Persistent Citizens

Despite widespread reforms in recent years, expanded social welfare programs in Global South democracies still fail to reach many of those who need them most. Persistent Citizens draws on original focus group data from Brazil and Argentina to develop a new concept of 'state-centric persistence' to explain these gaps in access. State-centric persistence – unmediated, individualized pursuit of state benefits – is increasingly important in the Global South. The book connects existing research on claim-making and administrative burden to argue that self-efficacy, entitlement, and indignation encourage persistence. It analyzes original survey data to show evidence that these attitudes, along with knowledge of social rights, are associated with greater persistence. Persistent Citizens centers the experiences of poor citizens to offer an individual-level theory that contributes to our understanding of what influences social policy access across the globe.

Rebecca Weitz-Shapiro is an associate professor and Royce Family Associate Professor of Teaching Excellence in Political Science at Brown University. She has published articles in leading journals in political science and Latin American studies. Her first book, Curbing Clientelism in Argentina: Politics, Poverty, and Social Policy (CUP, 2014), received the Donna Lee Van Cott Award from the Political Institutions Section of the Latin American Studies Association. Matthew S. Winters is a professor of political science and the director of the Center for East Asian and Pacific Studies at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He studies foreign aid, development, and political behavior and has conducted fieldwork in countries including Indonesia, Mali, and Uganda. He has published over forty articles in leading political science and development studies journals.