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Deliberate non-enforcement of the law has been analyzed as a policy tool to redistribute income. I show that it also responds to political incentives for the provision of insurance, resembling two well-known dimensions of social policy design. I analyze data from a large informal program of social insurance in the world: informal access to electricity service. Transmission and distribution losses (TDL) in the electricity sector are counter-cyclical because non-compliance and theft increase during economic crises. By exploiting variation in political institutions, I capture political motivations for the provision of informal insurance. Using a panel of 110 developing countries (1970–2014) and instrumental variables for business cycles and regime type, I show that unlike highly entrenched autocrats, democracies tolerate increases in electricity losses during negative income shocks. This paper expands the literature on "forbearance" showing how the provision of informal insurance varies across the developing world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The "insider–outsider" perspective, which dominates the discourse on labour regulations, argues that protective regulations hurt the less well‐off outsiders but are kept in place in the interests of the insiders, who are covered by the regulations. Thus, if the insider–outsider divide were as depicted in the standard representation, outsiders would be strongly against regulations. Our evidence that a large majority of outsiders in developing countries in fact support protective labour regulations calls for a rethink of the sharp insider–outsider divide. We suggest a number of avenues for exploration, including income‐sharing, transitions, fairness and employer power in labour markets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite substantial advances in political participation across Latin America, relevant data from the region reveals an important cross-national and temporal variation in voter turnout. Unlike existing region-specific explanations of voter turnout, but in line with research on advanced democracies, we show here that actual electoral mobilization in Latin America is linked to the ideological and programmatic shifts experienced by political elites since the 1990s. Specifically, we first suggest that by setting clear programmatic stances and differentiation polarization allows voters to better understand the costs and benefits of turning out to vote. When more public policy is at stake, elections become more consequential, and thus voters are more likely to turnout. Second, polarization facilitates the formation of party brands that structure the policy preferences of voters, easing their mobilization to the polls. Our results, using elite survey data and electoral turnout for eighteen Latin American countries during the 1993–2010 period, provide strong statistical support for the elite polarization-turnout hypothesis and remain robust to different specifications of the model. Substantially, an increase in one standard deviation in elite polarization increases turnout – measured as a percentage of registered voters – by about 7 percentage points. This effect increases to 9 percentage points when turnout is measured as a percentage of the voting age population. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is often thought that political incumbents in developing countries abandon the poor during economic crises because of narrow and pro-cyclical welfare policies. In contrast to that view, this article argues that informal transfers for those excluded from the welfare state represent an example of "social policy by other means". During dire economic conditions, democratic incumbents, who need the support or acquiescence of dislocated groups, expand irregular access to the electricity service counter-cyclically. Comparative time series data from slums and residential areas of Montevideo show that electricity losses respond to the political provision of both informal social insurance and informal redistribution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]