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This book improves understandings of how and why clientelism endures in Latin America and why state policy is often ineffective. Political scientists and sociologists, the contributors employ ethnography, targeted interviews, case studies, within-case and regional comparison, thick descriptions, and process tracing

This book improves understandings of how and why clientelism endures in Latin America and why state policy is often ineffective. Political scientists and sociologists, the contributors employ ethnography, targeted interviews, case studies, within-case and regional comparison, thick descriptions, and process tracing.

ABSTRACTIn theory, security and resilience in contexts of violence and crime are improved by participatory urban upgrading. Yet, upgrading practices actually demonstrate how vulnerabilities to violence, insecurity and crime are reproduced by state–society and intra‐community power hierarchies. On the one hand, the priorities and perspectives of politicians and bureaucrats continue to take precedence over the needs and demands of residents of marginalized communities, undermining participation. On the other hand, the internal socio‐political structures of marginalized communities complicate the capacity and willingness of residents and external state actors to engage with each other. The result is that upgrading programmes are not particularly successful in ordering development and security or in creating resilience. Internal processes have a greater impact on residents' choices in their daily struggles to survive and thrive, but the resilience they create is limited because power and resources tend to be centralized and sometimes linked to crime groups. This article uses the cases of Kingston (Jamaica) and São Paulo (Brazil) to highlight these power hierarchies and how they impede the resilience project of participatory urban upgrading processes in contexts of crime and violence.

Based on the varying views of power under neoliberalism, the literature draws divergent conclusions regarding its quality as a policy approach. Neoliberal economic restructuring is generally regarded as positive by the conservative public choice school, as positive by some Weberians and negative by others, and as overwhelmingly negative by Marxians and feminists. Critics usually present restructuring as something that is happening "to" us, that is presented to us as a fait accompli, handed down by bureaucrats and elected officials influenced by international business. This view obscures the role of the average citizen in pushing restructuring forward, not only in allowing it to happen, but also in actively performing it. In response, this paper suggests a global/local intersectional dialectic that locates the expansion of neoliberalism in global and individual sites without obscuring the various oppressions generated by restructuring.

Si le clientélisme, l'achat de votes, le patronage et les autres échanges personnels de même nature ont des répercussions négatives sur la démocratie, la chaîne de causalité n'est pas unidirectionnelle. Dans maintes démocraties en émergence, la précarité des assises du régime et la réactivité erratique du gouvernement dans des économies stagnantes incitent les politiciens et les électeurs à recourir aux échanges personnels. Or, lorsque les acteurs s'en remettent aux échanges personnels pour combler les brèches dans la représentation et la réactivité, ils choisissent des méthodes qui vont à l'encontre de la consolidation des institutions démocratiques, sans toutefois accepter l'asservissement à l'autorité. La dynamique des échanges personnels accompagne des changements sociopolitiques de plus grande envergure et ces échanges sont plus ou moins négociables et participatifs, selon le contexte. La présente étude vise à examiner cette dynamique au moyen de l'étude du cas de la ville de Mexico, où les gouvernements du Parti révolutionnaire démocratique (PRD) et leurs électeurs s'emploient à promouvoir la démocratie et l'égalité, tout en se livrant à des échanges personnels.

Clientelism, vote-buying, patronage, and other such personal exchanges have a negative effect on democracy, but the chain of causality is not unidirectional. In many developing democracies, weak regime consolidation and erratic government responsiveness in stagnant economies motivate politicians and voters to use personal exchanges. When actors opt for personal exchanges to fill gaps in representation and responsiveness, they are choosing methods at odds with the consolidation of democratic institutions, but they are not surrendering to authoritarian subjugation. The dynamics of personal exchanges accompany broader sociopolitical changes and are negotiable and participatory to a degree dependent on their context. This paper seeks to analyze these dynamics through a case study of Mexico City, where the governments of the Democratic Revolutionary Party and their constituents champion democracy and equality, while also engaging in personal exchanges. Adapted from the source document.

AbstractPRD politicians and officials widely use clientelism to structure their relationships with citizens. This is due not only to the entrenchment of clientelism in Mexican politics or to high rates of poverty and inequality, but also to the limited institutionalization of democratic rules inside the party. The last stems largely from the party's electoral strategy in its formative years, and has resulted in uncontrolled factional battles that play out through clientelism. The Brazilian PT faced external and internal conditions quite similar to those of the PRD, but its early focus on organization building and policy change allowed it to avoid clientelism to a greater degree. This analysis problematizes the trend of using minimalist definitions that assume clientelism to be nondemocratic because these approaches result in conceptual stretching and decreased explanatory power.