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In recent decades, developing and middle-income countries around the globe have adopted path-breaking reforms to their social protection systems. Latin America has been a pioneer region, expanding the state’s commitment on behalf of low-income citizens in key policy areas in many countries. This paper undertakes two tasks. First, it documents the surprising extension of noncontributory social protection policies across many Latin American countries, highlighting how tax-financed programs have come to play a central role in a variety of settings. Second, it examines citizen-level preferences that support this trend, arguing that employment vulnerability and threats to income continuity play a decisive role in shaping demand for public, rather than private, social protection. Survey data on labor-market risks and social policy preferences from eighteen countries corroborate these claims. Our findings suggest that other countries undergoing labor-market strains may experience similar demands for a “return of the state” as a guarantor of social protection in the coming years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What explains the recent rise in non-contributory social insurance programmes in Latin America? Since the 1990s, Latin American countries have enacted significant social policy reforms that have supplemented contributory insurance policies with new or expanded non-contributory programmes, financed by general tax revenues. We present a political explanation for this phenomenon, arguing that the process of deindustrialization, and especially the increased labour insecurity that it entails, has changed the mix of social insurance policies favoured by different individuals in the income and employment distributions. A long-term increase in economic insecurity has increased the relative demand for tax-financed, rather than contribution-financed, social insurance. Elected officials, especially those in the recent ‘rise of the Left’ in Latin America, have proved eager to meet these demands. We find strong evidence for this argument using both cross-national data on non-contributory pension policy adoption and individual-level data on policy preferences. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]