1. Forbearance: The Politics of Non-Enforcement in Urban Latin America.
- Author
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Holland, Alisha C.
- Subjects
- *
RULE of law , *PUBLIC welfare , *SOCIAL services , *SOCIAL policy , *SOCIAL structure ,COLOMBIAN politics & government - Abstract
Why do politicians tolerate the violation of the law? The conventional wisdom is that the weak rule of law reflects a weak state. This paper argues, in contrast, that enforcement depends on the electoral consequences. I develop the concept of forbearance, meaning intentional non-enforcement of law, and distinguish subtypes of forbearance based on their distributive incidence. When forbearance has economically progressive effects, I propose that politicians who represent poor constituents are more likely to forbear to provide informal social welfare and signal their commitments to the poor. However, substitute government social expenditures allow politicians to enforce, regardless of their electoral constituency, by boosting local welfare and attenuating class cues. I test the argument through an analysis of enforcement against unlicensed street vendors and squatters in two cities with varying electoral and social policy structures, Bogotá, Colombia and Santiago, Chile. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2010