This study analyzes the impact of politics on governmental efforts to promote social policies, more specifically Education and Culture, and Health and Sanitation policies. The paper aims to explain the variation in Brazilian states’ standards of social policy provision during the five governmental administrations following re-democratization. Our explanation focuses on political and institutional factors during the 1987-2006 period. Our aim is to assess the impact of political competition, the party system, the legacy of public policy, and economic and institutional constraints on social policy provision since the end of the military dictatorship. Our empirical analysis is conducted through estimates of Prais-Winsten regression models with panel corrected standard error model (PCSE-AR1). The results of this analysis show that the majority of parties in government do not differ in their social expenditures and that political competition loses its predictive capacity when faced with institutional constraints arising from the central government.