Recrafting Social Contracts: Welfare Reform in Latin America, East Asia and Central Europe

本项目的目的是解释在中等收入发展中国家和前社会主义国家的社会保险（特别是养恤金和医疗保险）和社会服务（基础教育和保健服务）改革中的独特模式。该项目的主要组成部分有三个：（1）对全球和区域发展中国家和前社会主义国家的社会支出进行定量分析;（2）对1980年至今的社会政策改革进行详细的比较案例分析，重点是对三个区域的案例进行抽样分析;（3）在联邦和分权制度的样本中建立一个关于社会支出的新数据集。 对福利国家的起源、扩张和变化性质的研究是发达工业国家比较政治学的核心支柱。对发展中国家社会福利政治的分析是最近才出现的。该项目将经合组织文献的理论见解扩展到中等收入国家的样本。研究者考虑并修正了一些核心假设，包括全球化的影响，政权类型和其他制度因素，发展中国家和前社会主义国家的情况。 该项目的中心理论方向是考虑社会福利模式如何补充三个区域更广泛的发展战略：一些亚洲国家的出口导向型增长、拉丁美洲的进口替代和东欧的国家社会主义。研究人员研究了这些模式的转变或崩溃是如何在社会政策改革方面产生政治冲突的，以及在这个问题上的党派冲突是如何反过来影响改革道路的。亚洲：韩国、马来西亚、菲律宾、新加坡、台湾、泰国;中欧：保加利亚、捷克共和国、匈牙利、波兰、斯洛伐克和斯洛文尼亚。 就更广泛的社会价值而言，关于社会政策的适当设计的辩论显然是一个非常重要的辩论，其目标之一是促进关于政策设计的辩论。此外，该项目的数据集将被置于公共领域，用于学术、研究和非商业目的，从而促进对社会政策和权力下放的研究。

The objective of this project is to explain distinctive patterns in the reform of social insurance (particularly pensions and health insurance) and social services (basic education and health services) in a sample of middle-income developing and formerly socialist countries. The main components of the project are three: 1) quantitative analysis of social spending in global and regional samples of developing and formerly socialist countries; 2) detailed comparative case analysis of social policy reform in the period from 1980 to the present for a focused sample of cases1 from the three regions; and 3) construction of a new data set on social spending in a sample of federal and decentralized systems. The study of the origin, expansion and changing nature of the welfare state is a central pillar of the comparative politics of the advanced industrial states. Analysis of the politics of social welfare in developing countries is much more recent. This project extends the theoretical insights of the literature on the OECD to a sample of middle-income countries. The researchers consider and modify a number of core hypotheses in this literature, including the effects of globalization, regime type and other institutional factors, to the developing and formerly-socialist country context. The central theoretical orientation of the project is to consider how social welfare models were complementary to broader development strategies in the three regions: export-oriented growth in some Asian countries, import-substitution in Latin America and state socialism in Eastern Europe. The researchers examine how the transformation or collapse of these models has generated political conflict around social policy reform, and how partisan conflict over the issue has in turn influenced the reform path. The cases considered in greater depth are: in Latin America, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Mexico, Peru, Uruguay and Venezuela; in Asia, Korea, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Taiwan, Thailand; in Central Europe, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia. For broader social value, the debate over the appropriate design of social policy is clearly a very important one, and one objective is to contribute to the debate about policy design. In addition, the data sets from this project will be put in the public domain for academic, research, and non-commercial purposes and thus facilitate research on social policy and decentralization.