Why do governments tolerate the violation of the law and when do they enforce the law? The conventional wisdom is that weak enforcement reflects a weak state unable to implement its laws due to budget and capacity constraints. But, enforcement also has distributive and political consequences. Particularly in cases where the poor violate property laws, tolerance of legal violations can distribute substantial resources and win votes. Yet rarely are enforcement decisions incorporated into analyses of social policy or electoral politics. In contrast, this project examines how electoral incentives shape administrative law enforcement decisions.
This project develops original data on legal violations and enforcement operations to test how the structure and competitiveness of local elections impacts law enforcement in three Latin American cities. It focuses on enforcement against a pair of legal violations, land invasions and unlicensed street vending, due to their consequences for the lives of the urban poor. By examining how enforcement varies across space, time, and sector, this dissertation shows that the design of electoral districts and social programs helps explain why some governments tolerate violations of the poor and others do not. The project involves the collection of two complementary pieces of data: 1) individual-level data on attitudes toward enforcement and social policy, to test the mechanisms behind the observed urban enforcement patterns, and 2) subnational data on enforcement against street vending and land invasions within Colombia, to see whether the theory developed accurately predicts the geographic and temporal distribution of enforcement outside of the cases on which the theory was developed.
The intellectual merit of the project lies in its ability to advance understanding of an alternative and consequential form of distribution in low and middle-income countries. Latin America is considered the most unequal region in the world, yet the region's governments spend less effectively than advanced democracies. This dissertation proposes that tolerance of property law violations can act as a substitute form of redistribution and a way for politicians to win the poor's vote. Understanding the politics of law enforcement is critical because it helps to explain both why certain laws go unenforced and why formal government programs to aid the poor lag. This project also makes an empirical contribution through the collection and dissemination of novel survey and experimental data on class attitudes toward enforcement and social policy.
The broader impact comes in understanding the weak rule of law. Policymakers often seek to improve the implementation of legal regulations. The deforestation of the tropics, the proliferation of precarious shantytowns, and artisanal mining with mercury are just a few examples where domestic and international actors hope to improve regulatory implementation. In explaining variation in enforcement, this research provides insight into the conditions that encourage subnational politicians to apply state norms, even when they conflict with distributive claims. Pinpointing the obstacles to enforcement may provide policymakers the tools and information to craft more effective social programs that substitute for informal transfers and to consider administrative reorganizations that align enforcement incentives.
This project explores why some governments tolerate the violation of property laws by the poor, such as unlicensed street vending and squatting. We examined public attitudes toward enforcement through an original survey fielded in Bogotá, Colombia in August 2013. The objective was to understand how ordinary citizens perceive decisions to enforce laws against street vendors and squatters. A better understanding of societal support for legal violations by the poor can help inform policy on how to shrink the informal sector and promote the rule of law in urban Latin America. The survey resulted in two main findings: first, using an experimental design, we showed that enforcement changes how individuals evaluate and vote for politicians. We provided voters information that a politician would enforce or not enforce regulations against street vendors. The informational treatments strongly affected voters’ perceptions: politicians who promise to enforce property laws are perceived as highly unsympathetic to the poor’s interests, and receive less electoral support, particularly from poor voters. The same politician who promises not to enforce regulations against street vending is perceived as likely to favor the poor’s interests in office, and poor voters are substantially more likely to vote for the candidate. Hence, we can conclude that there are clear electoral consequences of property law enforcement. Particularly when politicians require the support of poor voters to win elections, they may plausibly avoid enforcement to maintain a reputation as sympathetic to the poor’s interests and win the poor’s votes. Second, we showed that support for enforcement is contingent on formal social policies. Individuals who believe that the state offers housing programs that target the poor—or live in districts where housing projects have been built—are more likely to support state enforcement actions like evictions to deter squatting. The basic logic is that squatting is seen as a justifiable behavior when there are no other housing options. The development of social policies directly meets the material needs of potential squatters, and indirectly builds popular support for law enforcement. It is often assumed that laws go unenforced in developing countries due to weak institutions. Indeed, limited police, corrupt bureaucrats or paltry budgets undermine effective enforcement. While institutional limitations are important in many circumstances, the intellectual contribution of this survey research is to show that distributive politics also constrains enforcement. Politicians have strong incentives not to enforce certain laws and regulations, particularly when they run for office in districts with primarily poor voters. If our goal is uniform law enforcement, then the broader policy implication is that the removal of political discretion over enforcement may be more important than the provision of additional resources or bureaucratic training. Putting enforcement decisions in the hands of appointed officials who are less sensitive to the political costs may lead to more uniform and consistent efforts to control property law violations. The other major implication of this research concerns the importance of state social policies. In addition to weak institutions, it is often argued that Latin Americans’ cultural disrespect for formal rules accounts for widespread law breaking and hinders the state’s ability to enforce the law. Instead, this survey research suggests that support for law breaking is highly contingent on the generosity and design of state social policies. When governments offer formal alternatives to the poor, such as housing, they build support and legitimacy for enforcement actions. Hence, policy initiatives to strengthen social welfare provision, and particularly in-kind transfers that meet basic distributive needs, may be central to improving support for the rule of law in the region.
