Book project: The Politics of Informality and Redistribution in Latin America

Across metropolises in the global south, informal workers are densely organised, but only some of their organisations are considered a force to be reckoned with by government officials. What explains this varying success among the underprivileged? What are the claims and grievances voiced by these organisations, and how are they different from the preferences espoused by unorganised workers?

While most previous analyses stress the dependent nature of this mobilisation, I study how informal workers collectively influence the policy-making process, the sources of their differential success, and how collective action can shape their preferences about redistribution, linking questions mostly treated in isolation before.

I study these questions in Argentina, Mexico, and Brazil, all of which have sizeable formal and informal sectors and implemented both discretionary and non-discretionary policies targeting informal workers, but vary in the type and diversity of informal-sector organisations and the nature of the main parties mobilising popular-sector constituencies.

The book leverages administrative records of social program implementation, original survey data, participant observation, and in-depth interviews with hard-to-reach populations. My empirical strategy relies on ethnographically-informed surveys, spatial analysis, and quasi-experimental methods to illuminate the political economy of informality in three levels of analysis: district, organisational, and individual.

My findings show that informal workers’ organisations can achieve influence in the policy-making process beyond their role in clientelistic machines and that by doing so, they also contribute to shaping the preferences of those to whom they seek to give a voice.