Isabela Mares

Isabela Mares, Associate Professor of Political Science at Columbia University, will complete a manuscript looking at the evolution of widely varying policies of social protection in weak states like those of Southeast Asia or Central America. Over the past twenty years, some of these countries have enacted universal health care coverage, while making no provision for old-age insurance; other countries have moved in the opposite direction, shifting the responsibility for providing health insurance and retirement benefits entirely to the private sector. Mares will develop a political explanation that accounts for both the cross-national variation in social policies and differing emphases on social policies within individual countries.