Criminal Violence and Clientelism: Evidence from Mexican Infrastructure Funds

• In Event: Criminal Politics: Political and Criminal Violence

Abstract

How does criminal violence affect the prevalence of clientelism in societies? Recent literature has vigorously explored the consequences of violent crime and criminal organizations for electoral behavior, political parties and state capacity. This paper demonstrates that violence perpetuated by organized crime has another so far unexplored consequence on government policy: it leads to a more clientelistic resource distribution, resulting in the targeting of public resources to government partisan supporters, while neglecting the areas with the greatest socio-economic need within local governments.
I explore the relationship between criminal violence and clientelism using an original dataset on the village-level distribution patterns of Mexican Municipal Social Infrastructure Fund (Fondo de Infrastructura Social Municipal) by municipal presidents between 2012-2017. In Mexico, criminal organizations engaged in drug-trafficking, extortion and other activities have in many instances contested the government’s monopoly on violence in municipal and state levels, and captured local policy-making in in order to facilitate their illicit activities. I argue that public officials in areas controlled by the organized crime are primarily held vertically accountable to criminal organizations, which drastically reduces their accountability and responsiveness to the local population. Rents that local politicians receive from bribes from criminal organizations further reduce their dependence from the local electorate. This lack of accountability provides municipal politicians with greater freedom to rely on clientelism as a distributive strategy, facilitating the targeting of infrastructure funds to their core supporters.
Criminal violence further exacerbates this clientelist dynamics, as politicians use alliances with criminal organizations to suppress local opposition via threats of homicides, kidnappings and extortion, which further reduces the checks on municipal politicians in crime-dominated municipalities. However, if criminal organizations do not control local areas, and do not openly use violence in achieving their ends, clientelistic targeting is likely to be less optimal strategy for local government officials due to its potential electoral cost. Finally, I also argue that the salience of these relationships depends on the nature of political party in government. Non-programmatic parties relying on extensive clientelistic linkages, such as the Mexican PRI (Partido Revolucionario Institucional), are more likely to politicize resource distribution under the presence of criminal violence.
I find evidence for these claims using a difference-in-difference estimation strategy of more than 60 000 Mexican villages, nested in 2400 municipalities, during 2012-2017, making use of the original dataset on within-municipality distribution of social infrastructure funds in Mexico. My results are robust to various specifications and control variables. I complement the statistical approach with the case studies of two municipalities in the state of Puebla –Chignahuapan and Cuetzalan – which allow to understand better the causal mechanisms at play through original fieldwork.

Author

• Mart Trasberg, Tulane University