by Viviana Ramírez and Ricardo Velázquez Leyer
In our recent article published in Policy & Politics, we investigated The impact of self-reinforcing and self-undermining policy feedback on Mexican social policy: the end of the conditional cash transfer programme.
Conditional cash transfers, or ‘CCTs’, constituted the backbone of Mexico’s poverty reduction policy for more than twenty years. CCTs provided cash benefits targeted at poor people, conditional on the compliance of certain requirements, like school attendance by children and participation in health promotion activities and check-ups by all family members. The objective of CCTs was to fight poverty through the formation of human capital. The approach was a social policy investment seeking to mould the behaviour of beneficiaries in desirable ways.
Cash transfers were commonly paid to the mother of the family, to secure an adequate use of the additional income within the household. CCTs were pioneered in Mexico, the first country to introduce them at the national level, becoming the backbone of anti-poverty policy for more than two decades. Maintained and expanded by three federal governments of different political parties, the policy reached almost a quarter of the population and yielded significant improvements across many health, education and nutrition indicators, prompting its diffusion around the globe. The stability and positive results of CCTs might have presaged their continuity, but the government that came to power in December 2018, swiftly dismantled them with virtually no opposition.
The termination of CCTs in Mexico presents an interesting challenge for current theories on policy development. In our P&P article, we explore the reasons why the CCT programme was cancelled from the perspective of its beneficiaries –whose support for a policy is argued to be one of the most important sources of its stability and continuity. Our analysis draws on recent advances in historical institutionalism and policy feedback theory. We aimed to identify and compare the self-reinforcing mechanisms that foster policy continuity, as well as the self-undermining mechanisms that enable policy change, which according to current theoretical understanding, can be generated by each policy’s own design and implementation. Our analysis was based on primary data from interviews with women who were registered to receive CCTs, and who generously agreed to share with us their experience as beneficiaries.
In the article, we show that CCTs did generate strong self-reinforcing effects derived from the services and cash transfers they delivered, which recipients highly appreciated and felt sorry to have lost, and which were not compensated by any new social programmes created by the government. However, we also found powerful self-undermining effects which were unforeseen by the CCTs’ formulators. These unintended self-undermining mechanisms derived from the ‘hard’ approach in the design and implementation of conditionalities, which triggered severe punitive sanctions in case of noncompliance. The need to meet the programme’s conditionalities represented high material, time and relational costs for women beneficiaries. Particularly relevant were recurrent tensions with street-level bureaucrats in charge of providing the services, to whom the programme’s design gave great discretional powers in overseeing compliance of the conditions. Self-undermining mechanisms that resulted from these ‘hard’ conditionalities counterbalanced the self-reinforcing effects produced by the programme’s benefits, obstructed the interpretation of the programme as a social right, and ended up generating a sense of apathy towards its continuation or termination. (We propose the concept of policy apathy to refer to cases when a policy’s benefits are cancelled out by its unintended costs, fostering indifference towards its continuation).
Our research offers important lessons for policy scholars and practitioners interested in social policy and the fight against poverty. If behavioural conditionalities are included in an anti-poverty policy, their strict or hard design and implementation may obstruct the formation of policy feedback necessary to promote policy continuity, even in the presence of positive results. Politicians and public officials must heed the voices of beneficiaries, who in many occasions belong to the most vulnerable social groups, and make necessary adjustments, in order to guarantee the continuity of policies that have the potential to improve the welfare of citizens.
You can read the original research in Policy & Politics at
Ramírez, V., & Velázquez Leyer, R. (2023). The impact of self-reinforcing and self-undermining policy feedback on Mexican social policy: the end of the conditional cash transfer programme. Policy & Politics, 51(3), 508-529 from https://doi.org/10.1332/030557321X16813697853773
If you enjoyed this blog post, you may also be interested to read:
Crabtree, D., & Wehde, W. (2023). Examining policy feedback effects from COVID-19 on social welfare support: developing an outcome distance dimension. Policy & Politics, 51(1), 156-179 from https://doi.org/10.1332/030557321X16684225165558
Sewerin, S., Cashore, B., & Howlett, M. (2022). New pathways to paradigm change in public policy: combining insights from policy design, mix and feedback. Policy & Politics, 50(3), 442-459 from https://doi.org/10.1332/030557321X16528864819376
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