Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs
Brazil Initiative

Cheol-Sung Lee -Embeddedness and Welfare States: A Network Approach to Social Policy Expansion and Retrenchment in Developing Countries

Thursday, March 12, 2015

12:00pm – 1:30pm

McKinney Conference Room, Watson Institute, 111 Thayer Street.

Professor Lee explores how leaders of labor and civic organizations in Brazil and elsewhere mobilize and institutionalize divergent repertoires of social solidarity regarding social policy agendas, and how they channel those policy agendas into state institutions through the politics of threat and persuasion. He develops a society-based explanatory model of the welfare state, in which labor-civic solidarity and union-party alliance jointly account for outcomes of welfare state retrenchment as well as welfare state expansion.