DOI: 10.5064/f626jgpb
title: Data for: Forbearance as redistribution: The politics of informal welfare in Latin America

description: &lt;h3&gt;Overview&lt;/h3&gt;

&lt;p&gt;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.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;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.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;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).&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;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.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;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.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;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.&lt;/p&gt;
description: &lt;h3&gt;Technical Details&lt;/h3&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Compilation of existing materials: I reviewed all newspaper articles published about street vending and squatting between roughly 1990 and 2011.
Given that online archives were not available (or not for the entire period), I hired RAs to identify the set of newspaper articles that discussed these issues. RAs were trained to pull any article that related to street vending or squatting. In Peru, this task involved working from one of the main newspaper’s (&lt;i&gt;El Comercio&lt;/i&gt;) physical archive. RAs photocopied each newspaper article located. In Colombia, the newspaper archive is online for &lt;i&gt;El Tiempo&lt;/i&gt;, but the search algorithm is imprecise so the RA identified that each article actually related to street vending or squatting after doing a key term search for related words (for street vending, these included “vendedores ambulantes,” “comercio informal,” “espacio público”; for squatting, these included “ocupaciones ilegales,” “ocupaciones informales,” “barrios informales,” “subdivisiones informales,”
“piratas,” “terreros,” and “vivienda informal”).&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Content analysis: Using the newspaper article database, I coded (along with an RA) the topics discussed. The articles first were classified as one of four types: 1) news item, 2) letter to the editor, 3) short note, and 4) platforms, speeches, or interviews with politicians. Articles were then given a primary coding based on their dominant theme (sympathetic narrative, sympathetic polemic, unsympathetic narrative, and unsympathetic polemic), as well as secondary markers for the specific types of issues mentioned. Given the fact that the newspaper articles were not digitized, the articles were coded by hand (rather than through a machine learning procedure).&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Focus group:&lt;/strong&gt; I also conducted informal focus groups with street-vending associations and squatter-settlement leaders to understand how organized groups interact with politicians. In the case of street vendors, I located these association leaders through organized labor confederations and non-governmental organizations. The focus groups took place in the headquarters of one of the main labor confederation in each city (CUT in Colombia, CTP in Peru). In the case of squatters, I located these associations through local politicians in two districts of Lima, Villa María del Triunfo and Villa El Salvador.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Interviews (individual, face-to-face):&lt;/strong&gt; Three main types of respondents were interviewed for this project: 1) bureaucrats, 2) politicians, and 3) leaders of street-vending and squatting associations. I personally interviewed 149 district bureaucrats in Bogotá, Lima, and Santiago. These were all “street-level bureaucrats” in Lipsky’s (1980) sense that they interact with citizens directly and have discretion over decisions that matter for citizens’ lives. To conduct the survey, I went to every district government office, sometimes multiple times, and asked to speak with the director or sub-director of the office in charge of street vending and housing issues. All interviews were conducted in the local government offices. Interviewes lasted between 30 and 120 minutes and involved both a largely open-ended section of questions about the municipality’s enforcement activities (using an interview guide) and then a structured survey of the bureaucrats’ attitudes and experiences in the municipality.
I also gathered demographic information on each bureaucrat, such as their education, work history, and political engagement. &lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The sample does not include districts that are classified as more than 75 percent rural or have populations under 5000. This means that the sample excludes Sumapaz in Bogotá, and Ancón, Pucusana, Punta Hermosa, Punta Negra, San Bartolo, and Santa Rosa in Lima. In Santiago, I include the 34 districts that comprise Greater Santiago (32 comunas in Santiago, plus San Bernardo and Puente Alto in the provinces of Maipo and Cordillera, respectively). In Istanbul, I conducted the survey only in a subset of the city’s 39 districts. I first stratified the sample into lower, mixed, and upper-income districts. I selected four districts from each category (although I was unable to complete one interview in the low-income district of Çatalca). The districts surveyed included: Gaziosmanpaşa, Sultanbeyli, and Beyoğlu (lower); Arnavutköy, Beykoz, Fatih, and Kadıköy (mixed); and Beşiktaş Maltepe, Sarıyer, and Sultangazi (upper). All interviews were conducted in Turkish with the assistance of a translator. &lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;During my survey of district offices, I always attempted to speak with politicians as well. I conducted unstructured interviews with 62 politicians (mayors, city councilors, and local councilors). Local politicians are hard to track down given that their political careers depend in large part on constituency service and local councilors often have second jobs. I therefore only managed to interview politicians in a subset of my cases. My main concern in sampling was to complete interviews with politicians in districts with different socioeconomic profiles. These interviews generally were less structured than those with bureaucrats because I tried to ask about specific cases that bureaucrats had mentioned as challenges for the district. &lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Finally, I also interviewed the leaders of squatter settlements and street vending associations. In some cases, I located these leaders simply during my visits to local government offices. I spent countless hours in municipal government offices waiting to meet with bureaucrats and politicians. In these waiting rooms, I often encountered the leaders of squatter and street-vending associations and asked whether I could interview them about the types of concerns that they were bringing to the mayor. This approach introduced a potential bias in that the most active leaders tended to be those who showed up in local government offices. I therefore complemented this strategy with visits to specific squatter settlements and street vending markets. It was difficult to conduct these visits unaccompanied so most of these occurred with the assistance of a local NGO or a local politician.
Interviews with leaders then were conducted in the headquarters of the NGO or in the homes/community spaces. &lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Participant observation:&lt;/strong&gt; I shadowed roughly a dozen bureaucrats in their everyday tasks to understand the constraints on enforcement firsthand. In my interviews, I asked bureaucrats where I might be able to accompany them in their enforcement activities. Many objected or said they needed additional permission from the mayor. In the case that they permitted me to accompany them, I spent a half or full day watching them do their job and took field notes on the procedures. Those who allowed me to accompany them probably were not a random sample of all districts, but interestingly, many of those who wanted me to come along were from the most challenging districts where bureaucrats felt overwhelmed and wanted me to “see” the constraints that they faced.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Survey (face-to-face):&lt;/strong&gt; My interviews with bureaucrats ended with a short survey questionnaire about their experiences and attitudes (taking about
15-30 minutes). Through this survey, I collected data on offenses, enforcement actions, government resources, citizen complaints, decision-making, and bureaucrats’ perceptions of enforcement politics. See above on the selection of districts to survey. 
 The survey guides are included in the data deposit. &lt;/p&gt;
description: &lt;h3&gt;Data Narrative&lt;/h3&gt;

&lt;p&gt;This data collection includes three major types of materials, 1) a collection of newspaper articles, 2) a selection of interview transcripts, and 3) survey questionnaires and coded responses of bureaucrats.

&lt;p&gt;First, the newspaper articles constitute a curated collection on specific topics, street vending and squatting, which may be relevant to other researchers, from Peru’s newspaper, &lt;i&gt;El Comercio&lt;/i&gt;. This archive is not digitized and is not easily accessible for the early part of the time period studied (particularly the 1990s). The articles are organized by topic (street vending and squatting) and chronologically to make them most useful to other researchers.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Second, the interview transcripts constitute a sample of the interviews that I conducted. Due to the effort involved in de-identification and translation, only a set of 28 interviews from Lima is shared. Additional interviews may be available on request from the depositor. Where interviewees agreed to be identified, the transcripts include the name of the interview subject. I have included a full list of interviewees who agreed to be identified, in the case that a researcher is interested in a particular interview.In general, each interview includes the place and date where it was conducted consists of my detailed notes on the questions asked and the responses. In most cases, the interview does not constitute a complete transcription of the interview. Instead, I noted down key moments in the interview (the approximate time when a topic came up) which I then transcribed from the audio recording, or asked the interviewee to repeat to make sure that I wrote down the relevant quote appropriately. For pedagogical purposes, this approach may be interesting to other researchers. Many researchers (and especially graduate students) do not have the funds to transcribe each interview conducted, especially when doing a large number of interviews. They also may not have theoretical reasons to care about the specific language used by interview subjects (as was the case for many of the interviewees in this project). I did not transcribe every interview because I cared more about the general interactions and events described, rather than the specific wording used by the bureaucrat. In terms of replication, this approach to interviews obviously has downsides. The specific passages transcribed reflect my particular interests and hypotheses, and therefore may be less useful for future researchers hoping to test other hypotheses or wanting to see if they arrive at the same interpretation of the evidence.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Given the confidentiality concerns discussed, I am not allowed to share the audio recordings (when they exist) for the full interview and therefore it may be difficult for other researchers to reconstruct the full course of the interview to test other hypotheses. However, the detailed field notes do allow other researchers to see the questions and topics discussed that they could then follow up in the course of their own research or see if they find consistent with my interpretation of the evidence. &lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Third, I include the interview guides used for local-level bureaucrats, as well as a spreadsheet coding their responses to the structured questions included in the interview. The interview guides further help to understand the questions asked and the potential uses of the data collected beyond the original research project.&lt;p&gt;
description: &lt;h3&gt; Data Sensitivity &lt;/h3&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The data are sensitive because they include interviews with bureaucrats who admit that they do not enforce the law as required for their jobs, as well as street vendors without licenses and squatters without property titles. In the case of bureaucrats, although it would be very rare, some of their admissions may put them at risk of losing their job (particularly in Bogotá where the Comptroller investigates whether bureaucrats follow legal orders).&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The economic vulnerability of street vendors and squatters also raises particular concerns about revealing their identity. For these reasons, Harvard’s IRB suggested that I maintain the confidentiality of bureaucrats and leaders of street vending and squatting associations that agreed to be interviewed. I cite my interviews only based on the office of the individual in charge, as well as the district where they work (or where street vendors and squatters are located). In addition, Harvard’s IRB was concerned that releasing the audio recordings of my interviews would cause unnecessary risks to participants and asked that I delete these recordings as soon as they were transcribed. 
 I have included the approved IRB application to give a sense of the risks and precautions taken.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I also interviewed local politicians and higher-level bureaucrats. While I offered them anonymity, most agreed to be interviewed in their public capacity and therefore these interviews do not raise sensitivity questions like those discussed above. The list of identified interviews includes information on the interviewees who agreed to be cited by name.&lt;/p&gt;
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