Policy Dynamics and Government Attention over Welfare Policies: An Analysis of the Brazilian Case ^*

The recognition of issues as public problems and the ways governments prioritize them constitute focal points in the study of policy change and policy dynamics. In Brazil and other Latin American countries, social welfare systems and related policies have undergone transformations throughout the recent democratic period. This article aims to understand changes in the Brazilian social welfare agenda by means of an analysis of the attention given to social welfare policies at the federal level. The main analytical and methodological contribution of this article is its use of the research strategy developed under the Comparative Agendas Project (CAP) to analyze the Brazilian situation. We drew on a set of unpublished datasets on the attention given by governments to social welfare policies from 1988 to 2018 that involves more than one thousand observations across six different datasets. The analyses are made at two different levels: first, we seek to understand macro trends and moments of continuity and inflection in social welfare policy by federal government administration. Second, we analyze the composition of the attention given to social welfare policies, thereby identifying the themes given the highest priority.

Policy change; welfare policy; punctuated equilibrium; policy dynamics; policy attention