Chair:
Alejandra Berenice Trejo Nieto (El Colegio de México)
Presenters:
Winston Ardoin (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill): Citizen-State Encounters and Patterns of Participation in Urban Peripheries: Evidence from Rio de Janeiro
How do negative interactions with the state shape patterns of political participation in marginalized communities? We argue that divergent forms of state action—predation through exposure to routinized violence through predatory policing and neglect via the absence of public goods provision—channel citizen mobilization in distinct directions: predation pushes citizens away from the state toward non-state actors and institutions, while neglect motivates claim-making directed at the state. We field a survey experiment of residents of Rio de Janeiro’s favelas (informal urban settlements), where predation and neglect coexist with an uneven terrain of social welfare provision. To exploit variation across neighborhoods, we recruit our sample using geographically micro-targeted ads on Instagram on Facebook to sample residents of particular neighborhoods. In interactive vignette experiments, we vary narratives of state action across different domains of local governance—trash collection, policing, and housing—and measure their effects on two indices of political engagement: respondents’ willingness engagement in a range of political activities and which actors they see as more or less likely to be able to help solve community-level challenges. We disaggregate these activities and actors to test the directionality of engagement in what we term non-state and state-directed political participation. Our preliminary results highlight that debates regarding the determinants of political participation lack a crucial dimension of directionality: distinct patterns of citizen-state encounters produce variegated forms and targets of citizen mobilization and claim-making.
Manuel Cabal Lopez (Leiden University): Foot-Soldiers of the Revolution: Teachers and Land Reform in Mexico
How do weak states implement large-scale redistribution to the poor? The article problematizes the observation in recent research that land reforms are more likely under non-democratic regimes when landed elites break up with the dictator. I argue that, in contexts with low state capacity, dictators must mobilize peasants first. However, peasant mobilization is not straightforward, given that rural communities do not necessarily desire land redistribution. The case of Chiapas (Mexico’s southernmost province) shows that peasants may side with landlords against pro-redistribution politicians because the landlords provide agricultural jobs and local public goods. For this reason, Mexico City used teachers to agitate and mobilize for land reform and to help peasants in the complicated legal process of requesting part of their old masters’ land. Teachers could mobilize peasants because they had already gained the communities’ trust and were the only government representatives in remote rural communities. Empirically, the article achieves two things. First, it clarifies how the post-revolutionary state turned primary school teachers into political agitators, through process tracing methods. Second, it tests a key empirical implication of my argument, the relationship of school presence with land petitions, using original microdata at the municipality level. Theoretically, the article makes two contributions. On the one hand, it contributes to understanding how weak states can achieve large-scale redistributive reforms. On the other hand, it departs from recent research on the political economy of education by showing that schools can strengthen a dictator through teachers’ leadership, not only through textbooks’ symbolic power.
Mustapha Majidi (Hassan First University of Settat): Extractivist Legacy and Civic Mobilization: Governance Dilemmas in Post-Mining Jerada
The closing of coal mines in Jerada, a small town in northeastern Morocco, marks a crucial moment in the town's governance trajectory. Jerada, which was once a prosperous mining center, heavily depended on coal for jobs and local economic growth. The closure of the mines in 2001, influenced by national economic strategies and the decreasing profitability of coal, resulted in the town experiencing a socioeconomic crisis. Using a qualitative approach, by combining documentary analysis of policy frameworks and historical records, this article looks at how the mine closure revealed governance deficiencies in Jerada by demonstrating the limitations of institutional action in the face of social and environmental marginalization. In this context, the article explores the ambivalent role of contestatory civil society. Its entry into municipal institutions following the hirak (movement) (2017/2018) emboldened a hope for change but encountered clientelist practices and a lack of resources. Through the analysis of public policies and social dynamics, this paper offers a reflection on the conditions necessary for inclusive governance in the post-mining period.
