ABSTRACT
Social policy is the quintessential lever available to Mexican presidents to manage state-society relations in general and assuage social tension in moments of economic and political crisis (Collier and Collier, 1979; Rubio and Newell, 1984; Story, 1986). Today, in Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America, the provision of social resources is being rethought in an era of démocratisation and market-oriented reform. Moreover the provision of social resources has been an essential part of the Mexican system of governance under the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). Thus it is an opportune moment to re-evaluate the variables that influence its design and articulation ‘in the field’ so that it can be linked to the larger issue of continuity and discontinuity in Mexican state-society relations.
