EmergingWelfare · 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 whyit has emerged. The project will compare Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Mexico, South Africa and Turkeyto test two hypotheses: (i) emerging market economies are forming a new welfare regime that differs fromliberal, corporatist and social democratic welfare regimes of the global north on the basis of extensive anddecommodifying social assistance programmes, (ii) the new welfare regime emerges principally as aresponse 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 thatcombines 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 literatureson welfare regimes, welfare state development and contentious politics, by challenging the existingparadigms dominated by structuralist perspectives, a myopic focus on Western countries, and limited datacollection 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 firststudy to classify and explain welfare systems of emerging markets as a new welfare regime and (ii) theproject demonstrates a causal link between changes in grassroots politics and welfare policies and challengethe structuralist preponderance in the existing welfare state development literature (iii) it makes a prodigiouscontribution to our empirical knowledge on contentious politics in emerging markets by creating the firstcross-national databases on protest event, employing state-of-the art computer methods, such as naturallanguage processing and machine learning, on newspaper archives.