Fourteenth International Conference on Interdisciplinary Social Sciences

Abstract

Public policy documents are a useful source to analyse the discourses and practices of policymakers’ designers. Based on an extensive literature review, policy documents, and semi-structured interviews, this paper examines how state social protection policy is underpinned by the moral discourses informing policy designers about which social groups - categorised by their economic background – should be included in or excluded from state social protection policy. In this sense, this paper argues that neoliberal antipoverty programmes, based on targeting mechanism, understand poverty as a natural and marginal phenomenon, where structural aspects of unemployment and conditions of inequality are minimized. Both situations are seen as a problem of inappropriate individual decisions, which results in the lack of access to employment and high dependence on the economic benefits granted by the state. In addition, it is argued that the neoliberal policy design, which operates under criteria of efficiency and economic rationality, favours the intensification of punitive conditionality and distracts attention from other social protection systems; such is the case of the Universal Basic Income (UBI); whose implementation has been rapidly gaining prominence. However, in the Mexican context, its legitimacy is still under debate.