Unequal States, Unequal Welfare: Subnational State Capacity and Social Policy

How does the heterogeneous and unequal reality of state capacities in subnational governments affect the outcomes of social welfare policy provision? How prepared are these governments to ensure human development, considering the territorial variation in their state capacities? How do subnational state capacities shape the distribution of public service delivery in decentralized, federal, and unitary systems? This heterogeneity is a reality in both unitary and federal countries and, therefore, the question is virtually universal, particularly in developing countries where social inequalities are greater. Some studies have shown that investments in public welfare policies at the local level are path-dependent and that durable capacities are central to community well-being. This panel aims to bring together papers that discuss how and through which instruments the development of state capacity can explain social development, while also shedding light on its territorial variations, especially in socially and territorially unequal countries. This problem becomes more acute in contexts where decentralization expands local provision of social policies and, in particular, where responsibilities are transferred without a corresponding strengthening of local government capacity, affecting how this level of government is organized and the outcomes it can achieve in this field of action. Academic knowledge on local government should better understand how and why state capacities are activated to produce and implement social policies. For example, state capacity may vary at the local level depending on mayors’ profiles and their political ideology, professional background, among other factors. Furthermore, the panel seeks to advance the theoretical discussion on different strands in this literature (e.g., scale free capabilities and non-scale free capabilities and infrastructural power of local governments). This reality has both academic and practical implications in an area that remains relatively underexplored in comparative research. The panel is open to different methodological approaches as well as to different conceptual backgrounds, such as state capacity, policy capacity, and dynamic capabilities, to analyze the provision and results of social protection policies at the local level. We also encourage the paper givers to propose comparative research to expand the knowledge on this topic.