Not so Faceless, not so Weak? Welfare Workers, Social Brokers, and the Accessibility of Social Policy in the Outbreak of Covid-19 in Argentina.

ARCIDIÁCONO, PILAR; PERELMITER, LUISINA

Buenos Aires

Congreso; 27th world congress of political science; 2023

UCA

Street-level bureaucracy literature has analyzed the way in which state frontline work is conditioned by macro factors such as social inequality and poverty, limited state capacities, institutional weakness, and political culture, among others. However, little is known about the way in which these factors shape the behavior of street-level bureaucrats in a context of disruption of socio-economic and institutional normality, such as that generated by the outbreak of the covid-19 pandemic. To what extent factors usually associated with institutional weakness -such as porous borders between state institutions, political parties, and social movements, political brokerage in the management of public resources, informality and/or volunteerism in SLBs work habits’ - operated as “weaknesses” in this context? This paper explores these questions based on the analysis of diverse welfare state workers and grassroot brokers’ practices along the implementation of the Emergency Family Income (IFE) during the Covid-19 pandemic in Argentina. In the context of confinement, the IFE was the main economic support policy for families during 2020, reaching an unprecedented coverage (9 million people in a few days). It was also an entirely digitalized and unconditional policy, which a priori did not require the habitual face-to-face work of SLBs or brokers. Nonetheless, we show how the activities -many of them classifiable as belonging to a context of institutional weakness- that both welfare state workers and brokers deployed in these circumstances, improve the accessibility of this policy. In the face of the confinement and the closure of welfare offices, and the difficulties that part of the beneficiaries had in operating the technological platforms to get access to the IFE, SLBs and brokers became crucial “digital translators” and “personal technology providers”. The analysis is based on a wide-ranging qualitative research, carried out between March and October 2021, in 10 urban conglomerates in the country, which included more than 300 in-depth interviews with welfare frontline state workers, brokers and IFE's beneficiaries in these conglomerates.