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Partisanship and Protest: The Politics of Workfare Distribution in Argentina

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 October 2022

Rebecca Weitz-Shapiro
Rebecca Weitz-Shapiro*
Affiliation:
Columbia University
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Abstract

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The Argentine workfare program known as the “Trabajar” program shared many characteristics with other targeted social welfare programs implemented in Latin America in the 1990s, including being subject to accusations that program funds were misused for political gain. This paper tests existing hypotheses concerning the political manipulation of public spending using data from two phases of the program and a measure of fund allocation that improves on that employed in previous analyses of the program. It finds that partisan criteria most often cited in the literature affected distribution under one administration only. It further demonstrates that political protest had a differential impact on the distribution of program funds across time and suggests some reasons for this.

Resumen

Resumen

El programa argentino de empleo transitorio—Plan Trabajar—compartió muchas características con otros programas sociales implementados en América Latina durante los años 90, incluyendo acusaciones sobre el mal uso de los fondos debido a razones políticas. El presente artículo evalúa hipótesis existentes sobre la manipulación política de fondos públicos utilizando datos correspondientes a dos fases del Plan Trabajar, junto con una medida de distribución de fondos que ha sido mejorada con respecto a las medidas utilizadas en previos análisis de los planes. El artículo concluye que los criterios partidarios más citados en la literatura afectaron la distribución únicamente durante una administración. Adicionalmente, muestra que la protesta política tuvo un impacto distinto durante diferentes períodos y sugiere algunas razones para explicar dicha variación.

Type
Research Article
Information
Latin American Research Review , Volume 41 , Issue 3 , October 2006 , pp. 122 - 148
Copyright
Copyright © 2006 by the University of Texas Press

Footnotes

1.

I would like to thank Valeria Brusco, David Epstein, Macartan Humphreys, Mark P. Jones, Robert Kaufman, Ozge Kemahlioglu, Carmen Le Foulon, María Victoria Murillo, Alfred Stepan, Matthew Winters, and three anonymous reviewers for comments on earlier drafts. Ernesto Calvo, Polly Jones, Georgia Kernell, Eduardo Leoni, Germán Lodola, and Julia Maskivker aided with helpful comments, conversations, and data. The National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship provided support. All remaining errors are my own.

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