Partisanship and Protest: The Politics of Workfare Distribution in Argentina

Abstract

The Argentine workfare program known as the "Trabajar" program shared many characteristics with other targeted social welfare programs implemented in Latin America in the 1990s, including being subject to accusations that program funds were misused for political gain. This paper tests existing hypotheses concerning the political manipulation of public spending using data from two phases of the program and a measure of fund allocation that improves on that employed in previous analyses of the program. It finds that partisan criteria most often cited in the literature affected distribution under one administration only. It further demonstrates that political protest had a differential impact on the distribution of program funds across time and suggests some reasons for this.