisms beginning with the physical and political barriers to human interaction and culminating with contemporary patterns of regional authority. Using data on 1767 regions in 95 countries, it finds causal power in the claim th...
When Democracies Deliver: Governance Reform in Latin America. By Katherine Bersch. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. 236p. $100.00 cloth. - Movement-Driven Development: The Politics of Health and Democracy in Brazil. By Christopher L. Gibson. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2019. 328p. $90.00 cloth, $30.00 paper. - Volume 18 Iss...
Bolivia and Brazil have universalized their pension and healthcare systems, respectively. Civil society organizations participated actively in social policy expansion, yet they have done so in starkly different ways, reflecting general patterns in each country. Whereas in Brazil, popular participation in social policies takes place through “inside”...
¿Un Imán de Bienestar en el Sur? de Koen Voorend estudia dos preguntas fundamentales: ¿En qué medida el sistema de salud pública costarricense atrae a la inmigración nicaragüense?, ¿es esta migración la responsable por el deterioro de los servicios sociales? La respuesta a ambas preguntas, según Voorend, es negativa: personas nicaragüenses no migra...
Cambridge Core - Comparative Politics - Uneven Social Policies - by Sara Niedzwiecki
El principal hecho político en Argentina durante 2017 fue el triunfo del gobierno de Cambiemos en las elecciones de medio término. Ese resultado fue favorecido por la estrategia del gobierno de administrar la dinámica intertemporal del ajuste económico. Antes de las elecciones, el gobierno difirió medidas y llevó adelante una política económica que...
This paper presents a new dataset on regional authority in 27 Latin American and Caribbean countries for 1950–2010 based on the Regional Authority Index (RAI), which makes it possible to compare regional authority over time and across regions. We explain conceptualization, operationalization, and coding decisions with the aim of making judgments ex...
This article provides an overview of the profound changes in the more advanced welfare states in Europe and Latin America over the past 35 years. Deindustrialization, informalization, and the rise of unstable employment, combined with aging populations rendered traditional employment-based models of social protection less effective and at the same...
Social Policies and Center-Right Governments in Argentina and Chile—ERRATUM - Sara Niedzwiecki, Jennifer Pribble
This symposium Regional Authority and the Postfunctionalist Theory of Governance engages two recent books on regional governance. The first sets out a measure of regional authority for 81 countries in North America, Europe, Latin America, Asia and the Pacific between 1950 and 2010. The second theorizes how regional governance is shaped by functiona...
Previous literature on the consequences of decentralization has demonstrated a positive effect on voter participation in subnational elections. However, does this positive effect also extend to national level elections? This paper evaluates the consequences of decentralization-level political participation. Our approach innovates by disaggregating...
Mixed-Methods Research in the Study of Welfare States - Volume 50 Issue 4 - Sara Niedzwiecki, David Nunnally
Latin America's “left turn” expanded cash transfers and public services, contributing to lower poverty and inequality. Recently, right-leaning candidates and parties have begun to win back seats in the legislature, and in some cases have captured the executive branch. This shift has sparked debate about the future of Latin America's welfare states....
Latin America's “left turn” expanded cash transfers and public services, contributing to lower poverty and inequality. Recently, right-leaning candidates and parties have begun to win back seats in the legislature, and in some cases have captured the executive branch. This shift has sparked debate about the future of Latin America's welfare states....
The 2015 national, subnational, executive and legislative elections marked a turning point for Argentina's democratic history. For the first time, a non-Peronist centre-right coalition won the presidency. These elections also inaugurated the first non-Peronist governor of the Province of Buenos Aires in almost 30 years. This article tries to make s...
Chapter Three aims to elucidate the decisions from indicator to observation and provides a hands-on guide to the coding scheme. The regional authority index (RAI) breaks down authority into self-rule—authority exercised within the territory of the region, and shared rule—authority co-exercised within the country as a whole, each of which is measure...
Ana Lorena De La O , Crafting Policies to End Poverty in Latin America: The Quiet Transformation. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Figures, tables, bibliography, index, 194 pp.; hardcover $84.99, ebook $68. - Volume 58 Issue 2 - Sara Niedzwiecki
This article assesses how the political context shapes policy implementation in decentralized countries. It finds that effective implementation of non-contributory social policies depends on political alignments across different territorial levels. Subnational units governed by the opposition hinder the implementation of national policies, but only...
This paper studies the effect of organized labor on social policy commitment in Latin America. Contrary to the idea that unions are not expected to be major promoters of social state development due to being weakened by dictatorship and structural adjustment, I argue for the incorporation of this variable in statistical analysis of social spending....
The state remains the most important political unit of the modern world. In the most recent phase of globalization the role and position of the state has changed, but after a short intermezzo in which nothing less than the “end of the state” was frequently proclaimed, the social sciences have reached consensus about the ongoing centrality of states...
This article shows how modified European power resources theories can be applied to Latin America to explain differences in the depth of policy reforms. It innovates on previous work on Latin American social policy by particularly examining the effect of unions and other civil society groups on the process of structural reforms (or lack thereof) in...
This article analyzes theories of institutional trust in Haiti and the Dominican Republic, two developing countries that have shared some historical legacies but currently manifest divergent economic and political trajectories. The evidence confirms that conventional theories emphasizing participation and government performance help us understand i...
This paper uses a new dataset on regional governance in eighty countries since 1950 to understand its transformation from uniform to differentiated governance. The classic model of governance within the state conceives a series of uniform, nested tiers. The model is uniform, elegant, and reaffirms the fundamental notion that states impose the same...
Dieser Beitrag analysiert den Ausbau der Sozialpolitik, welcher aktuell in den am weitesten entwickelten Ländern Lateinamerikas und Ostasiens zu beobachten ist. In den letzten drei Jahrzehnten begünstigten verschiedene wirtschaftliche Entwicklungen den Ausbau sozialpolitischer Instrumente und Leistungen. Das Politikerbe aus vorherigen Zeiten beeinf...
This paper presents a new dataset on regional authority in 27 Latin American and Caribbean countries for 1950 to 2010 based on the Regional Authority Index (RAI). For the first time, levels of regional authority can be directly compared over time and across the region. We explain the conceptualization, operationalization, and coding of regional aut...
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