I am a political and urban sociologist interested in macro-historical change and political economy. I focus on Latin America, using comparative, case-study, and mixed-methods approaches. My dissertation research and book project sheds new light on the political effects of urban growth and the dynamics of urban clientelism. I also study the relationship between civil society and the state, as well as problems central to comparative-historical methods and social theory.
Urbanization and political development. The growth of large metropolises has been a defining feature of modernity, but the literature at the intersection of political and urban sociology has said relatively little about how the process of urban population growth itself — as opposed to urban economic growth and the urban public sphere — affects politics. My dissertation and book project, The Political Development of Urban Clientelism, focuses on the relationship between urban population growth and politics in the context of sharp inequality. I examine 20th century Latin America — which experienced the fastest urban expansion in world history, concentrated in squatter settlements — through a comparative analysis of Lima (Peru), Caracas (Venezuela), and Mexico City (Mexico). Drawing on over 20,000 pages of archival data culled from 12 archives, I show that urbanization was a master process that shaped national politics in the region.
In Part I, I argue that urban growth gave rise to clientelist relations which helped to cement precarious regimes in power. The poor were disproportionately represented in the wave of urban growth that started in the 1930s and 1940s. New urban denizens often formed squatter settlements. This put millions of residents in the position of supplicants who requested permission to live on land over which they lacked legal rights and who hoped the state would equip it with urban infrastructure. State and political party officials, meanwhile, sought to harness squatters’ political loyalties to build their bases of support. The existing literature captures many aspects of the resulting relationships in vivid but limited single-case studies. My cross-national comparative analysis and rich data (most of which has never been consulted) allow me to detail a general pattern of urban clientelism in Lima, Caracas, and Mexico City: officials extended tacit permission to squat and help urbanize these new habitats in ways that helped satisfy the urban poor’s basic needs, in exchange for which the leaders of neighborhood associations organized residents to lend political elites conditional support, thereby bolstering political elites in power.
The way that the concentration of the national population in the capital city furthered the concentration of power is best evidenced by early-20th century Mexico. The Mexican countryside was riven with agrarian revolt during the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920) and thereafter. Whereas the post-revolutionary regime was unable to consolidate control in the countryside, it was quite successful in Mexico City. Urban clientelism helped stabilize the Institutional Revolutionary Party’s (PRI) position in power, helping it to rule at almost all levels of government for 71 years. Urban concentration furthered the concentration of power.
In Part II, I focus on the evolution of the neighborhood-level leaders and neighborhood associations that mediated between squatters and political officials in three parts of Mexico City (Iztacalco, Nezahualcóyotl, and Tlalpan). During the 1970s and 1980s, each of these grew to the size of a major city unto itself. In each case, continued urban concentration generated conflicts between older and newer generations of residents that drove newer residents into neighborhood association leaders’ arms for protection, thereby allowing these leaders to mobilize followers for their own ends. Since neighborhood associations now derived authority from the process of urban concentration, they grew increasingly independent of the PRI. This made neighborhood associations powerful in their own right. It also allowed their leaders to peel support away from the regime, contributing decisively to the erosion of the PRI’s base by the late 1980s, and helping to precipitate its decline and eventual fall. Thus, whereas urban concentration furthered the concentration of power in the early-20th century across much of Latin America, further urban concentration diluted power in late-20th century Mexico City.
Civil society and the state. I have written several articles about the relationship between the state and civil society. In one, which is forthcoming at The Sociological Quarterly and which builds off of my study of the state’s relationship with squatter neighborhood leaders in Research in Political Sociology, I intervene in the literature on state autonomy by challenging the view that rule-bounded bureaucracies enable the state to autonomously determine how it will shape society. I examine the Peruvian state’s legalization of squatters’ residential lands in Lima — the largest extension of so-called “urban citizenship” rights in history — on the basis of original data and a mixed-methods research design, showing that rule-boundedness is insufficient to make the state autonomous. The bureaucracy tasked with this initiative met the criteria for autonomy because it was not coopted or controlled by street-level bureaucrats, and it did not respond to social movement pressures or variations in voting. Nevertheless, because it was rule-bounded, during policy implementation the state encountered steadfast societal obstacles who were capable of slowing bureaucratic penetration in some quarters, leading it to allocate these rights disproportionately in others. This suggests that accurately capturing the state’s impact on society requires conceiving of the state bureaucracy as an actor in a field in which it meets with societal resistance on some fronts but not on others. Bureaucratic priorities emerge from this balance of forces.
In another article, I probe the nature of civil society — a sphere of voluntary membership groups characterized by within-class heterogeneity and occasional cross-class convergence — a topic that has been at the center of recent debates in the social sciences. Existing research shows that civil society organizations proliferated during East-Central Europe’s transition from state socialism to capitalism. While some have taken this as evidence for a congenital incompatibility between state socialism and democratic politics, in reality it points to a question: was it a kind of political economic system that generated civil society or a transition from one political-economic arrangement to another that did so?
To probe this question, my co-author (Laura J. Enríquez) and I analyze original data to identify the effects on civil society of a political-economic transition in the opposite direction: Venezuela’s 21st century transition from capitalism towards socialism. In our article in Comparative Sociology, building from our work in the Journal of Agrarian Change, we find that this kind of transition also fomented civil society. Since the Venezuelan state advocated socialism but continued to support traditional economic activities, it offered civil society groups myriad ways to define themselves vis-à-vis its alleged socialist project. This led them to adopt divergent views even when their members hailed from the same class and to occasionally converge across classes — as is characteristic of civil society. The finding that it was Venezuela’s transition per se that generated civil society suggests that we should see the relationship between political economy and civil society in dynamic terms, and focus more on transitions and processes than on static political economic models and the idea of their congenital compatibility or incompatibility with civil society.
Methodological and theoretical work. In addition to using comparative-historical methods in my dissertation/book project, I have been compelled to enter methodological debates. A previous generation of researchers leveled convincing critiques of existing comparative-historical methods and developed and employed alternatives. But we know less about the implications of these alternatives. I believe that just as we should know the assumptions of the statistical techniques we use in order to avoid erroneous quantitative conclusions, we should also be cognizant of the assumptions of these newer comparative-historical methodologies. To these ends, in a paper conditionally accepted for inclusion in Comparison After Positivism (edited by Nicholas Wilson and Damon Maryl), I evaluate two of them: the negative-case method and the alternative-factors approach. I show that since the former strives for explanatory power, it presupposes general laws; and that since the latter aims to identify causal mechanisms that transcend each of the cases studied, it encourages the researcher to identify micro-level or quasi-psychological mechanisms. If we leave these assumptions unchecked, they may lead us to introduce inaccuracies in our explanatory accounts. Better awareness of them helps safeguard against this.
Urbanization and political development. The growth of large metropolises has been a defining feature of modernity, but the literature at the intersection of political and urban sociology has said relatively little about how the process of urban population growth itself — as opposed to urban economic growth and the urban public sphere — affects politics. My dissertation and book project, The Political Development of Urban Clientelism, focuses on the relationship between urban population growth and politics in the context of sharp inequality. I examine 20th century Latin America — which experienced the fastest urban expansion in world history, concentrated in squatter settlements — through a comparative analysis of Lima (Peru), Caracas (Venezuela), and Mexico City (Mexico). Drawing on over 20,000 pages of archival data culled from 12 archives, I show that urbanization was a master process that shaped national politics in the region.
In Part I, I argue that urban growth gave rise to clientelist relations which helped to cement precarious regimes in power. The poor were disproportionately represented in the wave of urban growth that started in the 1930s and 1940s. New urban denizens often formed squatter settlements. This put millions of residents in the position of supplicants who requested permission to live on land over which they lacked legal rights and who hoped the state would equip it with urban infrastructure. State and political party officials, meanwhile, sought to harness squatters’ political loyalties to build their bases of support. The existing literature captures many aspects of the resulting relationships in vivid but limited single-case studies. My cross-national comparative analysis and rich data (most of which has never been consulted) allow me to detail a general pattern of urban clientelism in Lima, Caracas, and Mexico City: officials extended tacit permission to squat and help urbanize these new habitats in ways that helped satisfy the urban poor’s basic needs, in exchange for which the leaders of neighborhood associations organized residents to lend political elites conditional support, thereby bolstering political elites in power.
The way that the concentration of the national population in the capital city furthered the concentration of power is best evidenced by early-20th century Mexico. The Mexican countryside was riven with agrarian revolt during the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920) and thereafter. Whereas the post-revolutionary regime was unable to consolidate control in the countryside, it was quite successful in Mexico City. Urban clientelism helped stabilize the Institutional Revolutionary Party’s (PRI) position in power, helping it to rule at almost all levels of government for 71 years. Urban concentration furthered the concentration of power.
In Part II, I focus on the evolution of the neighborhood-level leaders and neighborhood associations that mediated between squatters and political officials in three parts of Mexico City (Iztacalco, Nezahualcóyotl, and Tlalpan). During the 1970s and 1980s, each of these grew to the size of a major city unto itself. In each case, continued urban concentration generated conflicts between older and newer generations of residents that drove newer residents into neighborhood association leaders’ arms for protection, thereby allowing these leaders to mobilize followers for their own ends. Since neighborhood associations now derived authority from the process of urban concentration, they grew increasingly independent of the PRI. This made neighborhood associations powerful in their own right. It also allowed their leaders to peel support away from the regime, contributing decisively to the erosion of the PRI’s base by the late 1980s, and helping to precipitate its decline and eventual fall. Thus, whereas urban concentration furthered the concentration of power in the early-20th century across much of Latin America, further urban concentration diluted power in late-20th century Mexico City.
Civil society and the state. I have written several articles about the relationship between the state and civil society. In one, which is forthcoming at The Sociological Quarterly and which builds off of my study of the state’s relationship with squatter neighborhood leaders in Research in Political Sociology, I intervene in the literature on state autonomy by challenging the view that rule-bounded bureaucracies enable the state to autonomously determine how it will shape society. I examine the Peruvian state’s legalization of squatters’ residential lands in Lima — the largest extension of so-called “urban citizenship” rights in history — on the basis of original data and a mixed-methods research design, showing that rule-boundedness is insufficient to make the state autonomous. The bureaucracy tasked with this initiative met the criteria for autonomy because it was not coopted or controlled by street-level bureaucrats, and it did not respond to social movement pressures or variations in voting. Nevertheless, because it was rule-bounded, during policy implementation the state encountered steadfast societal obstacles who were capable of slowing bureaucratic penetration in some quarters, leading it to allocate these rights disproportionately in others. This suggests that accurately capturing the state’s impact on society requires conceiving of the state bureaucracy as an actor in a field in which it meets with societal resistance on some fronts but not on others. Bureaucratic priorities emerge from this balance of forces.
In another article, I probe the nature of civil society — a sphere of voluntary membership groups characterized by within-class heterogeneity and occasional cross-class convergence — a topic that has been at the center of recent debates in the social sciences. Existing research shows that civil society organizations proliferated during East-Central Europe’s transition from state socialism to capitalism. While some have taken this as evidence for a congenital incompatibility between state socialism and democratic politics, in reality it points to a question: was it a kind of political economic system that generated civil society or a transition from one political-economic arrangement to another that did so?
To probe this question, my co-author (Laura J. Enríquez) and I analyze original data to identify the effects on civil society of a political-economic transition in the opposite direction: Venezuela’s 21st century transition from capitalism towards socialism. In our article in Comparative Sociology, building from our work in the Journal of Agrarian Change, we find that this kind of transition also fomented civil society. Since the Venezuelan state advocated socialism but continued to support traditional economic activities, it offered civil society groups myriad ways to define themselves vis-à-vis its alleged socialist project. This led them to adopt divergent views even when their members hailed from the same class and to occasionally converge across classes — as is characteristic of civil society. The finding that it was Venezuela’s transition per se that generated civil society suggests that we should see the relationship between political economy and civil society in dynamic terms, and focus more on transitions and processes than on static political economic models and the idea of their congenital compatibility or incompatibility with civil society.
Methodological and theoretical work. In addition to using comparative-historical methods in my dissertation/book project, I have been compelled to enter methodological debates. A previous generation of researchers leveled convincing critiques of existing comparative-historical methods and developed and employed alternatives. But we know less about the implications of these alternatives. I believe that just as we should know the assumptions of the statistical techniques we use in order to avoid erroneous quantitative conclusions, we should also be cognizant of the assumptions of these newer comparative-historical methodologies. To these ends, in a paper conditionally accepted for inclusion in Comparison After Positivism (edited by Nicholas Wilson and Damon Maryl), I evaluate two of them: the negative-case method and the alternative-factors approach. I show that since the former strives for explanatory power, it presupposes general laws; and that since the latter aims to identify causal mechanisms that transcend each of the cases studied, it encourages the researcher to identify micro-level or quasi-psychological mechanisms. If we leave these assumptions unchecked, they may lead us to introduce inaccuracies in our explanatory accounts. Better awareness of them helps safeguard against this.
