MEASURING THE INDIVIDUAL-LEVEL DETERMINANTS OF SOCIAL INSURANCE PREFERENCES.

This studi/ employs an original, nationally representative survey of citizens in Argentina to understand the economic and political factors that shape individual-level preferences for social insurance. In the past two decades, Latin American democracies have undergone significant changes in their social welfare institutions, in some cases dramatically reversing course from previous policies. We develop a theoretical framework to explain how and when citizens shift their preferences for competing social policy proposals. We emphasize the role of dissatisfaction with prevailing policies in creating political opportunities for the introduction of sweeping reforms. Our survey capitalizes on the 2008 pension reform in Argentina to test competing hypotheses regarding preferences for different policies of old-age insurance. We find that dissatisfaction with existing private policies increases individual-level support for policy reform across all citizens, whereas partisanship has a more restricted effect, shaping preferences only among middle- and low-income respondents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]