Indigenous Politics
The Long Shadow of Extraction: The Origins of Indigenous Autonomy Demands (book manuscript accepted at Princeton University Press)
Research from this project featured in the Global Development Review Podcast, Governance Uncovered Podcast, and Social Science Matrix Research Highlights.
Extraction, Assimilation, and Accommodation: The Historical Foundations of Indigenous-State Relations in Latin America. 2024. American Political Science Review.Included in the APSA Public Scholarship Program (write-up by Syeda ShahBano Ijaz).
Why do some indigenous communities experience assimilation while others obtain government protection for their longstanding institutions and cultures? I argue that historical experiences with labor extraction play a key role. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Latin American governments enacted discriminatory policies that conscripted unpaid indigenous labor to build roads and railways. Communities exposed to this extraction faced a common enemy, increasing collective action capacity within and across communities. Over time, this ability to collectively mobilize endured and enabled native groups to obtain more substantial government protections for their institutions and cultures. I test this argument using an original natural experiment in which communities’ exposure to unpaid labor conscription on a 1920s Peruvian highway was as-if randomly assigned. I combine this design with historical data on indigenous rebellions and community-level collective action, as well as contemporary data on community conflict with outsiders, language survival, and the persistence of indigenous institutions. The theory and evidence shed new light on the long-term effects of discriminatory policies on indigenous groups’ political power.
Why do some indigenous groups achieve coethnic political representation while others do not? In this paper, I highlight the primary role of communal property in shaping indigenous representation. While scholars often laud the developmental benefits of communal land titling, I argue that formalizing collectively held land can inhibit indigenous coordination to achieve political representation. Where communal land is informally held, indigenous groups are more likely to invest in traditional institutions that facilitate collective action to elect coethnic candidates to political office. Conversely, titling communal property secures indigenous land access but in the process erodes traditional institutions that would otherwise promote collective action during elections. I test my argument using a multi-method approach that includes interviews and experiments with three-hundred Peruvian indigenous leaders, historical land-title data, and information scraped from mayoral candidate CVs. The findings suggest that the oft-cited economic benefits of collective property may generate negative political effects.
Autonomy has long been regarded as a principal solution to indigenous groups' persistent marginalization from state-administered distributive politics. Despite its promise, however, autonomy also presents indigenous communities with a series of new challenges in obtaining access to needed public goods and services. The fundamental issue involves an autonomy-representation dilemma: autonomy provides indigenous groups with greater control over local governance, but that increased independence from the state may imply that indigenous leaders have fewer resources and administrative capacity to respond to local demands. As such, pursuing coethnic representation within the state might--under certain conditions--provide a preferable way for indigenous groups to obtain needed goods and services. Drawing on natural experimental evidence and an original survey of indigenous community presidents from Peru, I first demonstrate that achieving coethnic political representation within the state can expand indigenous groups' access to the public good they most need: water. I then illustrate how capacity constraints that arise from autonomy have prevented native groups in Bolivia's autonomous municipalities from achieving similar distributive gains. Ultimately, the findings provide insights for understanding the sources of--and potential institutional remedies for--persistent distributive inequalities between indigenous and non-indigenous groups in the Americas and beyond.
Awarded an Honorable Mention for the Sage Prize, APSA Comparative Politics Section
Governments in the Global South have historically lacked bureaucratic capacity in peripheral areas, making it difficult for central states to maintain order and implement their preferred policies. This paper explores when central governments invest in establishing bureaucratic presence. We focus on the pivotal role of twentieth-century peasant mobilization, which provided an important impetus for incumbents to create bureaucratic agencies. Using a novel dataset of bureaucratic presence and municipal-level data on peasant collective action in mid-twentieth-century Peru, we show that the Peruvian president responded to peasant mobilization by investing in new bureaucratic offices that could respond to peasant demands. We further demonstrate that these investments in bureaucratic offices endured, enabling the implementation of pro-peasant policies and reducing violence during the Shining Path insurgency of the late twentieth century. This suggests a surprising reversal: early peasant mobilization is associated with a long-term reduction in peasant unrest.
State efforts to expand education often faced opposition from entrenched local strongmen, or bosses, who were resistant to funding potentially invasive state projects and increasing literacy among otherwise disenfranchised groups. This paper argues that weak states could overcome this obstructionism through a strategy of balancing, which created new subnational executive positions to undermine bosses' monopoly on local power. We evaluate our argument leveraging a natural experiment and novel data on 12,000 Peruvian sub-municipal units from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. We exploit as-if random variation in the appointment of a justice of the peace, the chief institution through which gamonalismo (bossism) was solidified and---in some cases---created. We show that the Peruvian government responded to increases in gamonalismo by creating new local-level executive positions (lieutenant governors). We further demonstrate that this balancing allowed the state to conduct a 1902 education census, which was otherwise opposed and often blocked by local bosses.
The decision of states to enforce property rights has been a primary target of analysis in political economy. This article examines a still under-explored question: when do poor and marginalized populations receive access to secure property rights? Our empirical focus is Indigenous populations in Latin America, which have long faced uneven access to secure property rights. Exploiting exogenous variation in land value---as a result of railway construction and relative altitude---and the timing of a national disenfranchisement reform in late nineteenth-century Peru, we show that conflicts over valuable Indigenous land were more likely to occur when Indigenous groups lacked political power. We demonstrate that the state's failure to reliably enforce Indigenous property rights subsequently led these groups to seek alternative forms of defense of their land, including the formation of pan-ethnic organizations in the early twentieth century. We further show that Indigenous groups with valuable land refused state offers of property rights until the franchise was restored in 1979. Our findings have important implications for understanding the causes and consequences of uneven property rights enforcement. Specifically, political power is essential for the defense of valuable land; lacking access to the vote, groups develop substituting, non-electoral forms of mobilization to defend their property rights.
Party System Erosion: Evidence from Peru.
Party Politics. 2020. In representative democracies, political parties play a central role in linking voters to the state. Yet, in many young democracies, parties often fail to fulfill this key responsibility, providing neither accountability for poor politician performance nor effective and accurate representation of citizens' preferences. Increasingly, parties have sought to implement internal democratization reforms, which increase voter voice in party decisions. Many of these reforms (e.g., party primaries and binding referenda on party positions) are costly to entrenched party leaders, who must cede control over important choices. Yet, we argue that even lower-cost reforms---such as the opportunity to provide non-binding feedback on the party and its platform---can be effective in re-engaging voters. In contexts of low party trust and elite capture of political parties, voters are more likely to view party efforts to solicit their feedback as a sign of respect; this increases their sense of efficacy and political interest, resulting in enduring increases in voter attachment to the adopting party. Drawing on evidence from a large-scale field experiment with Ecuadorian voters and a well-known political party, we find that the adoption of low-cost internal democratization reforms increases voters' sense of efficacy, political interest, and reported ties to our party partner. These effects are particularly strong for historically excluded groups, especially when paired with a broader party commitment to inclusion. The results show that even low-cost reforms can restore faith in discredited political institutions and---in the
Conquering powers routinely adopt state-directed nationalization projects that seek to make the boundaries of the nation coterminous with the (newly expanded) boundaries of the state. To this end, they implement policies that elevate the economic status of individuals who embrace the national identity of the conquering power and discriminate against those who do not. This article develops a formal model that illuminates when such policies succeed or fail. We show that the effectiveness of discrimination hinges on the perceived longevity of rule by the conquering power. If the popular perception is that such rule will be short-lived, then discrimination will backfire, as dissident parents exert greater effort to transmit the marginalized national identity to their children. This intense intergenerational socialization more than compensates for the negative wealth effects of discrimination. If, on the other hand, rule under the conquering power is perceived to be long-lasting, then discrimination will achieve the aims for which it is intended. Case studies on the Chilean occupation of Tacna, Perú (1880-1929) and the Prussian occupation of the Danish-German border region of Schleswig-Holstein (1866-1920) illustrate the logic of the model.
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Awarded the Leon Weaver Best Paper Prize, APSA Representation and Electoral Systems Section
In representative democracies, political parties play a central role in linking voters to the state. Yet, in many young democracies, parties often fail to fulfill this key responsibility, providing neither accountability for poor politician performance nor effective and accurate representation of citizens' preferences. The inability of parties to form strong and enduring connections with voters provides a fertile ground for the emergence of non-democratic ideas and politicians. Using evidence from the case of Ecuador, a country with an exceptionally weak party system, this paper examines when otherwise weak parties form enduring ties with voters. We first highlight two central challenges to parties in Ecuador and beyond: low trust in and engagement with the political system and control of parties by entrenched, personalistic leaders, or caudillos. Drawing on evidence from a field experiment with Ecuadorian voters and a well-known political party, we find that parties can address both challenges by providing voters an opportunity to participate in defining the party's platform. Such participation increases voters' sense of efficacy, their political interest, and their support and trust in the political party and its leaders. The results shed light on a relatively low-cost way that discredited political institutions might be strengthened to prevent democratic erosion.
As increasingly large shares of the developing world’s population come to live in cities, it is important to examine the effects of political, fiscal, and administrative decentralization on urban governance and service delivery. Relevant academic scholarship and policy research, we show, suggests that clientelism, populism, and local capture often persist following the establishment of municipal elections. However, conditions such as political competition, independent fiscal resources, and strong civil societies can facilitate more democratic outcomes following decentralization. Meanwhile, our review of literature on decentralization’s impact on two quintessentially “urban” services—land market regulation and urban water and sanitation—suggests that decentralization involves important trade-offs. On the one hand, decentralization can help citizens to pressure more effectively for inclusion and access, particularly in the presence of political competition and a robust civil society. On the other hand, it can make it more difficult for policymakers to address metropolitan-level or long run concerns regarding investments in basic infrastructure that are often not at the forefront of voters’ minds. We also highlight the need for primary data collection, suggest research design strategies that would allow for more rigorous empirical analyses, and highlight important topics that have received very little attention.
A growing literature in political science and economics has addressed how the provision of
information to citizens shapes accountability, corruption, and voter turnout in the developing
world. Yet, only limited attention has been devoted to understanding the information
environments of local-level elected officials, particularly whether they have adequate and
accurate information about the effects of certain nationally funded programs and how different
types of information affect their decisions to implement those programs in their municipalities.
Two questions thus arise: 1) How do officials’ decisions to implement programs change once
they are correctly informed about various program effects? And 2) are local officials more
concerned with the policy outcomes of programs or their potential electoral effects? I use a field experiment with Peruvian
mayors to answer this question.
Funded by: J-PAL Governance Initiative
Implementing partner: IPA
"Instrumental variables: From structural equation models to design-based causal inference."
Sage Handbook of Research Methods in Political Science & International Relations. Eds. Luigi Curini & Robert J. Franzese, Jr. 2020. With Thad Dunning.
Instrumental-variables (IV) analysis bridges structural equation modeling and design-based methods for causal inference. In both frameworks, researchers invoke random or as-if random assignment of units to treatment conditions as a way of addressing concerns about confounding variables. Yet, despite areas of convergence, these different approaches to IV analysis rely on distinct underlying assumptions. In this chapter, we discuss areas of overlap and divergence in the modeling strategies. While structural equations embed several core assumptions in linear response schedules, design-based approaches disaggregate and clarify these assumptions. We then use a hypothetical empirical example—price elasticity of demand for coffee—to illustrate these similarities and differences. The chapter concludes with a note of caution on the use of instrumental variables for political science and international relations: whichever framework is invoked, IV analysis generates results that may not generalize beyond the specific intervention that gave rise to the instrument.
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Disrupting Regulation, Regulating Disruption: The Politics of Uber in the United States.
Perspectives on Politics. 2019. With Ruth Collier and Veena Dubal Platform companies disrupt not only the economic sectors they enter, but also the regulatory regimes that
govern those sectors. We examine Uber in the United States as a case of regulating this disruption in different
arenas: cities, state legislatures, and judicial venues. We find that the politics of Uber regulation does not
conform to existing models of regulation. We describe instead a pattern of disrupted regulation, characterized
by a consistent challenger-incumbent cleavage, in two steps. First, an existing regulatory regime is not deregulated
but successfully disregarded by a new entrant. Second, the politics of subsequently regulating the challenger leads to
a dual regulatory regime. In the case of Uber, disrupted regulation takes the form of challenger capture, an elite driven
pattern, in which the challenger has largely prevailed. It is further characterized by the surrogate representation of
dispersed actors—customers and drivers—who do not have autonomous power and who rely instead on alignment with the challenger
and incumbent. In its surrogate capacity in city and state regulation, Uber has frequently mobilized large numbers of customers
and drivers to lobby for policy outcomes that allow it to continue to provide service on terms it finds acceptable. Because
drivers have reaped less advantage from these alignments, labor issues have been taken up in judicial venues, again primarily
by surrogates (usually plaintiffs’ attorneys) but to date have not been successful. The rise of labor platforms is a cause and consequence of an ongoing change in the nature of work toward a model where workers split time across multiple companies, without the rights and benefits of employment. Given that Uber exercises more control over workers than most other labor platforms, it provides a most likely case for regulation. Nevertheless, regulators in legislative and judicial arenas failed to regulate labor on ride-hailing apps in the first six years. We explain this failure in terms of 1) the problem of classifying a new type of firm, and 2) the relative distribution of power between labor and capital. The weakness of the former emerges from collective action problems and has given rise to a form of skewed surrogate representation. A handful of recent regulatory attempts introduces a note of uncertainty for the future.
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© 2018 Christopher Carter
Adapted from road2stat (Nan Xiao)