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The Distributive Politics of Emergency Employment Programs in Argentina (1993–2002)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 September 2022

Agustina Giraudy
Agustina Giraudy*
Affiliation:
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
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Abstract

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During the 1990s, the Argentine federal government dramatically increased the number of workfare programs targeted to the unemployed. The distribution of employment programs, however, varied across provinces. Previous studies suggest that this uneven distribution has taken place because politicians have not distributed programs according to formal eligibility criteria, but rather, in a clientelistic manner to entice voters' support.

I conduct a balanced pooled time series analysis for twenty-four provinces for the period 1993–2002 and find that partisanship, institutional features of the Argentine federal system, social mobilization, and economic factors strongly determine the way in which presidents have distributed employment programs. The results challenge the assumption that these programs have been exclusively used as clientelistic handouts to buy people's votes, and point to the necessity of looking at institutional, social, and economic variables to better understand the criteria used by federal politicians to distribute means-tested programs.

Resumo

Resumo

Durante los años noventa, el gobierno nacional argentino ha incrementado en forma dramática el número de programas destinado a la población desempleada. Sin embargo, la distribución de estos programas ha variado de provincia en provincia. Diversos estudios señalan que esta distribución desigual ha sido posible debido a que los funcionarios no han distribuido los programas de acuerdo a criterios formales de idoneidad, sino más bien, de forma clientelar para obtener el respaldo de los votantes. Utilizando una serie temporal para 24 provincias durante el período 1993–2002, este artículo demuestra que el color partidario, los aspectos institucionales del federalismo argentino, la movilización social, y ciertos factores económicos han determinado la forma en que los presidentes han distribuido dichos programas de empleo. Los resultados que se presentan cuestionan el presupuesto según el cual estos programas se han utilizado exclusivamente como moneda de cambio para comprar votos, y señalan la importancia de incorporar variables institucionales, sociales y económicas para entender de forma más acabada el criterio con el cual los funcionarios nacionales distribuyen programas focalizados.

Type
Research Article
Information
Latin American Research Review , Volume 42 , Issue 2 , June 2007 , pp. 33 - 55
Copyright
Copyright © 2007 by the University of Texas Press

Footnotes

1.

I thank Jonathan Hartlyn, Evelyne Huber, and John Stephens for their support and advice during different stages of this paper. I am also grateful to Ryan Bakker, Ernesto Calvo, Mireya Dávila, Juan Pablo Luna, Jennifer Pribble, Inés Valdez, and three anonymous reviewers, all of whom provided excellent comments to earlier versions of this article.

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