Группа авторов

The Politics of Incremental Progressivism


Скачать книгу

of multiple processes and actors.

      A combination of political competition and policy production processes explain São Paulo's incremental trajectory of policy change. Each of these processes alone would probably lead to very different results. The comparative literature suggests that political competition alone may lead to a race to the bottom of clientelist practices (Herrera 2017), while, despite the hopes of many authors, civil society activism alone may produce visible mobilizations but rarely produces policy change without the necessary embeddedness in policy processes (Banaszak 2010; Abers 2019; Gurza Lavalle et al. 2019). On the other hand, the authoritarian experiences in Latin America during the 1960s and 1970s confirm that strong and insulated State actors by themselves may imply technocratic reasoning and bureaucratic capture. It was the combination of these features that led policies in São Paulo toward incremental progressivism.

      Political competition triggered two combined mechanisms that explain the actions and strategies of mayors and other local elite political actors: namely, partisan politics (Hubber and Stephens 2013) and median voter (Meltzer and Richard 1981) mechanisms. However, policies were produced and delivered in processes that involved local agencies, bureaucrats, private contractors and activists in different combinations according to policy. This foregrounds processes and feedback mechanisms not foreseen by traditional policy theories (Kingdom 1984; Sabatier and Jenkins‐Smith 1993) to explain different policy rhythms and resilience. It is worth detailing each of these mechanisms before discussing the actors and processes involved in them in the next section.

      We define redistributive urban policies as those that reduce inequalities in access to services and amenities, improve service quality, and enhance the wellbeing of the poor. Obviously, financial and contributory (or not) features of policies influence their degrees of redistribution, but these go far beyond economic factors alone. Therefore, it is the overall design and functioning of policies that define their redistributive features. In mobility policies, for example, bus fare prices are essential, but the existence of smart cards is even more central since these allow multiple journeys with just a single fare or fares, irrespective of the traveled distance. Likewise, dedicated bus lanes or corridors can reduce the otherwise absurd travel times to segregated poor peripheries. Sometimes expanding services and improving quality are indissociable, but in other cases, these may advance separately or even at the expense of each other.

      The presence of redistributive policies under specific governments clearly challenges classic public choice interpretations (Peterson 1982), which maintained that mayors would systematically seek to promote growth and avoid redistributive policies, in a fortunate convergence with political economy growth machine predictions (Molotch 1976). The lack of choices in local politics, however, has already been confronted by the urban regime and governance typologies that anticipated the existence of several types of regime, including redistributive (Stone 1993; Pierre 2011), depending on the composition of the electorate, local bureaucracies, and political conjunctures.

      The policies we analyze here confirm the relevance of local politics, showing that redistributive policy changes, especially the more conflictive ones, mainly occurred under left‐wing administrations. Also in line with this theory, center governments produced a much lower but intermediary number of redistributive programs, while right‐wing administrations an almost negligible amount. Additionally, to be able to produce and implement these policies, left‐wing governments enlarged State capacities, creating reinforcement mechanisms in favor of these policies, as we discuss later.

      Some redistributive policy changes were more resilient, however, and survived under right‐wing administrations, while others were discontinued or severely reduced. The policies that became a permanent item on the agenda include, for example, public transportation innovations and slum upgrading, while discontinued policies include mainly those initiatives that impact land values, such as active planning, redistributive land use, and social housing for rent. These different trajectories are explained not only by the actors involved but also by the distinct policy processes that produced them.