Barrio Leaders as Agents for the Party and State: Implications for Governance

• In Event: Civil Society and Social Movements in the Global South

Abstract

Outside of the urban core, states often rely on trusted neighborhood-level intermediaries to connect residents and to the state by collecting key demographic data and communicating grassroots concerns. For example, elected leaders of neighborhood communal action board (Juntas de Acción Comunal) in Colombia help residents navigate bureaucracy and provide up-to-date information about the neighborhood to municipal decision-makers with less detailed knowledge. In Latin America and elsewhere, these intermediary local leaders are often co-opted into clientelist networks where politicians use their knowledge and community standing to gain votes in exchange for favors, leaving local leaders as agents with multiple principals. When local social leaders multitask as both neighborhood brokers and neighborhood governors, does their brokerage work affect the quality of their grassroots governance work?

When local leaders acting as brokers can increase turnout, their political mobilization efforts make them better at grassroots governance, but when turnout is difficult, performance monitoring by politicians encourages local leaders to misreport demographic data to the municipal government. My fieldwork in Santa Marta, Colombia, reveals that, particularly in the periphery of urban areas, residents are often originally from neighboring municipalities, and prefer to return there to vote. For brokers working in urban neighborhoods, residents that refuse to vote at the neighborhood polling station lower the turnout rates in the neighborhood, which negatively impacts a broker’s performance statistic (votes / neighborhood population). In response, brokers under-report the number of residents in the neighborhood on informal membership files collected by the municipal government, which has negative ramifications for neighborhood development and good governance.

I test the relationship between voter turnout and data misreporting in Colombia using qualitative interview data, voter registration files, a unique disaggregated administrative dataset on neighborhood association membership, and population estimates from Facebook’s Data for Good program. When local leaders, acting as brokers, expect that turnout in future elections will be poor, they mask their poor performance by under-reporting data on neighborhood residency levels. I further explore the downstream effects of data misreporting on communal action board leader re-election rates and margin of victory collected during additional fieldwork in April 2020.

Author

• Deanna Kolberg, University of Michigan