Alisha C.

Holland
Junior Fellow, Harvard Society of Fellows
Assistant Professor, Politics, Princeton University
Book title: Forbearance as Redistribution

Introduction

María Luz has a newspaper article plastered to her precarious house in a squatter

settlement in Bogotá, Colombia. The article title reads, “Social Interest Housing: A False

Promise?” It chides the Colombian government for excluding the poor from its housing program

through onerous savings requirements. As María Luz reasons, the absence of state housing

alternatives “protects” her house built in the city’s slums without land title: “If the government

will not provide a dignified house and living conditions for my family, then it has no right to take

me off this land.”1

María Luz is similar to tens of millions of Latin Americans who have accessed housing,

jobs, and services not through state provision, but through the violation of property laws. These

informal welfare benefits do not appear on any government balance sheet or international report.

Yet they often surpass government social expenditures in magnitude. Think about the case of

housing: from 1950 to 2000, almost two-thirds of housing construction in Colombia has occurred

informally. The state has built just 3 percent of the housing stock for the poor (DNP 2007: 8).

This phenomenon is not confined to Latin America. In Turkey, the rent payments that squatters

save by using state or private land to build their own houses are worth more than triple the value

of all government social assistance (Başlevent and Dayıoğlu 2005: 37). Legal tolerance thus can

result in substantial transfers of land and resources. Yet rarely are enforcement decisions

incorporated into analyses of politics or social policy.

1
Author interview, Bogotá, Colombia, September 5, 2012.

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 The idea of choices to enforce the law may seem counterintuitive. Conventional wisdom

holds that limited enforcement reflects an impotent state that cannot act otherwise. On the one

hand, a state can deter and penalize all offenses with sufficient police, judges, and bureaucrats.

Few states, particularly in low and middle-income countries, have this fiscal luxury (Becker and

Stigler 1974; Becker 1968; Centeno and Portes 2006; Geddes 1994; O’Donnell 1993). On the

other hand, enforcement can lag due to principal-agent problems in which politicians struggle to

monitor their agents. Police and bureaucrats may accept bribes or shirk in their responsibilities.

Douglass North (1990: 59) emphasizes: “Enforcement in Third World economies is uncertain not

only because of ambiguity of legal doctrine (a measurement cost), but because of uncertainty

with respect to the behavior of the [government] agent.” Weak administrative capacity thus

limits enforcement (Dimitrov 2009; Gans-Morse 2012; Lipsky 1980; Markus 2015; McCubbins,

Noll, and Weingast 1987).

In light of standard expectations, widespread violations of property laws are unsurprising

in developing countries. Far more puzzling are instances when governments do enforce their

laws. Ecuador and Rwanda evict squatters, while their equally poor respective neighbors, Peru

and Uganda, do not (Dosh 2010; Goodfellow 2012). State capacity tends to change over the

course of decades (if not centuries). Yet enforcement fluctuates quickly. After decades of

encroachments, Colombia removed thousands of street vendors that had built entire stores in the

middle of major avenues to sell everything from car parts to feather dusters in the late 1990s.

Enforcement then stopped again in the 2000s (Chapter 4). Equally nettlesome questions arise as

to why “strong” states tolerate legal violations. The United States deports fewer illegal

immigrants than countries that face much smaller immigration flows, such as Germany

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(Ellermann 2009). Chile can compel the rich to pay taxes (Bergman 2009), but allows street

vendors to operate in some city areas while enforcing vigorously in others (Chapter 5).

These scattered examples raise broad questions about enforcement politics: Why do

governments tolerate the violation of their own laws and regulations? And when do they enforce

them? Why is enforcement stable and uniform in some contexts, and volatile in time or space in

others? These broad questions give rise to more micro-level questions about how ordinary

citizens, bureaucrats, and politicians view enforcement. Does the public want more

enforcement? Are these “bad” laws that do not reflect majority views? Do politicians try to

change enforcement and hit bureaucratic resistance?

This book investigates how well theories of distributive politics can make sense of

variation in enforcement once we account for the redistributive consequences. My central

argument, which is elaborated in the next chapter, is that politicians choose not to enforce the

law, a behavior that I call forbearance, when it is in their electoral interest. Focusing on laws

that the poor violate, I argue that their incentives hinge on two factors: the social policy context,

and particularly, the targeting and type of government social expenditures; and second, the

electoral geography, by which I mean the ways that class groups are split across political

districts. Politicians turn to forbearance when formal welfare policies are inadequate and they

depend on the poor’s votes to win office. Enforcement becomes possible when politicians can

offer the poor formal versions of the same goods, or they can cut poor voters out of their winning

coalition.

The focus is Latin America, a middle-income region where many governments are

capable of enforcing their laws, but sharp income inequality and residential segregation create

different incentives to do so depending on where politicians seek office. I select city cases that

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vary along the principal independent variables under both my theory and competing state

capacity-based explanations. The cases span a city known for its capable institutions, Santiago,

Chile, and cities with more middling capacities that divide the electorate into a single catchall

district, Bogotá, Colombia, and into many income-segregated districts, Lima, Peru.

My argument underscores the strategic—and deeply democratic—nature of enforcement

against laws that the poor violate. “Weak” enforcement in urban Latin America does not

necessarily imply a weak state that cannot regulate the behavior of its citizens. To the contrary,

forbearance can indicate healthy electoral democracy in which politicians are responsive to poor

voters and choose not to enforce laws that conflict with local preferences. This theory naturally

suggests counterintuitive policy conclusions: reforms to strengthen the welfare state may do

more to build the rule of law than additional funding for police and bureaucrats. Successful

democratization and reforms to increase the poor’s political power, if unaccompanied by

improvements in social policy, can erode enforcement.

I am hardly the first to note that politicians manipulate enforcement for electoral ends.

But the twin challenges of comparing enforcement effort given unknown offense levels, and

separating situations when governments cannot enforce the law from those when they will not

enforce it, mean that forbearance rarely has been documented empirically. I do not tackle these

challenges in a single blow. Rather, I take a multi-method approach in which observations about

how a range of actors behaves—namely citizens, bureaucrats, mayors, and presidents—are used

to distinguish my theory of forbearance. I document a series of anomalies in standard state

capacity-based theories and show how an electoral theory of forbearance elegantly reconciles

them. Varied types of evidence from qualitative interviews, administrative records, public

opinion surveys, campaign platforms, and focused experiments mean the combined findings are

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difficult to dismiss as measurement error alone.

The concept and methods developed can apply to many types of forbearance, including

those that benefit the rich, but the empirics focus on two of the most consequential legal

violations for the lives of the poor, the taking of property for commercial purposes (street

vending) and residential purposes (squatting). Social and corporate welfare rarely are included

in the same study; likewise, forbearance that aids the poor merits a separate analysis. It comes as

little surprise that the rich can use their money and power to change enforcement outcomes.

Instances when the poor turn the law in their favor are more unexpected and instructive about

electoral politics, given that the poor primarily have their votes to offer. The structure of laws

that the poor and rich violate also tends to differ: property owners are less interested in using

their labor to appropriate capital and more invested in protecting their wealth against seizures.

As Anatole France (1905) famously observed, “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids, the

rich, as well as the poor, to sleep under the bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.” In

this spirit, street vending and squatting chiefly affect the poor in need of property, not the

wealthy in need of property protection.

Chapter 2 explores how ordinary citizens think about forbearance and social policy

provision. The chapter examines an intuitive idea: if forbearance serves as a form of

redistribution, then canonical models developed to understand redistributive preferences should

apply, and even more cleanly, to forbearance. Many forms of social spending in Latin America

historically have been truncated, meaning that whatever their degree of universality on paper,

they covered those with formal employment and middle incomes in practice (Haggard and

Kaufman 2008; Lindert, Skoufias, and Shapiro 2006). There is little reason to expect the Latin

American poor to support more state spending if they are not the beneficiaries. Instead, because

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the poor are the primary violators of laws against squatting and street vending and stand to gain

resources, class divisions should be even sharper around forbearance. To test these claims, I

combine original and regional survey data. I show that many tax-based social policies do not

align the electorate along the income scale. In contrast, forbearance generates stronger class

cleavages, provides more credible cues about the political spectrum, and in a survey experiment,

motivates vote choice.

Chapter 3 explores the mechanisms that link the national social policy context to local

enforcement decisions. Chile, Colombia, and Peru have made different investments in housing

policy, which change the electoral incentives to evict squatters. Truncated housing policies in

Colombia and Peru have led the poor to demand and organize around forbearance and linked

forbearance to pro-poor distributive cues. Politicians believe that they lose votes if they enforce

in the majority-poor districts where squatting tends to occur. Chile’s substitutive housing policy,

in contrast, has focused popular demands on housing authorities and associated forbearance with

cheating the welfare bureaucracy. Mayors not only face fewer land invasions, they also see a

political mandate to control them. Of course, countries that do not invest in social policy also

may lack the budgets and bureaucrats to enforce their laws. I separate these circumstances by

showing that mayors create political bottlenecks in which they stop enforcement procedures after

bureaucrats complete their jobs. I also adapt the idea of elasticity from economics, or how one

variable (in this case, enforcement) changes in response to another (say, budgets or costs to

enforce), as a way to observe intent. What the idea of intentional non-enforcement means

empirically is that politicians are unwilling to increase enforcement irrespective of the costs.

Enforcement, in other words, is inelastic to improvements in resources. Meanwhile, I expect

enforcement to be highly sensitive to electoral conditions. Consistent with these predictions, I

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show that politicians in Lima and Bogotá have refused to increase enforcement as satellite

imagery has made it cheaper to control squatting. But they have enforced when the political

costs are low, as in the unusual cases when the rich occupy land illegally.

Chapter 4 examines how mayors use enforcement against street vendors to appeal to

voters in citywide elections in Lima and Bogotá. I use the same idea of elasticity to probe how

enforcement responds to fiscal conditions over time since the introduction of direct elections for

mayor. I show that enforcement peaks in Lima and Bogotá following major economic

downturns, when state capacity is close to a nadir. Bogotá reverts to forbearance in the 2000s,

just as the economy and police force improve, while Lima continues to enforce. Enforcement

thus varies independent from resources. I rationalize these patterns by considering the core

constituencies of different mayoral administrations. Some mayors have incorporated

forbearance into their political platforms to attract lower-class core constituencies. Enforcement

alienates poor voters. I suggest that voters use enforcement positions as cues of a mayor’s

broader affinities, generating income-based voting patterns even in elections with very weak

standard Left-Right divides. Thus, forbearance can function almost like a programmatic policy,

or what I call an informal welfare policy, in that mayors stake out clear electoral positions that

align the electorate. Forbearance also can involve real ideological content. Not just a matter of

political posturing, I show that the Constitutional Court of Colombia has offered a principled

defense of forbearance toward street vending as necessary to protect the poor’s well-being in the

absence of state welfare policies.

Chapter 5 tests a core prediction of my theory that electoral rules produce different

enforcement patterns. Specifically, I hypothesize that decentralized cities that elect multiple

mayors in sub-city districts respond to the different desires of local voters across space, while

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centralized cities that elect a single mayor have enforcement patterns that are uniform across

space and vary with different core constituencies over time. I exploit the differences in electoral

rules across the cities examined to test this hypothesis. Using data on both offenses and

sanctions against street vending at the district level, I find that enforcement varies with voter

demographics just when cities hold elections at the local level, as in Lima and Santiago. The

number of street vendors is the main determinant of enforcement in centralized cities like

Bogotá. At least one mechanism driving the results is voter demands, not just partisan ideology,

as illustrated by following the political careers of mayors who run for office in different types of

districts. Even mayors from Chile’s most conservative and self-disciplined party sometimes

enforce rules against street vendors, yet sometimes forebear instead. Their choices depend on

the electoral context.

While the bulk of this book focuses on politicians at the local and city level, who cannot

change the design of social policy in the short run, Chapter 6 turns to the national level. It

considers why presidents and their parties, who can alter social policy, rely on forbearance rather

than tax-based forms of redistribution. I suggest a theory based on several forms of policy

feedback effects. Like public welfare policies, informal welfare policies foster widespread

public expectations, give rise to coordination problems, and change institutional capacities in

ways that become resistant to change. The costs of switching to a model of state welfare

provision are particularly high in multilevel democracies where change requires shifting the

enforcement behavior of local politicians. While the evidence and variation are insufficient at

the national level to pinpoint the effects of forbearance, I trace the history of social housing

policy and (more briefly, given its many inherent difficulties and multiple forms) employment

policy, considering how major historical shifts, such as the dictatorship in Chile, were able to

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disrupt the informal welfare model. In countries that never underwent such political shocks,

such as Colombia and Peru, informal welfare policies have proved resilient to change, even when

broadly recognized as inefficient ways to resolve distributive demands. Once legal violations are

widespread, politicians see electoral rewards from providing reactive social policies, meaning

measures to legalize and improve property seized through law breaking. But reactive social

policies increase the value of property law violations and reinforce expectations that violations

will end in legalization, which further cements forbearance. Many Latin American governments

thus have developed stable informal welfare regimes that supplement and sustain truncated

formal ones.

Exit from the informal welfare model, however, is possible. To increase the variation at

the country level, Chapter 7 considers a case where forbearance has been ended endogenously,

Istanbul, Turkey. As in the Latin American cases examined in depth, Turkish politicians

historically relied on forbearance to win the poor’s support and patch over welfare state

deficiencies. But I demonstrate that the electoral incentives to enforce have changed in Istanbul.

The growth of a lower-middle class has led to a sustained enforcement turn, suggesting that the

informal welfare state could be on the wane if Latin America’s equitable growth continues. The

analysis of a more ethnically and religiously diverse city also opens up questions about how

social cleavages affect the use of forbearance, both within Latin America and beyond.

Stepping back, this book helps explain the form that welfare regimes take in much of the

Global South. A growing literature focuses on why Latin American welfare states are “laggards”

in comparative perspective, and what explains their uneven progress toward more universal

policies in the contemporary period (e.g. Carnes and Mares 2014, 2015; Garay Forthcoming;

Haggard and Kaufman 2008; Huber and Stephens 2012; De La O 2015; Magaloni, Diaz-

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Cayeros, and Estévez Forthcoming; Pribble 2010, 2013; Wibbels and Ahlquist 2011; Wibbels

2013). Looking beyond the confines of state social expenditures presents a different view. Far

more redistribution of property has occurred in Latin America than is commonly recognized,

through the active manipulation of laws in the poor’s favor. Including forbearance toward the

poor in the picture makes sense of why governments have made progress in reforming some

social areas, such as cash transfers and health care, while other “big-ticket” policies with

effective informal substitutes, such as housing and employment policy, remain untouched.

The benefits from forbearance matter because their redistributive effects can be so

substantial. For example, about 13 percent of the population in Lima, Peru currently lives in a

house acquired through a land invasion and 10 percent work as street vendors. According to

calculations in Chapters 3 and 4, forbearance toward these populations is tantamount to transfers

of about $750 million each year. In contrast, cash transfer programs cover just 7 percent of

households nationwide (and almost none in Lima) and cost the government about $250 million

annually. Furthermore, cash transfers programs spread in the 2000s, whereas as early as the

1960s, land invasions were recognized to be a “legitimate part of housing policy” and housed

half a million people in Lima alone (Collier 1976: 29). Thus, informal transfers can dwarf

targeted state assistance per capita in their coverage, depth, and historical import.

Allowing the poor to claim commonly held public resources, such as land, is

redistributive in the same way that giving the poor commonly raised tax revenues is the

backbone of modern welfare states. It is the politics of these processes that differ. Forbearance

occurs through state inaction toward legal violations, which makes its costs less visible and its

benefits less secure. But precisely the fact that these informal transfers do not require a welfare

bureaucracy or legislative debate also makes their implementation more credible, especially in

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contexts where promises of state welfare solutions often fail to come to fruition. A deep

normative tension thus runs through this book: forbearance offers much-needed support,

particularly for groups outside the aegis of the formal welfare state, yet it also can perpetuate

truncated welfare states, exclusionary citizenship regimes, and stratified economies. Whether

forbearance is desirable thus depends on the willingness of Latin American welfare states to

provide for the poor’s social needs in other ways, and the time horizons over which we evaluate

its effects.

A focus on the distributive consequences of law enforcement also highlights an under-

recognized political factor in shaping weak institutions. Different levels of enforcement have

implications for our theories about institutional design, effects, and change (Levitsky and Murillo

2009). But we still know little about the sources of different enforcement outcomes. If opinions

about enforcement differ by class, attention to the way electoral boundaries are drawn can

explain both when enforcement occurs and its variability across space and time. Forbearance is

stable in contexts where politicians face electoral districts of mostly poor voters. A gap opens

between the written law and behavior in some districts, or what Guillermo O’Donnell (1993)

labels “brown spots.” But in districts that mix different class groups, forbearance shifts with the

constituency courted by politicians. Uneven enforcement across time, or what I call “brown

periods,” can be even more consequential for electoral politics.

My findings also challenge the assumption that the central axis of politics forms between

the Left that favors tax-based redistribution and the Right that resists it. Most scholars start with

this view of the political spectrum, which is derived from advanced industrial democracies where

the state has a long tradition of pro-poor redistributive action. They then struggle with what

Robert Kaufman (2009) calls the “inconvenient facts” that Latin America’s poor do not demand

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more redistribution than the rich or vote for leftist politicians who advocate it. Clientelism,

populism or characteristics of informal labor contracts are the dominant explanations for why the

poor fail to ally consistently with their natural representatives on the Left. But this view of

politics is inappropriate for contexts where much downward redistribution happens by the state’s

leave, rather than through the state’s hand. The contribution of this book is to show that the poor

do have shared material interests that motivate their organizing and electoral behavior. These

interests lie in forbearance. In other words, we may be looking for the wrong redistributive

cleavage in developing democracies that have yet to develop modern welfare states. The

political spectrum, particularly for urban elections, often makes more sense when defined by

enforcement positions.

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