Trading Favors: Politics, Service Delivery, and Civil Society in Brazil

• In Event: The Political Economy of Service Delivery in Developing Democracies

Abstract

How do citizens influence the distribution of public services? In this paper, I study the role of community associations as intermediaries in the local political system. These locally based associations are democratic institutions at the most micro level, and I highlight the role of elected association leaders, who often mobilize community members around candidates and oversee implementation of development programs. Drawing on 18 months of fieldwork in Brazil, I test my hypotheses about the perceived role of civil society in local accountability and development with a conjoint experiment conducted with 1,745 rural residents of Ceará, Brazil merged with precinct-level electoral data. In my results, residents perceive that communities will have better public services where the association has strong participation by community members, the association has a president who is responsive to resident concerns, the association has high competition for the position of association president, and the association endorses a specific candidate for city council member. I contribute to our understanding of distributive politics and democratic accountability by emphasizing the collective agency of citizens as they interact with brokers and politicians and by highlighting the role of community associations in enabling marginalized citizens to access the state.

Author

• Alicia Dailey Cooperman, Texas A&M University