Interest Organizations and Distributive Politics: Small-Business Subsidies in Mexico

AcknowledgmentsHundreds of people helped with this project and I am deeply indebted to all of them. First, this project only exists because of the incredible women and men who work on the streets and put in extra hours to organize their colleagues and demand a better life. I am grateful to the dozens of street vendors in Bolivia and Brazil who decided to trust me, talk with me, and teach me. I am especially grateful to the women and men who took the time to explain how the markets work, how to sell in them, and how to interact with officials as a vendor. I regret that I can't thank people by name for confidentiality reasons, but from the bottom of my heart, thank you G.for teaching me how to set up a stall and be a vendor, and I hope we have many more conversations about politics over api. Thank you to the champañeras for making me an honorary sister and for letting me spend so many happy hours with all of you in the plaza. Thank you R. for being my sócio, teaching me how to set up and protect a stall, and sharing all of your stories with me; let's plan for many more. Thank you to everyone at the Federation and the Markets Office for your patience, your stories, and your advice. In addition to the vendors that are part of this project, the project would not have gone very far without the help of Cecilia Salazar, Luciana Molina

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Disobedient Markets: Street Vendors, Enforcement, and State Intervention in Collective Action

Hummel

2017

“…In addition to limiting opposition mayors’ ability to hijack credit, these organizations may offer additional benefits to the presidents’ party: Organizations may be helpful in party-building services, such as mobilizing organized civil society groups, creating a local presence in localities (Zucco & Samuels, 2015), recruiting and endorsing candidates or even socializing partisans (Palmer-Rubin, 2016). These activities and party-building services could operate as complementary benefits to the central incumbent in channeling resources to NSPs in aligned and unaligned localities.…”

Section: Are Opposition Mayors Unable To Hijack Credit?mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The web that ties political parties and organizations in Brazil seems to be much looser and less sectarian than those found in party systems with deeper religious and ethnic cleavages—after all, many organizations have multipartisan boards and high rates of party switching. The set of organizations I examine appear to combine different types of entities: the “extremely political, yet non-partisan” small business organizations that Palmer-Rubin (2016, p. 17) examines in Mexico, to the heterogeneous, yet politically active, NGOs and grassroots organizations in Bolivia that Boulding (2014) describes, and even to third-sector organizations in developed countries, such as the United States (Chaves, Stephens, & Galaskiewics, 2004; Salamon & Anheier, 1997; Salamon et al, 2003).…”

Section: Are Opposition Mayors Unable To Hijack Credit?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Bypassing the Enemy: Distributive Politics, Credit Claiming, and Nonstate Organizations in Brazil

Bueno

2017

How do incumbents prevent the opposition from claiming credit for government programs? The received scholarly wisdom is that central government authorities favor copartisans in lower tiers of government to reward allies and punish opponents. Yet this depiction ignores the range of strategies available to incumbents at the center. I argue that another effective strategy is to channel resources through nonstate organizations, thus bypassing the opposition and reducing “credit hijacking.” Using a regression-discontinuity design with data from Brazil, I show that mayors from the president’s party receive more resources, but that the election of an opposition mayor induces the central government to shift resources to nonstate organizations that operate in the locality. Original survey data, fieldwork, and data on organizations’ leaders support the claim that opposition mayors do not hijack credit from government spending through nonstate organizations.

“…Labor unions, many of which continue to enjoy mandatory affiliation, tend to focus on wages and social security benefits for union members rather than selective material benefits accessed through gestión . Business chambers are quite prevalent, yet intermediation of state benefits tends to be less central to their political activity (Palmer-Rubin, 2016). On the contrary, given their focus on housing and economic conditions for the most vulnerable, hundreds of neighborhood and peasant associations throughout the country specialize in brokerage of proyectos productivos and vivienda .…”

Section: Interest Organizations In Mexicomentioning

confidence: 99%

Incentives for Organizational Participation: A Recruitment Experiment in Mexico

Palmer‐Rubin

Garay

Poertner

2020

Self Cite

While the presence of a strong civil society is recognized as desirable for democracies, an important question is what motivates citizens to join organizations. This article presents novel experimental evidence on the conditions under which citizens join interest organizations. We presented 1,400 citizens in two Mexican states with fliers promoting a new local interest organization. These fliers contain one of four randomly selected recruitment appeals. We find evidence that both brokerage of state patronage and demand-making for local public goods are effective recruitment appeals. The effect for patronage brokerage is especially pronounced among respondents with prior organizational contact, supporting our hypothesis of a “particularistic socialization” effect wherein organizational experience is associated with greater response to selective material benefits. Our findings suggest that under some conditions, rather than generating norms of other-regarding, interest organizations can reinforce members’ individualistic tendencies.