Countries in the Global South experienced a massive increase in immigration in the past decade, with more migrants ending up there than in the Global North. Within South America, over seven million Venezuelans have left their country since 2015, leading to an extraordinary scale of intraregional migration. During these same years, and due to the expansion of social programs, millions of citizens in the region accessed basic income and better-quality healthcare, many for the first time. This talk studies these dual trends and analyzes whether social policies effectively incorporate immigrants. Failing to provide newcomers with a basic standard of living produces social exclusion. It shows that immigrants have more impediments to accessing the welfare state than citizens, even for universal public health, but especially for targeted social assistance. This derives from a combination of political elites’ views around the degree to which immigrants “deserve” access to different types of policies. The research focuses on the barriers that immigrants face to accessing social policy in middle-income South American countries with high rates of immigration—Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Colombia. Barriers to access are measured through qualitative coding of social assistance, social pensions, and public healthcare that build on legal documents, information requests, and secondary literature from 1990 to 2023, and public officials’ views are measured through in-depth interviews. In analyzing barriers to accessing social policy, this study contributes to the literatures on comparative welfare states and immigration, as well as comparative social policy in middle income countries.

Sara Niedzwiecki is Associate Professor of Politics at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She studies social policy, subnational politics, and immigration in Latin America. Sara is the author of Uneven Social Policies: The Politics of Subnational Variation in Latin America (2018, Cambridge University Press), which was awarded LASA's Donna Lee Van Cott Book Award from The Political Institutions Section and the International Public Policy Association's IPPA Book Award. She also co-authored Measuring Regional Authority: A Postfunctionalist Theory of Governance (Oxford University Press, 2016). Sara has authored and co-authored articles in Comparative Political Studies, Electoral Studies, Latin American Politics and Society, Studies in Comparative International Development, Regional and Federal Studies, PS: Political Science and Politics, International Political Science Review, among other peer-reviewed journals. During 2020-2021 academic year, Sara was a fellow at the University of Notre Dame’s Kellogg Institute for International Studies where she worked on a new project on social policy and immigration in South America. Website: saraniedzwiecki.com

If you cannot attend in person, it is possible to follow the lecture via Zoom:
https://uni-bremen.zoom-x.de/j/63621789671?pwd=dbHcT1eGhCg7ONxCB3pEQR5EQKRkSt.1…
Meeting-ID: 636 2178 9671 Passcode: 452328

PEW offers a platform to discuss early/unpublished papers that investigate the political economy, broadly construed, of social policy and inequality, with the ambition to bring together researchers at the SOCIUM and beyond, across methodological divides and with varying levels of experience.

The workshop format is as follows: Authors briefly introduce the background of the paper (1-2 minutes), a discussant shortly summarizes the paper and provides feedback (10-15 minutes), and subsequently we open to the audience. Papers are circulated one week in advance.

And most importantly, everyone is warmly welcome to attend!

You can sign up here for our mailing list.

PEW offers a platform to discuss early/unpublished papers that investigate the political economy, broadly construed, of social policy and inequality, with the ambition to bring together researchers at the SOCIUM and beyond, across methodological divides and with varying levels of experience.

The workshop format is as follows: Authors briefly introduce the background of the paper (1-2 minutes), a discussant shortly summarizes the paper and provides feedback (10-15 minutes), and subsequently we open to the audience. Papers are circulated one week in advance.

And most importantly, everyone is warmly welcome to attend!

You can sign up here for our mailing list.

The Summer School is organised by the Collaborative Research Centre (CRC) 1342 “Global Dynamics of Social Policy” (University of Bremen).

Welfare states can be studied with a number of theoretical and methodological approaches, from various chronological perspectives and with a focus on different empirical phenomena and localities. The NordWel summer school aims to stimulate discussions across disciplines and foster innovative cross-disciplinary research on the development of welfare states over time and in a global context. The summer school brings together PhD students and well-established international scholars in scientific exchange.

We invite PhD students from different disciplinary backgrounds to participate in the discussion on the development of welfare states, their preconditions, present status, and how we ought to study them. PhD students present their papers in parallel sessions and get feedback from senior scholars and junior colleagues.

Keynote speakers and discussants include Daniel Béland (McGill University), Patrick Emmenegger (University of St. Gallen), Alexandra Kaasch (University of Bielefeld), Marianne Ulriksen (University of Southern Denmark), Lutz Leisering (University of Bielefeld), Carina Schmitt (University of Bamberg), Klaus Petersen (University of Southern Denmark), Pauli Kettunen (University of Helsinki) and Åsa Lundqvist (Lund University) and Herbert Obinger (University of Bremen).