Trends and Transitions in Mexican Social Policy

Abstract

The objectives of this paper are to discuss the way in which social policy studies have developed in Mexico from a perspective of social policy models and their institutions; and to define some problematical aspects of such focuses. Also, I present the diverse arguments on the main characteristics of present Mexican social policy, in contrast to that of the ISI period. This article especially highlights some of the most important problems in the research about the Mexican Social Policy the lack of knowledge about the "hybridization" phenomenon of trends, conflicts within the social institutions, the disdain to the social actors, the contempt for local-regional differences, and the simplification of continuity-discontinuity dynamics in the present social policies. In this paper, the transformation process of the Mexican social policies is revealed as a complex reality, far beyond binary conceptions.