Social Protection Programs: Elections and Governance Challenges

IntroductionSocial protection programs encompass policies that provide social insurance and social assistance to the population.The main goal of social insurance is to protect people from health, unemployment, and income risks, either through contributory or noncontributory schemes.Social assistance programs are targeted to the poor and vulnerable.Their main role is to prevent house holds from falling into poverty.Social assistance programs include conditional and unconditional cash transfers, childcare, employment guarantee programs, food vouchers, and universal basic income programs.Social programs are a salient topic in political campaigns, where candidates often claim that their opponents will eliminate or curtail existing programs.For example, in Mexico, the opposition candidate in the 2024 presidential elections indicated that the incumbent accuses her of planning to eliminate the social programs in place if she is elected. 1 This partly explains a burgeoning lit er a ture exploring the impact of social programs on electoral results, citizen-state interactions, and other governance challenges such as corruption.Several characteristics of these programs make them particularly relevant po liti cally.First, social assistance programs have broad coverage, particularly of poor voters, encompassing a substantial portion of the electorate.For example, Bolsa Família beneficiaries in Brazil represent 30 percent of the population. 2 Similarly, it is estimated that over 15 percent of adults in India are beneficiaries of NREGA, the employment guarantee program.Second, unlike public goods such as roads or other forms of infrastructure that benefit all house holds in a given constituency, many social protection programs are excludable because they are targeted to individual citizens or house holds.Furthermore, benefits from these programs usually accrue directly to individuals or house holds, often in the form of income.This contrasts with other policy domains or public goods (such as monetary policy, regulation, and infrastructure) whose benefits are often more abstract for individual citizens.As we will discuss later, the targeting of social programs makes them particularly susceptible to clientelistic exploitation and manipulation during elections.