Determinants of Civil Society Demand-Making: Experimental Evidence from Peru

• In Event: Accountability and Demand-Making in the Global South

Abstract

Citizens’ political engagement is often theorized to enrich representation, accountability, expand rights and generally strengthen democracy. Yet extensive evidence documents that political engagement in younger democracies engage occurs not only to demand rights, policy change, and better government services, but also to ask for targeted goods, at times in exchange for political support. Where particularistic and even clientelistic demand-making become prevalent, core components of democracy such as political competition in elections, political parties and even citizen councils or participatory budgeting can become sites of quid pro quo transactions rather than preference articulation and collective problem-solving. Aside from poverty and vulnerability, little is known about the conditions that induce citizens to initiate clientelistic exchanges, and this field of study rarely intersects with the study of other forms of engagement, leaving unanswered questions about choices and tradeoffs.
This paper examines demand-making by citizens and civil society associations, and whether demand-making strategies are condition on theoretically specified qualities of state institutions. Previous research notes that citizens choose institutionalized tactics if they provide a readily available and efficient means of articulating demands. We argue, however, that citizens in their strategic calculus not only decide what tactics to use but also what type of demands to make. We theorize that partiality and favoritism in government administrative bodies inform the logic of demand-making. Where government jobs and resources are allocated along lines of political alliances or social favoritism, leveraging connections may seem the more rational strategy to advance claims, and particularistic and even clientelistic demand-making are likely to be more prevalent.
Our empirical focus is on the engagement strategies of leaders of civil society associations. Civil society involvement is often seen an engine for political and societal development. While scant, some evidence suggests that associations at times also engage in clientelistic exchanges with officials. We map engagement strategies and test our argument on an original survey of 2300 associational leaders to be carried out in April in urban and peri-urban areas in Peru. An embedded 2x2 survey experiment manipulates institutional characteristics providing information about corruption and information about, as well as instructions on how to use an institutional grievance mechanism designed to stimulate universal demand-making (in this case, complaints to the Ombudsman office). This design will reveal whether partiality in institutions not only induces citizens to make clientelistic demands but also whether it prompts, or alternatively deters, them from using grievance mechanisms as intended. The paper will also add to the study of bottom-up accountability mechanisms, which has struggled to explain the often low level of citizen interest and utilization. In addition, the paper will provide a first ever mapping of the extent to which associations make universalistic or clientelistic demands and the tactics used when doing so.

Authors

• Agnes Cornell, University of Gothenburg

• Marcia Grimes, University of Gothenburg

• Paula Munoz-Chirinos, Universidad del Pacífico