Government Contacting and Lower-Class Political Representation in Latin America

• In Event: Clientelism

Abstract

Although there has been increasing research on political participation and representation in developing democracies – mostly focused on voting and protest behavior – relatively little attention has been paid to political contacting. Yet, direct citizen contacting of government officials is among the most common forms of political activism in many countries, second only to voting. In Latin America roughly a quarter of people contact local and national government officials on a regular basis. Though direct government contacting is often portrayed as symptomatic of clientelistic relationships, it can also be a powerful mechanism through which ordinary citizens express their preferences, hold government officials accountable, and demand adequate representation.

This paper has two goals. First, it uses the robust battery of questions from the LAPOP surveys of 18 Latin American countries to describe contacting behavior across Latin America to better understand who contacts and where. We distinguish between contacting local government officials and contacting officials in the national government, which is arguably much harder to do and may be beyond the capacity of low-income actors to undertake unless they receive support from organizations or political parties. Second, the paper seeks to evaluate the relative importance of individual versus contextual factors in explaining contacting behavior. Though contacting behavior is often seen as a core repertoire of low-income individuals, the results show that in some contexts the affluent contact government officials just as or more often than poor people. The paper argues that individual level resources and attitudes are not enough to explain contacting behavior, rather factors like membership in grass-roots organizations, the strength of political parties, and the nature of government expenditures determine how likely individuals in a given context are to contact government officials.

Because government contacting depends on the strength of organizations and political parties, and on the capacity of the state to deliver basic services, the strength of democratic institutions has an enormous impact on the capacity of low income individuals to demand representation and hold governments accountable through direct demand making. Attention to this important kind of political activism also provides a fuller picture of how inclusive and representative Latin America’s young (and often frail) democracies are of its poorest citizens.

Author

• Claudio A Holzner, University of Utah