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This article examines the implications of the multi-scalar politics of Mexican anti-poverty policy for the long-term process of democratization. The federal anti-poverty policy, Progresa/Oportunidades, was designed to eliminate traditional clientelistic practices. While more obvious practices of pork-barrel politics have been eliminated in poverty alleviation programs, continued practices of top-down processes of program design and implementation strategies have resulted in the emergence of semi-clientelism. Argued in this paper is that municipal and state political actors have responded to these federal policies in ways that may or may not promote deeper levels of democracy, and which have led to the reconstitution of semi-clientelism. The paper draws upon recent revisionist approaches to political clientelism, and introduces a multi-scalar approach borrowed from political geography. Based on this theoretical approach, the article examines the role of state and municipal authorities in the delivery of federal anti-poverty benefits within the Oportunidades conditional cash transfer program.

This study compares the reform of public social provision in the United States, Canada, and Mexico from 1996 to 2006. It highlights important parallels among the three countries in terms of policy design, discourses that frame each policy, and the ways social citizenship has become reconfigured. We argue that in all three cases, poor women/mothers are being regulated, monitored, and held accountable through surveillance and sanctions, reinforcing how social rights have morphed into social responsibilities and obligations. The objective is to shift welfare from “passive” support to “active” integration into the market, reinforcing a worker‐citizen model within precarious labor markets. The Canadian model shares elements with the U.S. model in its emphasis on welfare‐to‐work policies and integrating single mothers with young children into the workforce. The Mexican model integrates mothers as consumers into the market while investing in their children as future worker‐citizens. The article concludes by broadening the discussion from country‐specific analysis to speculating about the possibility of integrating workers within a North American market.

This article examines the lessons that can be drawn from social protection programs in Mexico at both the national and sub-national scales for the Social Protection Floor (SPF) initiative for the implementation of the Global Social Floor proposal in Mexico. Mexico's federal anti-poverty program, Progresa/Oportunidades, was a pioneer in the application of a social investment paradigm to the provision of social benefits to the extreme poor, and the targeting of benefits. At the same time, the left-leaning Partido de la Revolución Democrática (PRD) governments of the Federal District have introduced an ambitious new series of social programs at the municipal scale. PRD governments have directly criticized the targeting and surveillance involved in the Oportunidades program. Instead, the PRD has advocated more universalistic approaches to social policy, based on principles of social rights. This article examines the areas of congruence and dissonance between these Mexican innovations in social policy and the SPF initiative.