Social Mobilization and Political Competition in Paraguay’s Pensión Alimentaria: Social Policy Expansion Through Rivalry

Paraguay’s Pensión Alimentaria para Adultos Mayores, today the country’s largest non-contributory social protection program, is often attributed to the social agenda of left-of-center president Fernando Lugo. This article shows, however, that the pension emerged from the interaction between sustained mobilization by elderly organizations and the strategic calculations of Paraguay’s traditional political parties operating in a competitive setting, as they sought to regain control over social policy provisioning. Using process tracing based on interviews with key informants involved in the policy process, supplemented by documentary analysis, the research reconstructs the critical sequence of policy choices that shaped the program’s development. Elderly organizations pressed their demands for years, framing them in rights-based terms and deploying strategies such as mobilization, lobbying, and alliances with bureaucrats and legislators. Their persistent advocacy kept the issue alive, but political competition ultimately created the decisive opening to pass the pension. After Lugo’s unexpected 2008 victory and his plans to expand the conditional cash transfer program Tekoporã, opposition legislators advanced the pension not only to court an electorally salient constituency but also to constrain the executive’s capacity to consolidate a political base. The program’s endurance, culminating in its universalization in 2024, shows how sustained grassroots mobilization, combined with political competition, can drive social protection expansion even under limited state capacity, stringent fiscal constraints, and clientelism. More broadly, the findings add a strategic, rivalry-constraining mechanism to debates on political competition and social policymaking, showing how elites may adopt redistributive programs to limit competitors as well as to attract voters.