Inequality and Politics in Latin America/social distance among elites

Full text

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Forthcoming, Journal of Politics en español (July 2011)
Inequality and Politics in Latin America
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Merike Blofield
It is well-known that Latin America has the highest inequalities of any region in the world. They
have been an entrenched characteristic since colonization and have remained with democratic
transitions. Over the last ten years, scholars and policy-makers alike began to pay more attention
to them and, at the same time, we saw a slight, much-hailed decline.
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Despite the improvements,
however, socio-economic inequalities remain extremely high by any measure. According to
World Bank data, the gini coefficient in Latin America is 0.52 while it is 0.33 for advanced
industrialized countries. The second most unequal region is sub-Saharan Africa at 0.49, hardly a
propitious development comparison.
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Why do we care about socio-economic inequalities? Aside from intrinsic arguments
based on social justice, high inequalities of opportunity foster social exclusion, reduce the ability
of societies to use their human capital to its fullest potential and enable the wealthy to distort the
market to their advantage. They can also foster crime, violence and political instability. There is
a general recognition among policy-makers, United Nations agencies, the World Bank, and even
the bastions of pro-market liberalism, the International Monetary Fund and The Economist, that
inequalities in the region are too high, and that they have negative economic, social and political
effects.
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Despite two decades of democratic politics and these widely publicized concerns, why
do inequalities remain so high in the region?
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Many factors interact here, including the policy
legacies of the region’s development trajectories, the constraints of a global economy and the
mechanisms by which economic elites have privileged access to policy-makers. In addition to
these mechanisms, “social distance” among elites helps to explain how high inequalities are
perpetuated in the region. I define this sociological concept and then draw on emerging empirical
research on inequality and politics in the region -both my own and that of others- to illuminate
some of the policy consequences of social distance. The challenge for the region is to find
mechanisms to overcome social distance and to balance the interests of the rich and the poor.

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Elite influence in politics
The elite in Latin America are very wealthy in comparison to elites in other regions, and
as a group they have tended to act in ways that reinforce extant inequalities. Alejandro Portes
and Kelly Hoffman measure the class structure in Latin American countries, and find that while
the size of the three dominant classes (the capitalists, professionals and executives) combined is
small, ranging from 5 percent of the population in El Salvador and Brazil, to 9.5 percent in Chile
and 13.9 percent in Venezuela, “all the excess income inequality of the region” is attributable to
the combined income of this group.
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In the advanced industrialized countries, the income share
of the top decile fluctuates between 20 and 30 percent, while in Latin America it ranges from 34
percent in Uruguay to 47.2 percent in Bolivia, with Colombia, Brazil, Chile and Paraguay very
close behind.
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In today’s democracies, the threat of capital flight gives these economic elites significant
structural power and can constrain policy-makers even if they have been elected on redistributive
platforms.
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In addition, more instrumental business strategies such as campaign financing and
lobbying (and corruption which is of course harder to measure) favor the wealthy as they have
the resources to engage in these strategies. These dynamics tend to also perpetuate a self-
reinforcing cycle of absence of enforced regulations on such strategies.
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Given their wealth and
these mechanisms, politicians tend to be more beholden to the economic elite, even if they come
from more humble backgrounds and with redistributive platforms.
Social Distance
These mechanisms explain how elites wield influence to keep redistributive issues off the
political agenda. A less obvious question is why. On the one hand, elite behavior can easily be
explained by a rational actor model: elites tend to act in their own self-interest. On the other
hand, the negative effects of inequalities –on the poor but also on society as a whole and on the
wealthy- have been recognized, and a reduction of these inequalities through government
policies could promote the long-term public good of rich and poor alike. In other contexts elites
have been able to come together and act in more far-sighted and socially “responsible” ways. In
what are today advanced industrialized countries, a critical mass among the political and
economic elites decided a century ago to take responsibility and promote more collective
solutions to the threats they perceived poverty as posing and made concessions to the lower
classes, laying the foundations of the modern welfare state.
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In Latin America, that process has not taken root. The different industrialization paths,
with weaker working classes and more powerful elites, have left distinct policy legacies,
including much higher inequalities, in the region.
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Today, we have a democratic political
context with significant elite influence, and with their influence, the elite have not as a group
promoted social equity. I argue that this is, at least partly, due to the “social distance” between
the elites and the lower classes, which allows the rich to remain detached from the lived reality
of the poor. This social distance fosters behavior based on short term interests and individual
exit options and makes it harder to address collective problems and to promote the public good.
12
This is a concept that is well known in sociology and social psychology, but less familiar
to political scientists. The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology states that “[s]ocial distance is
based on social norms that differentiate individuals and groups on the basis of race/ethnicity, age,
sex, social class, religion, and nationality.”
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It is a broad concept with multiple dimensions, but
the essence is the idea of distance between groups that is not based on biological, geographical or
other such criteria but on social factors.
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In Latin America, because of the entrenched and
enduring inequalities, social distance is particularly salient between different social classes, and
it is reinforced by low levels of intergenerational mobility to and from the elite over time
(although more so from the middle classes).
15
People from different classes, especially from the
elite and the poor (again, to a lesser extent, the middle and formal working classes) live in
different worlds, according to different norms and expectations, with different life opportunities
and with limited interactions with each other. These divides condition their views of each other.
This observation is certainly not original, and many scholars have referred to this same
idea in different terms. CEPAL has referred to “psycho-social divides” between classes,
16
and
Paulo Pinheiro to “democracies without citizenship” .
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Several political scientists have referred
to the “dualist world”
18
that income inequalities have fostered in Latin America, and the
corrosive impact this has on a sense of “common belonging”
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and on “broad and effective
solidarity”.
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This “social distance” could be applied both to the rich and to the poor. However, two
factors make it particularly salient regarding the rich. The first is that the views and behavior of
the rich matter much more for all of society, including and especially the poor, as they are so
powerful. The views and behavior of the poor have a limited impact on the non-poor. Second,
social distance is exacerbated among the elite. The lower classes tend to be constantly exposed to
the lifestyle of the middle and upper classes, through television, which is ubiquitous,
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and
through their jobs, for example as maids in wealthier households. Most of them would likely
wish to participate in the lifestyles they experience vicariously. On the other hand, the well-to-do

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tend to have little concrete experiences of life in the lower classes. An example of this social
distance is reflected in the common refrain of well-to-do Latin Americans: “in Latin America,
everyone has a maid”. This denotes the boundaries of the in-group: the families and social
classes that hire maids, not those that supply them.
Indeed, one of the enduring effects of high inequalities and class divisions over time is to
render the lived experiences and interests of the lower classes less visible. This dynamic is
exacerbated when class interacts with other cleavages such as gender or ethnicity and race, and it
is often the groups of people who are ‘sub-disadvantaged’ within more than one cleavage whose
experiences and interests are rendered most invisible.
I refer to three dynamics that I see social distance as producing among the socio-
economic and also often the political elite, who tend to disproportionately come from the middle
and upper classes as well. First, social distance can lead to misperceptions of and indifference to
the social reality the poor live in. Second, and relatedly, it tends to reduce a sense of solidarity.
This in turn reduces willingness to contribute to solving collective problems, especially if they
involve any sacrifice on the part of the elites. Third, even if sacrifice is not involved, it tends to
foster indifference toward problems that are largely contained among the lower classes. All in
all, these dynamics make it more likely that most elites will resort to private exit options rather
than behave in socially more “responsible” ways to pursue the public good. Social distance, in
essence, exacerbates classic collective action problems.
I illustrate the dynamics produced by social distance by discussing three issues: elite
resistance to contribute through taxation, and lack of policy reform on two issues where the
harmful effects of the status quo are contained among lower class women, paid domestic work
and clandestine abortions, highlighting the interactive effect of class and gender cleavages.
The Policy Consequences of Social Distance
A key mechanism of solidarity on a collective level is progressive income and wealth
taxation that redistributes income from the rich to the poor and funds a modern welfare state.
While surveys reveal that a share of elites in the region recognize that inequalities are a problem
and that something should be done about them, they prefer not to contribute resources
themselves to solving this problem.
An elite survey of five countries in 2008 found that 40 percent of political, economic and
intellectual elites agreed that “the high level of inequality and poverty” in the region is bad for

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the consolidation of democracy.
22
Another survey, again in five countries, found that over 75
percent of intellectual and political leaders and 64 percent of business leaders agreed that “it is
fair to tax the rich to help the poor”.
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When it comes to actually increasing taxes on the wealthy, surveys reveal less support.
Elisa Reis’ study of elites in Brazil in the 1990s found that only nine percent and one percent of
business leaders, respectively, believed that the income and wealth tax should be increased, with
only minimally higher figures for political and intellectual elites.
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In the 2008 elite survey,
business elites were less supportive of taxation on income and wealth than were politicians, labor
unions leaders or intellectuals. As a strategy to fight inequality, a share of business elites agreed
that taxing income and great wealth is important, ranging from around ten percent in Chile to
close to 50 percent in Argentina. When asked more specifically if they support tax increases on
the wealthy, support falls quite dramatically. On increasing taxes on high salaries, figures ranged
from zero percent strong support among Chilean business elites to 21 percent among
Venezuelans, and on taxes on capital and property, again from zero percent support in Chile to
28 percent support in Argentina. On the other hand, strong support for decreasing these taxes
ranged from 22 percent in Brazil, to 36 percent in Argentina, 39 percent in Mexico, 46 percent in
Chile, and 56 percent in Venezuela.
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Of course, that economic elites in general prefer not to be directly taxed is not that
surprising. What stands out is the actual tax burden of the elites in Latin America, which is very
low compared to other regions. The average tax burden in Latin America as a percentage of GDP
in the late 1990s was 16 percent, and only 3.4 percent of GDP came from personal and corporate
income taxes, while the corresponding figure for developed countries was 29 percent and 10
percent of GDP, respectively.
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The direct tax burden has remained low during the 2000s, and
Mahon shows how governments in Latin America have followed the preferences of the elites in
revamping their tax systems, by levying regressive value-added taxes instead of more
progressive direct taxes (on income and wealth), which have the greatest redistributive potential.
While part of the pressure came from the IMF, Mahon argues that with the threat of capital
flight, value-added taxation was also considered an easier option than confronting the economic
elites by increasing or enforcing income and property taxation.
27
Tax evasion among those with resources is rampant as well. Recent estimates for
Argentina, Brazil and Chile place evasion on income tax at about 50 percent and corporate tax at
about 40 percent.
28
Such high levels reveal an unwillingness among those with the resources to

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contribute to do so by following the rule of law, but instead the use of private exit options to
retain wealth for themselves.
In many countries, redistribution takes place less through taxation and more through
spending. However, social expenditures in the region do not redistribute income either. While
public education (except for higher education) and health coverage tend to reach the poor better,
the bulk of social transfer payments (e.g pensions, unemployment insurance) are spent through
contributory systems that privilege higher-income workers in the formal sector.
29
In six major
Latin American countries, the top two income quintiles receive on average 70 percent of the
social insurance expenditures, while the bottom quintile receives only 7 percent. European
countries, on the other hand, spend 16 percent of GDP on transfers, where each quintile receives
about 20 percent of total expenditures.
30
As a result, the gini coefficient in Latin American
countries is on average reduced by only two percent with taxes and transfers, while in European
countries it is reduced by 15 percent, from .46 to about .31.
31
For the lower income quintiles and the vast informal sector, the states in Latin America
tend to provide little risk protection. Almost half of the economically active population in the
region is “excluded from modern capitalist relations and must survive through unregulated work
and direct subsistence activities”.
32
These individuals cannot cope with social risks through their
participation in labor markets or through their access to public goods and services, and are
required to rely a great deal on family and community arrangements, largely shouldered by low
income women.
33
One could argue that it is not social distance that is driving this unwillingness to pay
taxes; rather, the wealthy are willing to contribute but simply do not wish to do so via a state that
they perceive to be corrupt and inefficient. There is certainly legitimacy to this. However, two
factors need to be taken into account. First, corruption especially but also inefficiencies can be
related to social distance. Corruption favors those with resources, and is an individual exit option
used by both political and economic elites and reflects the absence of a sense of civic or social
responsibility. While spending inefficiencies are influenced by many factors, they also harm the
wealthy less than the poor. The question why elites have not collectively demanded more
accountability from the state remains.
Second, if the problem is not social distance, we would expect higher levels of private
philanthropy. Yet, here again the elites in Latin America stand out in comparison to their
counterparts in other regions of the world. In 2007, the rich in Latin America – defined as those
with more than one million dollars in investments alone- devoted only 3 percent of their assets to

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charity, while the figure for their counterparts in the United States and Asia was 12 percent.
While the combined wealth of the Latin American rich since 2007 grew faster than anywhere
else, their stated plans to give to charity in 2010 were lower than among the rich in any other
region of the world.
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Instead, most economic and political elites in the region have tended to opt for individual
and short-term, rather than collective and long-term, solutions to inequality, isolating themselves
in gated communities, private schools, and, when faced with redistributive demands, transferring
their money abroad. With their resources, they have been able to do so.
Social distance can also affect agenda-setting beyond taxation. Misperceptions,
indifference and lack of solidarity among the middle and upper classes, including politicians, can
influence what issues make it to the political agenda and what policies get implemented, even
when they may not involve directly redistributive concerns. For example, while research has
shown that people’s economic achievements in the region are significantly conditioned by their
circumstances, not their choices, thus reducing equality of opportunity,
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there is a tendency
among many elites to see the system as fundamentally fair. In Chile, only 30 percent of business
leaders surveyed agreed that inequality of opportunities and concentration of wealth are one
cause of poverty in Chile. A quote from a politician in Reis’ elite survey in Brazil epitomizes
this tendency: “When one is intelligent and determined, no doubt he or she can overcome
poverty and move ahead”.
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Assuming that the system is more fair than it is can also lead to
support for more punitive rather than preventive policies; Daniel Brinks has argued that lack of
solidarity among the elites fosters more acceptance of police violence against the poor.
37
To be sure, the claims I make require more research. Below, I draw on my own research
to show how social distance among the middle and upper classes, including politicians,
influences the political agenda on two issues. Current policies on reproductive health and on paid
domestic workers have a detrimental effect on the wellbeing of millions of lower class women.
38
However, the effects are contained among this group, making them less visible to the middle and
upper classes, which has prevented reform from making it onto the political agenda in the vast
majority of Latin American countries.
Legal abortion is highly restricted across Latin America, and the common explanation for
its prohibition is that the region is Catholic and therefore both governments and citizens prefer
‘pro-life’ policies. However, the behavior of Latin Americans does not follow Catholic doctrine.
Estimates indicate that about 28 percent of pregnancies in the region, or four million in total, end

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in induced abortion every year.
39
Poor access to contraception and sex education, particularly
through the public sector, contributes to the high rates.
These rates produce public health crises in the region. However, the consequences are
contained almost exclusively among lower-income women, who resort to clandestine abortions
that are often performed by untrained practitioners, forcing hundreds of thousands of women in
the region to annually seek medical attention in hospitals. They are often mistreated by hospital
staff, and in some countries may even end up in prison. Middle and upper class women, on the
other hand, simply require an afternoon off at a private doctor’s clinic to obtain a safe illegal
abortion performed by a qualified practitioner at a high price, and men can, if they choose,
remain completely uninvolved.
Certainly some of the opposition to legalization is religious, but class dynamics play an
important role. A comparison to southern European Catholic countries allows us to control for
religion, level of development and democratic history. Prior to reform in Italy, Spain and
Portugal, tens of thousands of middle class women and men signed petitions and marched in
solidarity with their lower class counterparts, who could not afford safe illegal abortions and
intermittently faced the threat of prosecution, and this social pressure eventually led to reform. In
Europe today, with some exceptions, the practice is legal and highly accessible, and abortion
rates are very low due to comprehensive access to prevention, enhancing the well-being of
especially lower income women. In Latin America, while poor women remain unorganized as
collective actors, the middle and upper classes have chosen private exit options instead and have
not collectively mobilized on the issue, leaving it to small groups of feminists with little social
backing. Even leftist politicians with an ostensible commitment to equity sense little urgency. A
comment by a Socialist senator in Chile to explain the lack of pressure for reform despite the
ubiquity of the procedure reflects the social distance between the elites and lower classes: “In
Chile, everyone knows a doctor”. Many of his constituents rely on unsafe methods and untrained
individuals, not doctors. This lack of cross-class solidarity and mobilization has then allowed a
conservative Catholic Church and its allies to dominate the debate, and frame abortion as simply
a moral-criminal issue while also restricting access to family planning.
The case of domestic workers perhaps best exemplifies the concept of social distance
despite physical proximity. Paid domestic work involves one-third of the households in the
region as either full-time employers or workers. These workers are regulated by discriminatory
labor codes. In most countries, their workdays range from twelve to sixteen hours a day, with
often weekends as well. For example, in Guatemala, they legally receive only six hours off per
week, in effect reducing a 14-hour workday to eight hours on Sunday. In several countries they

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are legally obligated to behave in a “subordinate” way. In Argentina they are explicitly excluded
from maternity leave in an occupation made up overwhelmingly of women.
These laws explicitly contradict international treaties and national constitutions. For
example, in Mexico the constitution mandates an eight-hour workday, yet domestic workers are
only required to be given enough time off to “eat and rest at night”. Also, enforcement of extant
rights is weak and domestic workers are much more likely than other workers not to have social
security. The state has in effect subsidized a cheap labor force and assured that the worker is
constantly available to serve the needs of her employers. This has made it extremely hard for this
group of workers to develop their private lives and to attend to their own, often extensive family
responsibilities.
Politicians have been disinclined to push for reform, as the status quo is comfortable for
the middle and upper classes. There is a tendency to see reform as unnecessary or not urgent,
which helps explain why it has so rarely made it to the political agenda. Often, elites draw on
personal examples, noting that they treat their maids “like family” and hence legal reform is
unnecessary and disruptive. In Peru, a female legislator noted that “[T]oday abuses no longer
exist.” While most employers are probably not abusive, the problem is that for those who are, the
laws often back them up.
In the minority of cases where reform has actually made it to a congressional debate,
most politicians do not openly argue against equal rights. It is these instances of open debate,
however, that allow us to see the public articulation of opposition that usually tends to remain
private and behind closed doors. This opposition reflects a deep social distance among the elites
from the lived reality of domestic workers. In Bolivia, a male senator argued that domestic
workers, unlike other workers such as miners who really needed to rest, were not in need of
legislated vacation time. In Costa Rica, a key female legislator argued that it was acceptable to
retain a longer workday for domestic workers because they watched soap operas during the
workday. The Guatemalan Constitutional Court denied equal work hours because domestic work
is not “continuous work”. A male Senator in Uruguay, also in opposition to equal work hours,
stated that “the nature of domestic work is distinct to other kinds of work, such as in commerce
or industry” because of “rest, interruptions, moments of distraction”, and a Peruvian male
legislator remarked that employers’ houses “are not hotels”. Leaving aside the issue of how
much effort cooking, cleaning and caring for dependents may or may not be in comparison to
other occupations, these comments ignore the needs of these women for time off from their work
place for their own lives and their own often extensive family responsibilities.

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On the other hand, the difficulties in organizing this sector in particular, due to the
isolated nature of domestic work and the fact that workers are employed by individual
employers, as well as the long work hours, make it harder to mobilize and pressure for reform.
Only in four countries –Bolivia, Uruguay, Costa Rica and Colombia- have the rights of domestic
workers been equalized with other workers.
The Regionwide Reaction: Redistribution Takes Center Stage
Social distance can be an effect as well as a cause, of course. Top-down reforms tend to
take place only once collective organization among the lower classes presents a powerful
counterweight to the interests of the elites. Can we expect elites to take notice of domestic
workers’ needs until they walk off their jobs to go protest? In Europe, the working classes
eventually organized into labor unions and leftwing political parties, which helped to place
redistributive platforms onto the political agenda once universal suffrage was instituted.
40
The
effects of equity-enhancing reforms tend to reduce social distance over time. While it is not my
desire to overly glorify a continent that underwent two world wars in the last century, in Europe
today we have a virtuous cycle of continued support for redistribution and equal opportunities
through government policies.
In Latin America, the informal sector has virtually no structural power, and has lacked
the collective organization to bring more programmatic platforms onto the political agenda.
However, public opinion surveys show that the majority of Latin Americans have become
increasingly unhappy with the status quo of high inequalities, even if these views tend to be
unstable.
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Indeed, over the past decade we have witnessed a regionwide reaction to these
inequalities, as leftwing governments for whom equity has been a primary concern have been
voted into office. This shift has not been driven by elites but rather by the political articulation of
dissatisfaction among the lower classes. Fernando Filgueira and his co-authors argue that a set of
specific advances over the last two decades –enduring electoral democracy, democratization at
the subnational level, urbanization, education and access to new communications technology
with its impact on exposure to patterns of consumption- have made “the failure in the
democratization of opportunities, income and assets…all the more salient”. The authors chart out
varied responses to this “incorporation crisis”, as they call it, from ‘radical populist’
governments such as those of Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador, to ‘social democrat’ governments
such as those of Brazil, Uruguay and Chile (until 2010).
42
While it is likely that the careful
policies of the latter will promote more social equity over the long term than the more

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confrontational policies of the former, a political balance between the rich and the poor has been
hard to strike.
At the same time, many Latin American governments, on the right and left, have
instituted some top-down reforms to address high rates of poverty and the inadequate
contributory insurance systems, the most prominent being conditional cash transfer (CCT)
programs targeted to the poor.
43
These programs, along with other factors, including returns to
higher labor skills, have reduced poverty from 44 percent of the population in 2002 to 32 percent
by 2010, while inequalities declined slightly as well.
44
These CCT programs have been politically relatively easy; to move beyond them and to
build on this “redistributive momentum” requires a broader tax base and redirection of current
expenditures to the poor, and this is likely to face more obstacles given, as López-Calva and
Lustig note, the “entrenched power of the elites”.
45
Given that their structural power is hard to
reduce without their co-operation, the next step will require overcoming social distance among a
critical mass of elites to forge a sustained commitment to collective solutions and to
disincentivize individual exit options. CEPAL has called for a social contract, “to be drawn up
and affirmed by key societal representatives at meetings convened by the national
government…. Its key pillar would be a “fiscal covenant,” which would begin with an
acknowledgement of governments’ right to collect taxes and an agreement on the level of
taxation appropriate to the country’s social needs and economic capacity”.
46
This requires
leadership from key economic and political elites. Of course, it also requires a commitment from
all sectors of society, and some willingness to put aside narrow self-interests by some labor
market insiders especially, but none of these sectors can be expected to work for the public good
if they do not perceive the elites to be willing to take the lead on making sacrifices of their own.
The next step also requires making the lived reality of the poor more politically visible by
promoting collective organization among them, especially the multiply disadvantaged groups
such as domestic workers, and bringing their interests to the political agenda.
The country that has come closest to confronting this political challenge and to finding a
political and economic balance between the rich and the poor is Uruguay during the last five
years of the leftwing Frente Amplio government. The government instituted a progressive
income tax and has promoted, in Filgueira’s words, “basic universalism”.
47
It has even equalized
the rights of domestic workers, and has come closest as a country to the legalization of abortion
in democratic Latin America (Congress approved reform but the executive vetoed it). This poses
the question: is it a coincidence that this country has the lowest income inequalities in the region
to begin with? Were the policies possible because of lower social distance between economic

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and political elites and the poor? What might be the windows of opportunity to convince the
middle and upper classes in other countries to allow and even push for more equity?
While an appeal to solidarity and the long-term public good may work for some, a more
powerful motivator may be fear and self-interest. The fear of disease, violence and rebellion
helped motivate European elites to come together to lay the foundations of modern welfare
states. Today, the one way that elites in the region do feel touched by the poor is in their fear of
crime and violence. The elites in Reis’ survey found crime and violence to be by far the worst
consequences of poverty and inequality. Framing the need for redistribution as a policy strategy
to reduce crime could make the elites more willing to pay.
48
In addition, many governments have
reasonably raised the expectations of the poor with more leftwing platforms and policies. Not
meeting these expectations even partially could lead to political instability detrimental to the
elites as well. A quote from Bolivia’s Vice-President, Alvaro García Linera, is indicative: “From
a strategic point of view, the most privileged sectors would understand that the best way to
preserve part of their privileges is to cede part of their privileges. But when they are not willing
to cede a part of these privileges, what that does is generate a pressure that’s more and more
adverse to them, with the risk that it could affect all their privileges”.
49
Leaving aside an
assessment of whether Bolivia’s current policies will promote equity in the long term, this
reasoning prompted changes in elite behavior in many countries that today are more equitable.
1
I would like to thank Felipe Agüero, Matthias Dietrich, Juan Pablo Luna and Jennifer Pribble
for insightful comments and, for intellectual inspiration, Elisa P. Reis and her works.
2
See Luis F. López-Calva and Nora Lustig, editors, 2010, Declining Inequality in Latin America:
A Decade of Progress? Baltimore: Brookings Institution Press and the United Nations
Development Programme.
3
See Francisco H. G. Ferreira, and Martin Ravallion, 2008, “Global Poverty and Inequality: A
Review of the Evidence”, Policy Research Working Paper 4623, Washington DC: The World
Bank Development Research Group.
4
CEPAL/ECLAC, 1997, La brecha de la equidad: América Latina, el Caribe y la Cumbre
Social, Santiago: United Nations, CEPAL/ECLAC; International Monetary Fund, 2007, World
Economic Outlook: Globalization and Inequality, Washington, DC: IMF; United Nations
Development Programme, 2004, Report on Democracy in Latin America: Towards a Citizens’

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Democracy; United Nations: UNDP; David de Ferranti, Guillermo E. Perry, and Francisco
Ferreira, 2004, Inequality in Latin America and the Caribbean: Breaking with History?
Washington, D.C.: World Bank; Inter-American Development Bank, 2008, Outsiders? The
Changing Patterns of Exclusion in Latin America and the Caribbean, Washington, D.C.: IADB;
The Economist, “A Special Report on Latin America”, September 9, 2010.
5
For an overview, see Nancy Bermeo, 2009, “Does Electoral Democracy Boost Economic
Equality?” Journal of Democracy 20 (4):21-35; various authors, 2009, “Symposium on
Inequality and Politics in Developing Countries’, PS Political Science and Politics 42 (4): 629-
672.
6
Alejandro Portes and Kelly Hoffman, 2003, “Latin American Class Structures: Their
Composition and Change during the Neoliberal Era”, Latin American Research Review 38(3):
52-59.
7
United Nations Human Development Report, 2007-2008.
8
See Carles Boix, 2003, Democracy and Redistribution, Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University
Press; and Daniela Campello, 2011, “The Politics of Redistribution in Less Developed
Democracies: Evidence from Brazil, Ecuador, and Venezuela”, in Merike Blofield, editor, The
Great Gap: The Politics of Inequality and Redistribution in Latin America, University Park, PA:
Pennsylvania State University Press.
9
See for example Mauricio Bugarin, Adriana Portugal and Sergio Sakurai, 2011, “Inequality and
Cost of Electoral Campaigns”, in The Great Gap; Tasha Fairfield, 2010, “Business Power and
Tax Reform: Taxing Income and Profits in Chile and Argentina”, Latin American Politics and
Society, 52 (2): 37-71; Benn Ross Schneider, 2004, Business Politics and the State in Twentieth-
Century Latin America, Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press; Kurt Weyland, 1998,
“The Politics of Corruption in Latin America," Journal of Democracy 9.2: 108-121; and Daniel
Zovatto, “Dinero y Política en Latinoamérica”, Biblioteca Jurídica Virtual del Instituto de
Investigaciones Jurídicas de la UNAM, at http://www.bibliojuridica.org/libros/6/2734/17.pdf.
10
See Abram De Swaan, 1988, In Care of the State, London: Polity Press; Elisa P. Reis, 2011,
“Elite Perceptions of Poverty and Inequality in Brazil”, in The Great Gap.

14
11
See Ruth Berins Collier and David Collier, 2001, Shaping the Political Arena, Notre Dame,
In: Notre Dame University Press; Fernando Fajnzylber, 1990, Unavoidable Industrial
Restructuring in Latin America, Durham, NC: Duke University Press; Gary Gereffi and Donald
L. Wyman, editors, 1990, Manufacturing Miracles: Paths of Industrialization in Latin America
and East Asia, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press; Dietrich Rueschemeyer, Evelyne
Huber Stephens, and John D. Stephens, 1992, Capitalist Development and Democracy, Chicago,
Il: University of Chicago Press.
12
Albert Hirschman, 1970, Exit, Voice and Loyalty, Harvard University Press; Guillermo
O’Donnell, 1994, “Delegative Democracy”, Journal of Democracy 5 (4): 55-69; and Elisa P.
Reis, 1998, “Banfield’s Amoral Familism Revisited: Implications of High Inequality Structures
for Civil Society”, in Jeffrey Alexander (ed.) Real Civil Societies, London: Sage, pp 21-39, and
2011, have discussed similar dynamics.
13
Joyce E. Williams, 2007, "Social Distance", in George Ritzer, editor, Blackwell Encyclopedia
of Sociology, Blackwell Publishing.
14
See Nedim Karakayali, 2009, “Social Distance and Affective Relations”, Sociological Forum
24:3, 538-562.
15
Alejandro Gavíria, 2006, “Movilidad social y preferencias por redistribución en América
Latina.” Documento CEDE 2006-03, Universidad de los Andes, Colombia; IADB 2008.
16
CEPAL, 2007, Panorama Social de América Latina, p.20.
17
Paulo Sergio Pinheiro, 1996, “Democracies Without Citizenship”, NACLA Report of the
Americas 30 (2): 17-23.
18
Terry Lynn Karl, 2000, “Economic Inequality and Democratic Instability”, Journal of
Democracy 11(1), p.153.

15
19
Carlos M. Vilas, 1997, “Participation, Inequality, and the Whereabouts of Democracy,” in The
New Politics of Inequality in Latin America, edited by Douglas Chalmers et. al., New York:
Oxford University Press, p.23.
20
Guillermo O’Donnell, 2004, “Human Development, Human Rights, and Democracy,” in The
Quality of Democracy, edited by Guillermo O’Donnell et.al., Notre Dame, Indiana: University of
Notre Dame Press, p.55.
21
See Fernandro Filgueira et. al, 2011, “Shallow States, Deep Inequalities and the Limits of
Conservative Modernization”, and Sallie Hughes and Paola Prado, 2011, “Media Diversity and
Social Inequality in Latin America”, both in The Great Gap.
22
See Denilde Holzhacker, 2010”, Observatory on Inequality in Latin America Working Paper
#28, Center for Latin American Studies, University of Miami.
23
University of Miami/ Zogby Latin American Elite Poll, 2003. Thanks to Benjamin G. Bishin
for sharing the data.
24
See Reis, 2011.
25
2008 survey by the Center for Research in International Relations at the University of São
Paulo. Thanks to Rafael Villa and Denilde Holzhacker for sharing these data.
26
de Ferranti et.al., p.252. Brazil has a tax burden at over 30 percent, although half of the revenue
comes from taxes on goods and services.
27
See James Mahon, 2011, “Tax Reforms and Income Distribution in Latin America”, in The
Great Gap.
28
Edwin Goñi, J. Humberto López, and Luis Servén, 2008, “Fiscal Redistribution and Income
Inequality in Latin America”, Policy Research Working Paper 4487, The World Bank
Development Research Group, p.12.
29
See for example Alberto Díaz-Cayeros and Beatriz Magaloni, 2010, “La Ayuda para los
Pobres de América Latina”, Journal of Democracy en Español 2 (July): 185-200; Evelyne
Huber, Jennifer Pribble, and John D. Stephens, 2009, “The Politics of Effective and Sustainable
Redistribution,” in Stuck in the Middle: Is Fiscal Policy Failing the Middle Class?, edited by

16
Antonio Estache and Danny Leipziger, 155-188.,Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press;
Wendy Hunter and Natasha Borges Sugiyama, “Democracy and Social Policy in Brazil”, Latin
American Politics and Society (2009): 51 (2): 29-58; K. Lindert, E. Skoufias and J. Shapiro,
2006, Redistributing Income to the Poor and the Rich, Washington: World Bank.
30
Goñi et. al., pp.18-19
31
Ibid., pp.5-6.
32
Portes and Hoffman, 2003, p. 53.
33
Juliana Martínez Franzoni and Koen Voorend, 2011, “Are Coalitions Equally Important for
Redistribution in Latin America?”, in The Great Gap.
34
The “World Wealth Report 2010'' by Capgemini and Merrill Lynch, quoted by Andrés
Oppenheimer, “Latin America’s Rich Could Be More Generous”, The Miami Herald, June 26,
2010.
35
See for example Anna Crespo and Francisco Ferreira, 2011, “Inequality of Opportunity in
Latin America”, in The Great Gap; IADB 2008; de Ferranti et.al., 2004.
36
See Reis, 2011.
37
Daniel M. Brinks, 2010, “Violencia de Estado a Treinta Años de la Democracia en América
Latina”, Journal of Democracy en Español 2 (July): 10-27; See also Pinheiro 1996.
38
The discussion draws on Merike Blofield, 2006, The Politics of Moral Sin: Abortion and
Divorce in Spain, Chile and Argentina, New York: Routlege; Blofield, 2008, “Women’s Choices
in Comparative Perspective: Abortion Policies In Late-developing Catholic Countries”,
Comparative Politics 41(4): 399-419; Blofield, 2009, “Feudal Enclaves and Political Reforms:
Domestic Workers’ Rights in Latin America”, Latin American Research Review 44 (1): 158-190;
and Blofield, forthcoming, Class, gender and the State: Domestic Workers’ Struggle for Equal
Rights in Latin America, University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press.
39
Alan Guttmacher Institute, 2008, “Facts on Induced Abortion Worldwide: In Brief”, October.
40
Rueschemeyer et. al.,1992.

17
41
See Blofield and Juan Pablo Luna on the World Values Survey, 2011, “Public Opinion on
Income Inequalities in Latin America”, in The Great Gap. See also the Americas Barometer and
the Latinobarómetro.
42
Filgueira et.al., 2011; see also Kenneth D. Roberts, “Repoliticizing Latin America”, Woodrow
Wilson Center Update on the Americas, November 2007; Kurt Weyland, editor, 2010, Leftist
Governments in Latin America, Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press.
43
See Díaz-Cayeros and Magaloni, 2010.
44
CEPAL, 2010; López-Calva and Lustig, 2010.
45
López-Calva and Lustig, 2010, p.19.
46
Quote from Mahon, 2011. See CEPAL, 2006, La protección social de cara al futuro.
47
Filgueira, 2011.
48
See Juan Méndez, Guillermo O’Donnell and Paulo Pinheiro, 1999, The (Un)Rule of Law and
the Underprivileged, Lynne Rienner; and Jana Morgan and Nathan J. Kelly, “Explaining Public
Attitudes Toward Fighting Inequality in Latin America”, Poverty and Public Policy 2 (3): 79-
111.
49
Laura Carlsen, 2007, “Bolivia—Coming to Terms with Diversity”, Americas Policy Program
Special Report, November 16.