Uneven Social Policies

Sara Niedzwiecki is Assistant Professor of Politics at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her research on the politics of social policy and on the territorial structure of government has been published in Comparative Political Studies, Latin American Politics and Society, Studies in Comparative International Development, Electoral Studies, International Political Science Review, and elsewhere. She is co-author of Measuring Regional Authority: A Postfunctionalist Theory of Governance (2016).

• 1. Social policies and politics in decentralized countries; 2. Implementing social policies: attribution of responsibility, political alignments, policy legacies, and territorial infrastructure; 3. Mixed methods and multilevel research design; 4. Subnational statistical analysis; 5. Conditional cash transfers in Argentina and Brazil; 6. Healthcare policies in Argentina and Brazil; 7. Social policy implementation: looking back and forward.

'Two giant federal states - Argentina and Brazil - legislated national programs for conditional cash transfers and primary health care benefits recently. But why are they implemented in such radically uneven ways? This book provides a surprising, complex set of answers and shows the crucial importance of 'credit claiming' in the subnational space.' Stephan Leibfried, Universität Bremen, Germany