Broadly targeted and patronage-free social policies in Latin America have the potential to promote the well-being of a given population. Yet in reality, national policies are only partially implemented in subnational units. As a result, their transformative potential has been limited. While a considerable literature has focused on the development of welfare states and the challenges of decentralization, far fewer scholars have studied variation in the actual implementation of policies. This is paramount because it connects the design of policies to their socio-economic outcomes. Existing approaches shed light on the reasons behind policy choices but are less equipped to explain why some policies are implemented better than others, why this variation is particularly relevant within countries, and why some policies deliver votes to incumbent governments while others do not. On the latter, while there are a number of studies on the role of clientelistic distribution of policies, it is crucial to analyze a less studied topic – the political determinants of patronage-free policy implementation. The main contribution of Uneven Social Policies is to account for subnational variation in social policy implementation through a combination of political motivations and capacity across multiple territorial levels within countries.