The new politics of welfare: towards an “emerging markets” welfare state regime
This research project aims to identify a new welfare regime in emerging market economies and explain why
it has emerged. The project will compare Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Mexico, South Africa and Turkey
to test two hypotheses: (i) emerging market economies are forming a new welfare regime that differs from
liberal, corporatist and social democratic welfare regimes of the global north on the basis of extensive and
decommodifying social assistance programmes, (ii) the new welfare regime emerges principally as a
response to the growing political power of the poor as a dual source of threat and support for governments.
Based on a comparative and interdisciplinary perspective, the project follows a multi-method strategy that
combines state-of-the-art computer-based protest event data collection techniques, macro-historical methods,
quantitative data analyses and qualitative content analysis. The project will radically expand the literatures
on welfare regimes, welfare state development and contentious politics, by challenging the existing
paradigms dominated by structuralist perspectives, a myopic focus on Western countries, and limited data
collection and analysis techniques. This project is genuinely innovative, unprecedented, ground-breaking,
ambitious and high-risk/high-gain in three ways: (i) it re-shapes the welfare regimes literatures as the first
study to classify and explain welfare systems of emerging markets as a new welfare regime and (ii) the
project demonstrates a causal link between changes in grassroots politics and welfare policies and challenge
the structuralist preponderance in the existing welfare state development literature (iii) it makes a prodigious
contribution to our empirical knowledge on contentious politics in emerging markets by creating the first
cross-national databases on protest event, employing state-of-the art computer methods, such as natural
language processing and machine learning, on newspaper archives.