A new book co-written by a U of I expert who studies development and governance explores the “state-centric persistence” of poor citizens of the Global South in their individual pursuit of benefits from government-run social welfare programs such as public healthcare and early childhood education services.
Middle- and low-income democracies in South America have expanded their welfare states, but the implementation of those new government-run social programs could be characterized as uneven at best, and some citizens who are entitled to the benefits of those programs are missing out due to the bureaucratic maze they encounter, said Matthew S. Winters, a professor of political science at Illinois.
The book, “Persistent Citizens: Pursuing Social Welfare Benefits in Brazil and Argentina,” was co-written by Winters and Rebecca Weitz-Shapiro, a professor of political science at Brown University.
The scholars were curious about what distinguished citizens in South America who ultimately gained access to government benefits from those who missed out.
“My co-author and I wrote some well-known articles about people’s reactions to political corruption and, in those studies, we found different patterns based on how politically sophisticated people were,” Winters said. “That led us to think about people’s knowledge of their social rights and what that knowledge means for how people interact with their government, which led us to this book project.”
Through research in Brazil and Argentina, the scholars arrived at the concept of “persistent citizens.”
“The idea is that people often need to go back to the same government office and need to overcome the obstacles in their way and just keep pushing through bureaucratic roadblocks,” Winters said. “The citizens who did that were ultimately more successful in securing the benefits they were entitled to. The book is mostly about who those people are and the characteristics that make them more persistent.”
The book, which was published by Cambridge University Press, is the culmination of a decade’s worth of work from conception to publication. It started with extensive focus group interviews.
“In Brazil, we did them in two cities, and we structured them around healthcare and early childhood education,” said Winters, a faculty affiliate of the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at Illinois. “In Argentina, they were all focused on healthcare. There were about a dozen to 15 people in each one, with eight groups per country. All told, what we learned in those groups was just fascinating.”
The scholars identified a shared set of psychological characteristics among individuals who were more likely to “persist” in their quest to obtain government benefits.
“People who perceived that they were entitled to the government program were more likely to persist. People who were likely to become indignant or have justified anger when they were told ‘no,’ that they’re not getting what they think they’re supposed to get, those people were more likely to persist. And then people with a high degree of self-efficacy who thought they’re capable when it comes to engaging with the government bureaucracy, we found that they also persisted,” Winters said.
The people who were not successful in accessing government benefits typically lacked those characteristics, Winters noted.
“We found that those characteristics predicted persistence even when we accounted for people’s education level, and we were mostly looking at poor people,” he said. “But even if we distinguished the truly destitute from people who we might describe as working class, those psychological characteristics still predicted beyond those income gradations. They predicted beyond gender. We still saw that those psychological factors of entitlement, indignation and self-efficacy mattered when it came to advocating for oneself and what people were owed from the governments.”
Another characteristic that those citizens shared was that they were informed about their social rights, Winters said.
“We started off by thinking about people’s knowledge of their social rights, and that led us to think, if those people are familiar with their social rights, how will they behave? How would they go about pursuing the fulfillment of those rights? And that was what we structured the focus groups around. They had the knowledge that the Brazilian constitution explicitly guarantees a right to education and to healthcare, and that the Argentine constitution does so implicitly. The key was just being persistent in advocating for oneself in the face of government bureaucracy.”
The stories that the focus group participants told and their variety of experiences were surprising to the researchers.
“We heard less about corruption and the value of personal connections than we thought we would,” Winters said. “When we prompted the participants about those issues, they would start telling stories. But that kind of low-level corruption wasn’t at the forefront of people’s minds.”
Very few participants talked about protesting against the government, Winters said.
“Participants never brought that up spontaneously, but eventually we had a section in the focus groups where we would nudge them a little bit on what they would do if the government wasn’t providing these things,” he said. “Would you try to get a group together? They said they could do that, but their preference seemed to be addressing their problems in individual ways rather than through collective action.”
Winters is the director of the Center for East Asian and Pacific Studies and a faculty affiliate of the Center for Global Studies, the Lemann Center for Brazilian Studies, the Center for the Study of Global Gender Equity, the Center for African Studies, the Program in Arms Control and Domestic and International Security, and the Center for Social & Behavioral Science Institute at Illinois.
