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Abstract
This dissertation traces Chile´s state milk distribution programs from 1954 to 2010 as a way map the trajectory of the Chilean social state through three different political, economic, and welfare regime combinations. It examines what commodification and decommodification mean to families in their everyday lives, how people adapt to and resist dramatically different political, macroeconomic, and social provision systems. The findings of this dissertation contribute to the discipline by proposing two lines of inquiry to the welfare literature, adding to ongoing debates within comparative-historical social science circles and challenging received narratives on the Chilean case. It concludes that regime type shapes but does not determine levels of provision and changes in formal rules are filtered through and resisted via practices and strategies enacted in face-to-face encounters between local state representatives and citizens. It shows that people who are regulated also have the capacity to change rules and eventually regulate the state. At the same time, state workers who organize and are organized by the state to distribute resources have some discretionary power, often breaking rules in order to follow their vision of the correct state or what they interpret as the spirit of the law. The primary healthcare network examined in this dissertation has had surprising continuity across regime type and played a key role in maintaining Chile´s relatively good health outcomes despite cutbacks and liberalizations in other policy arenas, recessions and increasing inequality. The examination of its ground-level and top-level politics of maintenance contribute to the comparative-historical literature on path-dependence and institutions. Rather than inertia or institutional stasis, this continuity is punctuated by moments of high contingency and agency referred to here as failed path reversals and sustained by strategies of conversion enacted in everyday encounters between citizens and public servants. Finally by focusing on a sector of the provision network often ignored by welfare scholars, this dissertation challenges received narratives of the alleged benefits of Chile´s neoliberal turn known as the Chilean Miracle, the success of the center-left Concertación and the implementation of Chilean policies as following a bureaucratic-rational model.
