Knowledge of Social Rights and Access to Social Programs: Evidence from Brazil

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Speaker: Rebecca Weitz-Shapiro, Associate Professor of Political Science, Brown University
Moderated by: Steve Levitsky, Professor of Government, Harvard University; Director of the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies

Even as many middle-income democracies today promise generous social welfare benefits to their citizens, actual access to these programs and benefits remains highly uneven. What explains why some citizens actually receive the benefits for which they are eligible while others do not? In this paper, we use qualitative and quantitative data from Brazil to develop and test the theory that variation in individual knowledge of social rights can explain variation in access to government social programs.

Rebecca Weitz-Shapiro is Associate Professor of Political Science at Brown University. Her research explores the politics of accountability and the quality of representation and democracy in lower and middle income countries, with a particular focus on Latin America. She has published articles in the American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, Comparative Political Studies, and elsewhere, and her book, "Curbing Clientelism in Argentina" was published by Cambridge University Press in 2014. Her current research includes a book project on citizen access to social welfare programs, as well as other projects that explore forms of bureaucratic oversight and politician credit claiming.

Steven Levitsky is the Director of the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard University. As the David Rockefeller Professor of Latin American Studies and Professor of Government, his research focuses on democratization, authoritarianism, political parties, and weak and informal institutions. He is author (with Daniel Ziblatt) of How Democracies Die (Crown, 2018), a New York Times Best-Seller that has been published in 25 languages, Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes after the Cold War (with Lucan Way) (Cambridge, 2010), and Transforming Labor-Based Parties in Latin America: Argentine Peronism in Comparative Perspective (Cambridge, 2003), and co -editor of Informal Institutions and Democracy in Latin America (with Gretchen Helmke) and The Resurgence of the Latin American Left (with Kenneth Roberts). He has written frequently for the New York Times, Foreign Affairs, Vox, The New Republic, The Monkey Cage, La República (Peru) and Folha de São Paulo (Brazil). He is currently writing a book (with Lucan Way) on the durability of revolutionary regimes. Levitsky received his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley.

Presented in collaboration with Weatherhead Center for International Affairs