Intermediaries of the State:

Bureaucratic Transaction Costs of Claiming Welfare

In my current book project, I argue that the existence of bureaucratic transaction costs hinders individuals’ pursuit of welfare benefits. Instead, these costs make individuals dependent on intermediaries of the state who facilitate access to welfare benefits. Intermediaries range from street-level bureaucrats or constituency service workers to political bosses, brokers or caciques. However, in institutionally weak contexts, intermediaries will often demand political loyalty in return for their assistance, a practice better known as clientelism.

If clientelist intermediaries mediate citizens’ engagement with the state, then obtaining access to welfare benefits does not enhance citizenship and produce stakeholders, as research on the welfare state in developed country contexts suggests, but rather intensifies political loyalties to intermediaries and their political parties. This democratic penalty, although most prevalent in economically developing countries, is not exclusive to the poor. More- over, mediated interactions with the state perpetuate pre-existing skill deficits, with adverse consequences for individuals’ sense of self-efficacy, political autonomy, and capacity to hold governments accountable.

Alongside more than 100 in-depth interviews with citizens, intermediaries, politicians, and bureaucrats, obtained during 13 months of immersive fieldwork, I test this argument through a large-scale field experiment in rural Mexico. The experimental results reveal that selectively reducing the costs of making bureaucratic claims increases the number of claims made through non-clientelist avenues. The experimental intervention also weakened the belief that welfare entitlements must be reciprocated with political support and diminished general approval of quid-pro-quo exchanges, two key normative buttresses of clientelism.

Although intermediaries may be efficient deliverers of benefits and may even compensate for deficiencies in state capacity, this dissertation maintains that mediated avenues of distribution can have detrimental effects on building citizens’ bureaucratic skills, autonomous political participation, and the ability to reliably make policy demands on the state. However, my results demonstrate that the vicious cycle of mediation can be broken, and citizenship strengthened, by reducing the costs that citizens face in obtaining welfare benefits directly from the state.