Political Science
Document Type
Article
Abstract
Chile’s massive 2019 protests indicate a pronounced discrepancy between the country’s alleged establishment of social democracy and the public’s perception of pervasive inequity. To understand this discrepancy, this analysis evaluates the extent to which Chilean social welfare policy conforms to social democratic norms of promoting solidarity, equity, and universalism. Analysis of poverty reduction, pension, health care, and education policy demonstrates that Chile’s center-left governments succeeded in mitigating some of the more extreme elements of the social welfare policies inherited from the Pinochet regime. However, they failed to reverse their underlying logic, which reinforces stratification and inequity and undermines incentives for the cultivation of solidarity among the working and middle classes. As a result, social welfare policy in Chile continues to resemble the neoliberal welfare regime implemented by the Pinochet dictatorship while the establishment of a social democratic welfare regime remains an aspiration for present and future leftist governments to realize. © The Author(s) 2023.
The available download on this page is the author manuscript accepted for publication. This version has undergone full peer review but has not been through the copyediting, typesetting, pagination and proofreading process.
Publication Title
Critical Sociology
Publication Date
2023
ISSN
0896-9205
DOI
10.1177/08969205231209424
Keywords
Chile, neoliberalism, social democracy, social welfare policy
Repository Citation
Posner, Paul W., "Social Welfare Policy in Post-Transition Chile: Social Democratic or Neoliberal?" (2023). Political Science. 8.
https://commons.clarku.edu/faculty_political_science/8
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
Copyright Conditions
Published source must be acknowledged with citation: Posner, P. W. (2023). Social Welfare Policy in Post-Transition Chile: Social Democratic or Neoliberal?. Critical Sociology, 08969205231209424.
Upon publication, must link to publisher version with DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/08969205231209424
