Community Leaders, Politicians, and the Public Good in Colombian Neighborhoods (Pre-Recorded)

• In Event: Grassroots Politics: Collective Action, Elites, and Local Political Behavior

Abstract

Community leaders aim to leverage support for political candidates during elections into material improvements in neighborhood conditions, yet many local community leaders fall short in securing these gains. I place community leaders on a two-dimensional accountability spectrum that considers the relationship between community leaders and both the community that appoints them, and the electorally motivated politicians who often fund their work. Accountability in these two directions is key to understanding the immense variation in the functioning of community organizations – ranging from effective social leaders who translate community needs into community improvement to leaders for community organizations that exist on paper only. Specifically, I theorize that two elements of effective social leadership – knowledge of rules and regulations needed to request improvements and political-bureaucratic influence to be able to receive favors from those in power are closely affected by the amount of accountability that a neighborhood leader faces.

I test this theory with a survey experiment and open-ended interviews conducted with 150 Junta de Acción Comunal community leaders throughout the Department of Magdalena in Northwest Colombia. Within comparative politics, community leaders have been depicted as appendages of political machines (Stokes et al 2013, Szwarcberg 2012), political mobilizers held captive by requests from residents (Nichter and Peress 2017), altruistic community-driven negotiators (Baldwin, Auerbach 2019), and decentralized despots. While these examples come from multiple case contexts, this work studies the theoretical conditions under which this variation can co-occur within even the same municipality.

Author

• Deanna Kolberg, University of Michigan