Managing CCTs in Brazil 2001 to 2017: Power, Agents, and Reputations

In this paper, we analyse the effects of alternations in power on CCTs in Brazil from 2001-2017. Our central argument is that the instrument constituency that promotes and advocates for CCTs, plays play an important role in explaining this policy’s development and continuity. We examine how these policy actors behave/respond to various types of alternations of power, and the policy consequences of their reactions. The paper’s central claim is that although the main factors of interest that condition the coalition dynamics of CCTs change with each alternation of power, this specific policy has, in contrast to other programs and policies in Brazil, been relatively consistent across administrations. Why? Our central goal is to explain this continuity beyond the mainstream institutional analyses that stress the standard policy feedbacks literature emphasizing the self-reinforcing effects of policy (Hacker 1998; Myles and Pierson 2001). We suggest that there are common operating processes in Brazilian politics, in particular at the bureaucratic level, that promote, protect, and defend CCTs as a policy instrument from elite and mass level politics, generating self-reinforcing policy effects that have been highly understudied. Based on reputation theory (Carpenter 2001; 2002;2010), we suggest that it is because certain actors and institutions in Brazil have come to exist by and for this policy instrument, that they must strike a balance between responding to new demand pressures, and protecting their reputations via the instrument’s refinement, by articulating solutions that provide agency to the “supply-push” of the instrument itself (Voss and Simmons 2014).