Electoral Polarization, Class Politics and a New Welfare State in Brazil and Turkey

Abstract

We explain why and how the governing parties, AKP of Turkey and PT of Brazil, converged on the same path of relying on the poor as the main strategy to stay in power. With the neoliberal reorganization and internationalization of their economies, the capacity of these governments to set up developmentalist alliances with big capital, the middle classes and the organized working classes was weakened. Based on a most-different-systems design and on descriptive statistical analysis, we argue that both PT and AKP failed to build multi-class bases and thus had to mobilize the poor by using various strategies, most importantly expanding social assistance policies, which accelerated the emergence of a new welfare state.