The Left’s Reasoning

The left, for its part, had justifiable reasons to be wary of CCTs when they first appeared. The 1980s debt crisis and subsequent market reforms strongly advocated by IFIs resulted in an overhaul of the region’s develop-ment model. Reforms led to significant cuts in social spending and, ulti-mately, to sharp increases in poverty and inequality (Huber 1996). The Washington Consensus called for governments to scale back their social policy ambitions and focus instead on the neediest sectors (Williamson 1990), a difficult proposition for the left to accept given its preference for universalistic policies and commitment to reducing inequality. Simply put, means- tested anti- poverty programs were not the left’s preferred approach to social policy.

Although regressive in that it largely excluded those outside the formal labor market, the “Latin American model” (Haggard and Kaufman 2008) of social protection pursued prior to market reform embodied universalistic aspirations. Such policies were inspired by Southern European welfare regimes in which social insurance benefits are linked to the employment of a (male) breadwinner (Esping- Andersen 1990; Barrientos and Santibáñez 2009). The architects of these policies had assumed that, as the region mod-ernized, agricultural and informal workers would be absorbed into indus-try and, therefore, qualify for the full range of contributory benefits (Lo Vuolo 2008). However, the import substitution industrialization (ISI) strat-egy pursued during the period from the 1940s through the 1970s failed to create the number of jobs needed to achieve near- universal coverage. Fur-thermore, the 1980s debt crisis and subsequent dismantling of ISI and the downsizing of public bureaucracies in the 1980s increased the share of the population employed in the informal sector and thus excluded from tradi-tional social policy.

Concerns over the growing social crisis and the threat it constituted to their popularity prompted governments throughout the region, with sup-port from IFIs, to experiment with targeted anti- poverty programs. The first generation of these programs, so- called emergency social funds, financed small- scale economic development projects proposed by commu-nities. These programs, however, largely bypassed the poorest communities (Huber 2005; Siri 2000; Tendler 2000). Furthermore, there was widespread evidence from across the region that governments distributed these funds clientelistically (Graham 1992; Molinar and Weldon 1994; Roberts 1995;

Bruhn 1996; Graham and Kane 1998; Schady 2000; Díaz- Cayeros, Estévez, and Magaloni 2016).

Evelyne Huber (1996, 181), one of the foremost authorities on the rela-tionship between the left and social policy, captures the Latin American left’s concerns:

Caution has to be exercised lest they [targeted programs] become mere pal-liatives. Such programmes can be very helpful, as long as they do not detract from the basic task of building permanent universalistic programmes and institutions. The danger is that such programmes lead to a diversion of resources and to duplication because of the creation of new institutions to administer them. . . . A second danger is that such programmes, by virtue of

being targeted, increase the discretion of political leaders and bureaucrats with regard to the allocation of resources and thus the incentives for patron-age and corruption.

In this context, marked by a recognition of the need to boost the incomes of the poor and the failure of social funds, technocrats in Mexico and Cen-tral America began implementing CCTs at the national level in the late 1990s. Led by the IDB and the World Bank, IFIs wholeheartedly embraced and promoted this new policy. From the left’s perspective, CCTs were just another technocrat- designed, IFI- backed policy aimed at doing just enough to defuse popular mobilization in favor of redistribution (Teichman 2008).

Furthermore, the left feared that the right and center would manipulate the new programs in order to remain in power.

Moreover, the left’s initial antipathy toward cash transfers was not a uniquely Latin American phenomenon. Prominent left wingers derided South Africa’s cash transfer programs for being “neoliberal” attempts at

“providing ‘talk left’ ideological cover for . . . ‘walk right’ policies” by the ruling African National Congress (Barchiesi 2011; Bond 2014; Ferguson 2015, 28).

In sum, the left’s objections can be categorized based on three criteria:

(1) programmatic opposition to narrow targeting and concern that CCTs would detract from the construction of universal policies, (2) concerns that CCTs would be used clientelistically as was the case with earlier programs, and (3) association of CCTs with right- wing governments and IFIs.

2.4 Conclusions

This chapter problematized and challenged the prevailing conventional wisdom regarding the relationship between government ideology and CCT adoption. Past research has found that, although the diffusion of CCTs across Latin America coincided with the left turn, CCT adoption was unre-lated to the left turn and presidential ideology more broadly. Granted, it is true that during the 2000s these programs were adopted by presidents of all ideological stripes. And, as past research and the statistical analysis con-ducted in this chapter show, left- wing governments were no more likely to adopt these programs than their centrist and right- wing counterparts (Díaz- Cayeros and Magaloni 2009; Sugiyama 2011). However, a deeper

analysis of the political debates surrounding CCT adoption in six countries across the region reveals that left- wing politicians had serious doubts about these programs and many even opposed them outright. The left initially opposed CCTs in Mexico and Brazil, the two countries most associated with CCTs. Even in Bolivia and Argentina, two countries where left- wing presidents ultimately adopted national- level programs, those leaders were late converts responding to proposals issued by rivals from other parties.

Left- leaning leaders in Nicaragua and Venezuela went so far as to dismantle existing programs upon taking office.

This surprising finding seemingly runs counter to PRT, the dominant explanation of social policy development in Latin America (Segura- Ubiergo 2007; Haggard and Kaufman 2008; Huber and Stephens 2012). The left opposed CCTs’ narrow targeting of beneficiaries, worried that they would foster clientelism, and was generally unwilling to support policies backed by right- leaning governments and multilateral banks, the very actors that years earlier had pushed for Washington Consensus market reforms. From the left’s perspective at the turn of the century, CCTs carried the stench of neoliberalism.

In short, presidential ideology influenced the spread of CCTs, though not in a straightforward or mechanical manner. Given the left’s initial atti-tude toward CCTs, the left turn might well have put a brake on their diffu-sion. But the story did not end there. The proven effectiveness and political popularity of CCTs gradually won over left- wing leaders. The Brazilian experience under Lula marked a major turning point in this regard. Origi-nally dismissive of the CCTs he inherited, Lula embraced them following the failure of his ambitious Fome Zero (Zero Hunger) program. Charis-matic, popular, and widely respected, Lula went on to sell the rest of the Latin American left on the benefits of CCTs.

The next chapter analyzes how Lula went from being skeptical toward CCTs to becoming one of their most vocal advocates.

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