Research

Publications

Fuchs, Federico (2023). “Competition, Cooperation, and Influence in the Informal Economy: Interest Representation in Informal Markets in Mexico City”, Comparative Politics, Available here.

Although informal markets are one of the main sources of employment for informal workers in developing economies and hubs of collective action, we know little about the economic and political activity that happens within them. While standard approaches to collective action would suggest that a greater level of organization should be associated with either a greater level of influence for this often relegated group or a lesser capacity to achieve collective goals, this paper proposes that neither is the case. Because of the specific conditions in which collective action ensues in this setting, there is a non-linear relation between organizational density (the number of organizations representing a single constituency) and effective claim-making around common objectives. Thus, informal workers’ capacity to demand resources from the government is best served by intermediate levels of organizational density, when organizations experience enough competition to make them responsive to their constituencies, but not so much that internal strife undermines their effectiveness in securing shared objectives. To test this argument, I leverage a mixed-methods approach to examine the case of informal workers’ organizational behavior in public and street markets in Mexico City. I exploit original data from an expert survey I conducted in 99 randomly sampled markets in Mexico City and complement the econometric results with a qualitative narrative from a street market in Iztacalco, Mexico City, that illustrates the mechanisms behind the theory. These qualitative insights are based on 100 semi-structured and short, open-ended interviews with public officials, leaders, and informal workers, and participant observation in markets’ daily life and collective meetings. I find evidence that markets with medium levels of organizational density are the most capable of gathering resources from local governments and that the dynamics of competition and cooperation suggested by the theory are at play: competition steadily increases as organizational density rises, while cooperation initially improves among a few organizations, but declines when organizational density is high.

Working Papers

Policy Preferences and Organizational Representation in the Informal Economy (under review)

This paper concentrates on an often relegated sector, informal workers, which routinely constitute between one and two-thirds of the labour force in developing nations, and asks whether organisational affiliation affects their preferences for redistribution. Whereas previous works have pointed out that in truncated welfare states labour market outsiders tend to display lacking support for redistributive policies because they are usually excluded from this type of benefit, I advance the argument that engaging in collective action changes such behaviour. Organisational participation allows informal sector workers to identify which are the types of redistributive policies they might benefit from and helps them overcome informal barriers of exclusion, accessing benefits they would not otherwise. By bringing policies closer to their base, organisations shift their members’ stance on policies with redistributive effects. Leveraging a conjoint experiment embedded in an original survey I conducted in 107 public and street markets in Mexico City, I show that (a) informal workers prefer universalistic and non-politically-mediated policies even if the alternative is geographically-targeted and politically-mediated public goods that they can also access; (b) that they support rule-based targeted transfers instead of politically-mediated transfers, but that this support varies by levels and types of political participation; and finally (c) that informal workers that are active participants in informal-sector organisations are more likely to favour redistributive policies than those that do not, but preferences for particular policy features vary between members of different organisational types.

Labour, the Left and the Political Economy of Labour Regulation in Latin America

This paper addresses whether ideological orientation and linkages to organised labour still play a role in driving partisan approaches to policy-making and implementation in labour regulation after the process of programmatic dealignment generated by successive waves of market-oriented reforms, and the pressures that arise from the integration of the region to the international economy. I implement a mixed-methods strategy that combines the statistical analysis of 19 Latin American countries with comparative case studies of the patterns of individual and collective labour reform. I show that partisanship is the most important determinant of changes in labour regulation, even controlling for the constraints deriving from the greater integration of Latin American economies into world markets. I also find that different parties have combined this greater propensity to protect workers in the labour market with varying degrees of strengthening of collective labour rights, reflecting varying coalitional imperatives in different political systems.

The Micro-dynamics of Labor Unions: Elites, Grassroots Activism and the Decentralization of Collective Bargaining, with Andrés Schipani (Universidad de San Andrés) The aim of this paper is to analyze the impact of market reforms on the internal structure and strategies of trade union organizations, as well as their effects on the patterns of industrial relations in contemporary Argentina. In particular, we will analyze the collective action dilemmas faced by trade unions in the industrial sector in the face of the increase in the heterogeneity of the productive network and labor force that has taken place within the industrial branches. These dilemmas, we will argue, have become more acute for union leaders since 2003, in a context of accelerated economic reactivation that has revitalized grassroots mobilization. Based on a comparative study of unions in the automotive and food industries, we show that even though this new productive configuration tends to conspire against the internal unity of unions, unions´ability to overcome this problem was uneven. The article proposes an explanation centered on historical factors: in particular, we will argue that the organizational legacies of the period of Import Substitution Industrialization (ISI), as well as the way in which the union elites dealt with their bases during market reforms, determined the type of leadership resources they would have at their disposal to manage the revitalization of grassroots mobilization that commenced in 2003.
Social Policy, Elections and The Weapons of The Poor: Informal Workers Influence In Latin America

To what extent do informal workers’ organisations, collectively, affect the geographic distribution of income support benefits targeted to the lower-income sectors? Why are some organisations more successful than others at obtaining benefits for their members? I argue that the informal workers’ collective action affects how social policy benefits are distributed both at the local level and, within districts, between organisations. Specifically, organisational density is a key factor explaining the distribution of resources that benefit the informal sector, especially when organisations are aligned with the governing party deciding the allocation of such resources. Furthermore, informal sector organisations with a greater capacity to mobilize and larger organisational structures are more able to negotiate with governments, and thus are more likely to capture a larger proportion of benefits. To test my argument, I leverage a previously unexploited census of beneficiaries of a core workfare program in Argentina that contains unique individual-level information of over 90,000 beneficiaries affiliated to 144 organisations.

Work in Progress

European Works Councils After Three Decades: Outlining a Research Agenda, with Patrick Witzak (Ruhr University Bochum)

Political Economy of Labour Legislation Reforms in Emerging Economies, with Umut Riza Ozkan (Université de Montreal)

Transnational Knowledge Networks and Policy Diffusion in Labour Regulation, with Umut Riza Ozkan (Université de Montreal)