Democratization and social expenditure in Latin America, 1980--1994

This dissertation investigates the impact of democracy over social spending---controlling for economic and demographic variables---through a times-series cross-sectional data set for seventeen Latin American countries between 1980 and 1994. The central question relates to the consequences of democratization over the share of social spending in the composition of the public budget, its budgetary priority, in a period of economic crisis and adjustment.;To answer this question, I relied on the literature about political regimes and regime transitions to formulated four hypotheses. The first hypothesis takes the effects of political regimes as clear-cut; it expects democracies to be positively associated with the budgetary priority of social spending. The other three hypotheses emphasized particular situations of the first years of new democratic governments and regime transitions.;The results show that democracies had a positive impact over the budgetary priority of social spending, a finding that held up to a battery of checks. Moreover, if one defines democratization as a process of regime transition, the effects between types of political regimes are even larger. Regime transitions are a specific moment in which the higher political uncertainty that permeates strategic interaction between political actors overrides general characteristics of each type of political regime, particularly by leading transitional authoritarian incumbents to give a greater priority to social spending. By not taking the effects of regime transition into account, therefore, one may underestimate the difference between types of political regime.;I employed the same hypothesis to examine the effects of democratization over the budgetary priority of spending on the three most important social programs: Education, Health, and Social Security. Results showed that democratization would increase the budgetary priority of spending on Education and Health, but not on Social Security.