Call for Abstracts

Social Policy Implementation in Latin America and Southern Europe: Failures, Breakthroughs and Challenges in the provision of Social Protection

Deadline for abstracts: Friday 29^th March

Editors: Gibrán Cruz-Martínez (Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain), Theodoros Papadopoulos (University of Bath, United Kingdom), Viviana Ramírez (Universidad de las Américas Puebla, Mexico) and Ricardo Velázquez Leyer (Universidad Iberoamericana, Mexico)

Description: 

Out of all the different stages commonly considered to form the policy cycle, social policy implementation is the one that appears to have received less attention in both the academic and political domains. This neglect of implementation dynamics is visible across the globe, and saliently in the welfare regimes of Latin America (LA) and Southern Europe (SE). There has been a tendency among actors engaged in social policy making -e.g. elected politicians, civil servants, NGO-related policy advocates, civil society representatives, journalists, analysts and academics - to focus more on social policy agenda setting and the formal aspect of policy design and less on the role of operational measures in carrying out social policy interventions. Multiple reasons may explain this limited attention to social policy implementation: difficulties in researching what are often severe limitations in the institutional or political capacity to plan, mobilize and manage the resources necessary to undertake social policy interventions; or challenges in empirically investigating policy choices motivated by the self-interest of socio-political actors who seek to influence the strategic orientation of social policies for their own political gains. Alternatively, it may be explained with reference to political actors’ ambitions to present the enactment of social policy legislation as success; or, conversely, with political strategies and practices of ‘blame avoidance’ in the face of political losses due to partial or failed policy adoption. In short, with respect to researching social policies in LA and SE, we can identify a relative reluctance to engage with the complexity of their operational dimension. Yet, implementation represents, politically and administratively, the most crucial step in any policy process. It is the most complex of the policy cycle stages, especially considering the number of actors participating in it and the number of people impacted by it. Without implementation, social policy interventions are limited to the realm of political symbolism and discourse, whether oral or written, with very little tangible impact on the lives of citizens. It is at the implementation stage where the full rationale of social policies and their governance are revealed, where the hardest battles for policy success are fought, and where they are lost or won.

This call for abstracts is for a special issue of the Journal of International and Comparative Social Policy that will gather new and groundbreaking research on social policy implementation into countries in Latin America and Southern Europe. For the purposes of this special issue Latin America (LA) is defined as the Spanish speaking nations of the Americas plus Brazil; while Southern Europe (SE) as the original four southern European Union member states (namely, Italy, Greece, Portugal and Spain). 

The reason for this choice relates to the central role that politico-economic and historico-institutional legacies play in our comparative frame of analysis. In particular, we maintain that aside several unavoidable differences that exist between and within each region, the remarkable similarities shared by many of their countries share render them a very attractive set of cases for comparative research on policy implementation, both theoretically and empirically. Indeed, despite their geographical distance, LA and SE - traditionally positioned as political economies in the semi-periphery of Western capitalism - share strong legacies of political authoritarianism combined with long histories of residual state-corporatism, politicized state bureaucracies and extensive practices of political clientelism and patronage; to mention but a few. Moreover, with respect to their welfare regimes almost invariably they were characterized historically by the predominance of social insurance systems (albeit with limited coverage), chronically restricted state capacity and resources in the field of social policy (both in terms of service provision and income redistribution) and strong familistic arrangements with respect of social reproduction, dominated by patriarchally gendered division of labour in the households. 

Against this background, our call is for academic articles that will contribute to the theorization, conceptualization and empirical investigation of social policy implementation in Latin America (LA) and Southern Europe (SE).

More specifically, but not exclusively, we call for abstracts of articles focusing on social policy implementation, with following characteristics:

• Studies of historical institutionalist explanations of the variegated legacies of top-down and bottom-up implementation processes in LA and SE.
• Single and comparative case studies that delve into the causes of successes and failures of policy implementation, both at national and sub-national domains.
• Research on the design, adoption and outcomes of professionalizing services and introducing new operational practices.
• Studies on social policy clientelism, its impact on public policy outputs and outcomes, and best practices undertaken to minimize it.
• The role of street-level bureaucrats in implementing public policies in LA and SE, especially empirical studies in their relationships with citizens and policy beneficiaries and their potential impact on policy outputs and outcomes.
• Studies of the organizational capacity and resources of civil society organizations to engage in the implementation and evaluation of social policy.
• Research on how membership of the European Union has shaped policy implementation in SE and how it explains similarities and differences within the region and in relation to LA.
• Studies of social policy co-production and policy learning through processes of bottom-up policy implementation.

Practical Information: 

Your proposal should consist of an abstract (300 words) and a brief biographical note (100 words per author). Please submit abstracts to viviana.ramirez@udlap.mx, by 29^th March 2024. If accepted, full 8,000-word drafts will be due by 16^th December 2024. This special issue is planned for publication in late 2025.