Data for: Forbearance as redistribution: The politics of informal welfare in Latin America

<h3>Overview</h3>

<p>Why do governments tolerate the violation of their own laws and regulations, and when do they enforce them? Conventional wisdom is that state weakness erodes enforcement, particularly in the developing world. In contrast, this book project, "Forbearance as Redistribution: The Politics of Informal Welfare in Latin America," highlights the understudied political costs of enforcement. Governments choose not to enforce laws and regulations, or forbearance, when it is in their electoral interest.</p>

<p>Focusing on laws that the poor violate, the manuscript shows how a simple distributive logic can account for enforcement patterns over space and time.
Politicians forbear when formal welfare policies are inadequate and they depend on the poor’s votes to win office. Forbearance both indirectly signals a politician’s class affinities and directly functions as a form of informal welfare provision to the poor. Unlike these informal transfers, many state benefits accrue to the middle class in developing countries. The poor therefore vote and mobilize for forbearance, while expecting little from tax-based redistribution. Forbearance thus offers much-needed support when governments fail, yet the book also show how it can perpetuate the same exclusionary welfare policies from which it originates.</p>

<p>The primary—but not exclusive—empirical focus is Latin America, a middle-income region where many governments have the money and manpower to enforce their laws. Latin America is the region with the most unequal income distribution in the world, which means that poverty rates are much higher than would be expected at similar development levels. Sharp inequality and residential segregation create different incentives to enforce depending on where politicians seek office within a city. I select city cases that vary along the principal independent variables under both my theory and competing state capacity-based explanations. The cases span a city known for its capable institutions (Santiago, Chile) and cities with more middling capacities that either group all voters into a single catchall district (Bogotá, Colombia) or divide voters into many income-segregated districts (Lima, Peru).</p>

<p>The decision to compare enforcement across cities reflects substantive and methodological concerns. City governments have become increasingly important sites of policymaking and electoral contestation after a wave of decentralizing reforms in the 1980s and 1990s. Methodologically, there are ways in which the biggest cities across countries—Lima and Santiago, or Lagos and Accra—are more similar to one another than to the secondary cities or rural regions to which they are compared in more common within-nation subnational research designs. Therefore, in this book I focus on Latin American capitals as a way to make valid inferences across similar units, and I use enforcement patterns both within and across cities to expand the number of testable observations. I underscore the comparability of major cities by extending the argument to Istanbul, Turkey. Common tensions around law enforcement emerge in a quite distinct national context.</p>

<p>I take a multi-method approach in which I use observations about how a variety of actors—citizens, bureaucrats, mayors, and presidents—behave to distinguish my theory from dominant alternatives moored in state weakness.
These included public opinion data that reveal that poor support forbearance and candidates who advocate it; qualitative interviews with local politicians, bureaucrats, street vendors, and squatters; local government data on enforcement actions and legal violations; an archive of all newspaper articles on squatting and street vending; and a range of administrative documents, such as government reports, campaign platforms, and correspondence with squatter settlements. I use a combination of methods, including 1) statistical analysis of public opinion data and enforcement data, 2) process-tracing using interviews, government documents, and newspaper reports, and 3) content analysis of newspaper reports.</p>

<p>My findings underscore the strategic—and deeply democratic—nature of enforcement of laws that the poor violate. “Weak” enforcement does not necessarily imply a weak state that cannot regulate the behavior of its citizens. To the contrary, forbearance can indicate healthy electoral democracy in which politicians are responsive to poor voters and choose not to enforce laws that conflict with local preferences. This theory naturally suggests counterintuitive policy conclusions: reforms to strengthen the welfare state may do more to build the rule of law than additional funding for police and bureaucrats. Successful democratization and reforms to increase the poor’s political power, if unaccompanied by improvements in social policy, can erode enforcement.</p>