5.6 - Adaptation of Social Policies
Governments create new social policies, gender equity policies, healthcare expansion, education access, and welfare programs, in response to political, cultural, and economic change, and these policies serve dual purposes: improving citizens' lives and maintaining or bolstering regime legitimacy at the same time.
Gender Equity Policies
Iran shows limited progress within an Islamic framework. Women can vote (since 1963), run for and serve in the Majles, and be appointed to cabinet positions, but their numbers stay small: women won fewer than 20 of the 290 Majles seats in the 2024 election, and only two women have headed a ministry since 1979 (Health Minister Marzieh Vahid-Dastjerdi from 2009 to 2012, and Farzaneh Sadegh, named minister of roads and urban development by President Masoud Pezeshkian in 2024). Significant restrictions remain: in practice women can't become president or Supreme Leader (the Guardian Council has never approved a woman to run for president), mandatory hijab laws remain in place, and there's legal inequality around inheritance, testimony, and divorce. Women also face restrictions from certain university degree programs like engineering and some sciences, justified through particular interpretations of Islamic law, and women's rights activists continue protesting these restrictions, most dramatically in the 2022 "Woman, Life, Freedom" protests after Mahsa Amini died in morality police custody. The Majles then passed a harsher "Hijab and Chastity" law, but the Supreme National Security Council put it on hold in December 2024 before it took effect. Women were kept out of men's soccer matches for decades after 1979; only after FIFA pressure and the 2019 death of Sahar Khodayari (a fan who set herself on fire after being charged for trying to enter a stadium) did the government let limited numbers of women into some national team games and, starting in 2022, some league games. The overall pattern is that the regime makes minimal concessions on gender equity while carefully preserving its patriarchal Islamic system, adapting just enough to respond to women's mobilization and international pressure without abandoning conservative gender norms.
Mexico shows much more significant progress. Candidate gender quotas grew over time (30 percent in 2002, then full parity, 50 percent of legislative candidates, in a 2014 constitutional reform), and a 2019 "parity in everything" reform extended parity to the cabinet, the courts, and other public offices. This dramatically increased female representation: in 2024 women won 251 of the 500 seats in the Chamber of Deputies, the first time women outnumbered men there, and Claudia Sheinbaum became Mexico's first woman president. Abortion policy is decentralized, with states setting their own laws: Mexico City legalized early-term abortion in 2007, the Supreme Court ruled in 2021 that criminalizing abortion is unconstitutional and in 2023 struck down the federal ban, and by 2025 more than 20 of Mexico's 32 federal entities had decriminalized abortion early in pregnancy, while conservative states like Guanajuato still treat it as a crime. This federalism creates genuinely different social policy across regions, reflecting real cultural diversity between the more conservative north and south and the more liberal urban areas. This adaptation responds to feminist movements, urbanization, and changing values more broadly, with quotas increasing women's political power and abortion liberalization reflecting broader secularization.
Nigeria shows unequal gender access to education along a clear north-south divide: northern states have lower female education rates, especially among Muslims, due to cultural and religious barriers, child marriage reducing school attendance, and Boko Haram specifically targeting girls' schools (like the 2014 kidnapping of 276 schoolgirls in Chibok), while southern states have much higher female education rates approaching parity. UNICEF estimated in 2022 that about 18.5 million Nigerian children were out of school, most of them in the north and about 60 percent of them girls. Contributing factors include religious conservatism in the north, regional poverty, and cultural traditions that value boys' education over girls'. Federal programs try to promote girls' education, but success in changing these cultural patterns has been limited, and regional variation persists, largely because Nigeria's federal system leaves most basic education to state and local governments, and twelve northern states have adopted Sharia law, which limits the federal government's ability to enforce uniform gender equity nationwide.
Social Welfare Policies
Governments implement poverty reduction, education, and healthcare policies both for citizen welfare and regime legitimacy.
On poverty reduction: China's poverty alleviation campaigns lifted close to 800 million people out of extreme poverty after 1978 (by the World Bank's count), and in 2021 Xi Jinping declared that extreme rural poverty had been eliminated by China's own poverty line, directly bolstering Communist Party legitimacy through visible economic results. Mexico's conditional cash transfer programs (Progresa, later called Oportunidades and Prospera) paid poor families specifically for keeping children in school and getting healthcare, meaningfully reducing extreme poverty; AMLO replaced Prospera in 2019 with direct cash programs like Benito Juárez scholarships for students and a universal pension for older adults, which Sheinbaum has expanded. Nigeria's oil revenues should theoretically enable similar social programs, but corruption limits their effectiveness, and persistent poverty continues to undermine legitimacy there.
On education: China provides nine years of compulsory education alongside massive literacy improvements and university expansion. Iran maintains high literacy rates (over 85%) and provides women's education access despite some restrictions, both sources of regime legitimacy. The UK provides universal public education, free through secondary school with subsidized university, maintaining high literacy that supports broader social cohesion. Mexico and Nigeria both provide free public education, but real quality gaps remain, with rural and poor areas consistently underserved despite genuine literacy improvements.
On healthcare: the UK's National Health Service provides universal coverage free at the point of use, functioning as a core source of regime legitimacy. China rebuilt public health insurance after market reforms wiped out the old commune clinics, first with a rural cooperative medical scheme (2003) and then by merging rural and urban residents' insurance in 2016; basic medical insurance now covers about 95 percent of the population, though out-of-pocket costs and rural-urban gaps remain. Mexico provides IMSS (social security healthcare) for formal workers; its Seguro Popular program (2004 to 2019) tried to cover everyone else, AMLO replaced it with INSABI in 2020, and INSABI's work moved to IMSS-Bienestar in 2023, though quality disparities persist. Iran maintains a basic healthcare network as part of the religious regime's broader provision of social services. Nigeria has limited public healthcare, with most citizens relying on private care or traditional medicine instead, and this state failure to provide healthcare directly undermines legitimacy.
Why Social Policy Matters for Legitimacy
This is a form of performance legitimacy: regimes get judged on whether they actually deliver services. In democratic regimes, electoral pressure forces responsiveness, since parties compete on social policy promises and citizen demands drive policy adaptation directly. In authoritarian regimes, social benefits often compensate for the lack of real democracy, a kind of "authoritarian bargain" where citizens accept political limits in exchange for economic and social security, with welfare provision helping legitimize non-democratic rule. China's Communist Party legitimacy depends heavily on economic growth and poverty reduction specifically because social policy success compensates for the lack of democratic politics.
When welfare provision fails, real legitimacy crises can emerge, protests, instability, and direct threats to the regime. Nigeria's federal government's failure to provide basic services despite its oil wealth has directly delegitimized federal authority, and Boko Haram has partly recruited by providing services the state itself couldn't deliver.
Adaptation gets driven by several forces: political changes (democratization enabling citizen demands, women's political participation forcing equity policies), cultural changes (urbanization and education shifting values, women's movements demanding equality, secularization in some contexts), economic changes (growth enabling welfare expansion, inequality creating pressure for redistribution, women's workforce participation driving equity), and international pressure (human rights norms, development assistance conditions, global gender equality movements).
Bottom line: governments adapt social policy in response to changing conditions, and this adaptation varies enormously: Mexico's quotas and abortion liberalization contrast sharply with Iran's limited reforms within Islamic constraints and Nigeria's persistent regional disparities. Welfare policy around poverty, education, and healthcare serves the dual purpose of improving lives and maintaining legitimacy, and success or failure directly affects regime stability. Democracies respond mainly to electoral pressure, while authoritarian regimes compensate for political restriction through social provision, but all regimes ultimately have to adapt their policies to evolving political, cultural, and economic circumstances to maintain stability.