Explaining The Adoption Of Care Policies In Latin America: A Care Streams Approach

Care policies can provide women economic independence, increase their participation in the public sphere of society, and reduce class, gender, race, and ethnic inequalities. In recent decades, socioeconomic transformations in women’s status in society, demography, and the structure of families have placed these policies at the centre of academic and political debates around the world. Most of the literature examining these dynamics concentrates on advanced economies, with developed welfare states, and large state and fiscal capacities to respond to changes in labour markets and families. In the developing world, Latin America has been a region that stands out for having experienced rapid socioeconomic and political transformations similar to those in the developed world. Women have been increasingly participating in the labour force, countries are experiencing demographic shifts, and the traditional male breadwinner model has eroded. In the first decades of the twenty-first century, political transformations placed an emphasis on expanding social benefits and entitlements to wider segments of the population. Amongst this expansion, care policies have featured prominently on the agendas of governments. This thesis aims to answer the following question: how do Latin American countries adopt care policies? The literature focuses on four main approaches to explain the adoption of these policies. The economic approach assumes that socioeconomic transformations place pressure on states to adopt care policies. The civil society approach explains that women’s movements or interest groups pressure the state or influence policymakers to adopt these policies. The power resource approach assumes that parties from left/centre-left ideologies and/or high electoral competition contexts are conducive to the adoption of care policies. Finally, the state-centric approach examines the role of women in legislatures, women’s agencies, and bureaucrats/technocrats/femocrats in influencing the adoption processes within the state ...