-1— 0— +1— 11 Are Coalitions Equally Important for Redistribution in Latin America? The Intervening Role of Welfare Regimes Juliana Martínez Franzoni and Koen Voorend Introduction Does social policy help improve income distribution at all in Latin America? his question is crucial in t he most unequal region of the world, as discussed in the introduction of this book. his chapter establishes the nature and mag- nitude of redistribution across welfare regimes in Latin America and dis- cusses the role of distributional coalitions, that is, of actors actively engaged in increasing the role of a public and collective allocation of resources. For the purposes of this chapter, we deine social policy as the constellation of key policies involved in social ser vices and transfers, primarily related to educa- tion, health care, and transfers such as social insurance and social assistance.  he power-resource approach contends that to counterbalance elites and their powerful resources, progressive parties should create distributional co- alitions with an extensive array of actors. Large, broad societal coalitions are more likely to emerge under the presence of universal rather than targeted social policy because they create incentives to get the middle class involved (Korpi and Palme 1998). In addition, Esping-Andersen (1990) shows for Euro- pean and North American countries that such coalitions difer considerably across welfare regimes: redistribution relects class alliances, leading to the central role of let-wing, social Christian, and liberal parties in social democ- racies, conservative welfare regimes, and liberal welfare regimes, respectively. his chapter received valuable insights from Merike Bloield, Fernando Filgueira, Juan Pablo Luna, James Mahon, Diego Sánchez-Ancochea, Jeremy Seekings, and participants at the Work- shop on Politics and Inequality, University of Miami, Miami, May 16–17, 2008. A shorter version of this chapter was published in Social Policy and Administration in August 2009. We are particu- larly grateful to Jennifer Pribble for her inputs on elite and societal coalitions. Flaws that remain are ours. 535-47165_ch01_1P.indd 348 535-47165_ch01_1P.indd 348 7/6/11 5:55 PM 7/6/11 5:55 PM