Dealing with Poverty: Change and Continuity in Argentine Social Policies

PERELMITER, LUISINA

Palmer House Hotel, Chicago, Estados Unidos

Conferencia; Annual Meeting of the MPSA Annual National Conference; 2008

Midwest Political Science Association

Despite current changes in perspectives and discourses within state social areas, Argentine social policy does not seem to have experienced much change compared with the ones of the 90s. This paper addresses the factors that account for this continuity. Focusing on the examination of new socio-economic perspectives within state, I will contend that not only structural constraints characterizing the current organizational and technical features of state, but also cultural imaginaries and political practices -on the part of both state agents and the social groups to whom the policies are addressed- are inherited conditions that cannot be easily dismantled with discursive emphasis. Moreover, while these conditions do not obstruct the introduction of changes in the scope and design of targeted assistance-based policies, they establish important restrictions to a real socio-economic turn in the conceptual orientation of social policies as a whole.