Between Citizens and the State: The Bureaucratic Transaction Costs of Claiming Welfare
My book develops a new theory about the conditions under which clientelism flourishes—as well as those under which it is weakened. In contrast to the extant literature, which has long held that clientelism is a consequence of low economic development, I argue that clientelism does not necessarily disappear as countries get richer. Instead, clientelist networks are sustained by the barriers and difficulties citizens face when interacting with the state, or what I call bureaucratic transaction costs. A particularly important avenue of interacting with the state is through claiming welfare. Perhaps even more than voting, claiming welfare has become the most important form of political participation in low- and middle-income countries, especially following the rapid expansion of social welfare that took place during the 1990s and 2000s.
I argue that the high bureaucratic transaction costs involved in claiming basic entitlements coupled with a high demand for these benefits create valuable arbitrage opportunities. These opportunities help create a market for intermediaries who exchange mediated access to state benefits and services for political loyalty or another form of political payment. These individuals are also known as clientelist intermediaries. Importantly, the intermediaries in this market do not often share how to access benefits, as doing so would shrink their market share. Thus, this clientelist market promotes and depends on the idea that welfare benefits are gifts that need to be repaid with political loyalty rather than rights and entitlements that the state guarantees.
Therefore, although potentially an efficient way of accessing welfare, I argue that mediated access to the state can have detrimental effects on building citizens’ civic skills, autonomous political participation, and ability to make policy demands on the state. These sets of incentives create greater dependency on clientelist networks as intermediaries between citizens and the state – further entrenching a clientelist equilibrium.
The dissertation on which this book is based can be found here.
Winner of APSA Best Experimental Research Dissertation Award, Honorable Mention, 2020.
Winner of 2017 Innovations in Transparency Prize given by the Mexican Government’s Instituto Nacional de Acceso a la Información y Protección de Datos Personal, Mexico.
Berinsky, Adam, Tesalia Rizzo, Leah Rosenzweig, and Elisha Heaps. (2018). “Attribute Affinity: U.S. Natives' Attitudes Towards Immigrants.” Political Behavior.
Abstract: We examine the extent to which relevant social identity traits shared between two individuals—what we term “attribute affinity”—can moderate out-group hostility. We argue that in-group affinity is a powerful force in shaping preferences over potential immigrants. We focus on two closely related, yet distinct, dimensions of identity: religion and religiosity. Using evidence from three surveys that included two embedded experiments, we show that sharing strength in religious practice can diminish strong aversion to immigrants of different religious affiliations. We find that, among highly religious U.S. natives, anti-Muslim bias is lower toward very religious Muslims, compared to non-religious Muslims. This attenuating effect of attribute affinity with respect to religiosity on anti-Muslim bias presents the strongest evidence supporting our argument.
(paper)
Breaking the Clientelist Feedback Loop: Evidence from a Field Experiment in the Yucatan Peninsula
Abstract: Across the electoral cycle, individuals rely on clientelist intermediaries because they face high bureaucratic transaction costs when claiming welfare benefits. However, relying on intermediaries inhibits individuals from gaining useful bureaucratic experience and know-how, further entrenching their dependency on this clientelist system. A large-scale field experiment in rural Mexico that reduces the costliness of claiming social programs by providing a facilitator trained to assist citizens in the application process tests this argument. I find that reducing bureaucratic transaction costs nearly doubled the number of claims made through non-clientelist avenues. Treatment also weakened the belief that entitlements must be reciprocated with political support and diminished approval of quid-pro-quo exchanges, two key norms that sustain clientelism. Finally, the intervention reduced partisan identification, especially with traditionally clientelist parties. An important implication of this paper is that reducing the costs that citizens face in interacting with the state can weaken clientelism and bolster individuals' political autonomy.
Motivated Brokers: An Ethnography of Political Brokers during the Electoral Off-Season
Abstract: I use data from in-depth interviews with party leaders and political brokers during the electoral off-season to show that brokers are not only motivated by electoral payoffs. Brokers also procure their clients’ esteem across electoral cycles to secure their positions. I argue that motivation to maximize electoral return during elections differs from the one to maximize their tenure during the electoral off-season. While the first requires strategic distribution according to electoral preferences, the second requires brokers to procure esteem and trust within their communities.
(paper)
How Election Officials’ Political Preferences Affect Electoral Outcomes (with F. Daniel Hidalgo).
Abstract: In Mexico, ordinary citizens are invited to participate as poll workers if the first letter of their last name and their month of birth is randomly drawn. Although the random draw of invitations is meant to form impartial polling committees, accepting to participate can be politically motivated. We match registered poll workers for the 2012 and 2009 elections in a northern state in Mexico to a unique data set of party sympathizers to test whether poll workers’ party sympathies affect election outcomes. Using the proportion of eligible party sympathizers to serve as poll workers, we instrument for citizen poll workers’ political preferences. We find that having a party sympathizer as a poll worker increases the vote share for that party by about 0.4%. Our findings have important implications for poll worker recruitment through lottery systems where compliance can be a problem.
(available upon request)
Making sense of rater disagreement using item response theory: methods for recruitment, evaluation, and interpretation in annotation tasks (with James Dunham and Adam J. Berinksy)
We propose a method for measuring performance in rating or labeling tasks. In contrast with statistics based on agreement that describe items or the task, our approach identifies characteristics of individual raters that in turn influence agreement. We measure the extent to which individuals’ ratings reflect latent item scores. We also identify raters’ tendency to give high or low ratings across items. This follows from an item-response-theoretic understanding of the annotation task as an instance of locating items’ unobserved scores and raters’ thresholds in a latent space. We demonstrate and assess the method with an application to a task that resulted in low inter-rater reliability. These results suggest rater recruitment strategies as well as procedures to evaluate and interpret their work.
(available upon request.)
Red Tape, Corruption, and Distributive Politics. (with Aditya Dasgupta)
Abstract: This paper investigates the distributive politics of red tape – the time-consuming bureaucratic hurdles attached to the application for government benefits and services – and its consequences for the distribution of access to government welfare programs. A simple model suggests that red tape has both progressive and regressive effects, tending to exclude not only the wealthiest individuals but also, in the presence of bureaucratic corruption, the very poorest individuals. This is because poorer individuals may be willing to pay but are constrained in their ability to pay the bribes required to clear red tape. This provides arbitrage opportunities for clientelist intermediaries that specialize in cutting red tape in exchange for the political loyalty of poor voters. Evidence is provided using household survey data on access to Below Poverty Line (BPL) cards in India.
(paper)
The Spillover Effect of Economic Cooperation on Civic Life: A Field Experiment in the Chiapas Highlands (pre-analysis plan)
This project seeks to understand how citizens build effective skills and tools to both collectively organize and individually effectively engage with the state. Specifically, the experiment aims to explore whether the creation of skills to successfully coordinate savings groups can transfer to other spheres of life. Borrowing from the literature on education, this project seeks to better understand whether transferable skills for interacting with the state can be built in contexts where the state is barely present. The experiment randomizes the expansion of their savings group program to other members within the same community. In 65 randomly selected communities, we will ask current members to invite between 1-3 people to join the savings group, de facto expanding the groups. Beyond examining the economic impact of these economic cooperatives, we seek to understand the extent to which the skills learned in creating and sustaining economic cooperation can be transferred and effectively used in civic domains, facilitating citizens’ ability to make claims on the state and the community’s ability to effectively organize to make demands. Outcomes will be measured at the individual level and the community level. Additionally, the design will explore treatment heterogeneity by members’ positionality within their village networks among other relevant characteristics on diffusion and persuasion to join savings groups.
Navigating the State as an Undocumented Immigrant: A Field Experiment in California's Central Valley (pre-analysis plan, to come)
This project exploits the recent expansion of welfare benefits to previously ineligible undocumented immigrants. This project seeks to understand how undocumented immigrants navigate the welfare bureaucracy in a context where they hold no political rights and the role that intermediary organizations play in the access in immigrants’ access to welfare benefits. This field experiment is intended to piggyback on the survey. The experiment randomizes different forms of assistance to the eligible population in accessing California Food Assistance Program (food stamps). Respondents will be offered direct help from a partner organization, direct contact with a welfare office, or an informational pamphlet. Randomization will occur at the census tract level during the validation process, and outcomes will be collected at the respondent level through the survey.
Political Brokerage as a Profession (with Pablo Balán)
This project asks the question: what is the long-term economic payoff of working as a party intermediary? Do intermediaries attain upward social mobility? To tackle these questions, we implement the first study of political intermediaries' long-run social and economic trajectory. We use two unique and previously untapped rosters of party intermediaries active in the late 1990s produced by the PRI, one of Mexico’s largest political parties. We interviewed former party intermediaries now in their 60s and 70s and conduct a phone life history survey. As a control group, we survey neighboring individuals who were on the second roster of party sympathizers who were never selected to be party intermediaries. We find that, although today political intermediaries are not much better off than their neighbors in terms of wealth, their children are much better educated, have many more family members involved in politics, and are more likely to hold local office.