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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]

Drawing on recent work and data on social protection in the developing world, this essay evaluates the current state of the art and suggests several important new lines of research. We first examine the historical origin and evolution of social protection systems in developing countries, arguing that insufficient attention has been paid to the authoritarian roots of developing nations' social policy. As a preliminary effort to remedy this shortcoming in the literature, we offer a political logic for the observed variation in the character of institutions of social policy established by nondemocratic regimes. Next, we explore recent research examining linkages between models of economic development and welfare regimes in developing countries. Finally, we turn to the study of the political determinants of the social policy reforms that occurred in the final decades of the twentieth century, arguing that variation in reform across policy areas has been more complex than is generally appreciated in the literature. To explain this variation, we develop a theory that identifies the political coalitions supporting different policy outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]