DISCLAIMER: This document does not meet current format guidelines Graduate School at the The University of Texas at Austin. of the It has been published for informational use only. Copyright by Calla Marie Buzy Hummel 2017 The Dissertation Committee for Calla Marie Buzy Hummel certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: Disobedient Markets: Street Vendors, Enforcement, and State Intervention in Collective Action Committee: Raúl Madrid, Supervisor Javier Auyero Michael Findley Kurt Weyland Scott Wolford Disobedient Markets: Street Vendors, Enforcement, and State Intervention in Collective Action by Calla Marie Buzy Hummel, B.A., M.A. DISSERTATION Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN May 2017 Dedicated to Nana Jo, Aunt Maureen, and everyone who shared their stories. Acknowledgments Hundreds of people helped with this project and I am deeply indebted to all of them. First, this project only exists because of the incredible women and men who work on the streets and put in extra hours to organize their colleagues and demand a better life. I am grateful to the dozens of street vendors in Bolivia and Brazil who decided to trust me, talk with me, and teach me. I am especially grateful to the women and men who took the time to explain how the markets work, how to sell in them, and how to interact with officials as a vendor. I regret that I can’t thank people by name for confidentiality reasons, but from the bottom of my heart, thank you G. for teaching me how to set up a stall and be a vendor, and I hope we have many more conversations about politics over api. Thank you to the champañeras for making me an honorary sister and for letting me spend so many happy hours with all of you in the plaza. Thank you R. for being my sócio, teaching me how to set up and protect a stall, and sharing all of your stories with me; let’s plan for many more. Thank you to everyone at the Federation and the Markets Office for your patience, your stories, and your advice. In addition to the vendors that are part of this project, the project would not have gone very far without the help of Cecilia Salazar, Luciana Molina Barragán, Luciana Itikawa, Amaru Villanueva, Jorge Derpic, Any Kennemore, and Sara Shariari; thank you very, very much, I am very lucky to have you as colleagues. Many thanks to Jenny, Silvia, Amira, Ceci, and everyone else with La Paz Rugby v Feminino for making life more fun. I was lucky to be part of an amazing community in Austin throughout six years of this project. Raúl Madrid has been and continues to be an ideal advisor and encouraged and helped me with this project before we had ever met. I look up to you as a scholar and a person. Javier Auyero, Mike Findley, Kurt Weyland, and Scott Wolford contributed to this project in more ways than I can count. Each encouraged me to work on this project in their courses as a young grad student and provided invaluable feedback that brought it from an off-the-wall idea to a fully formed (and published!) research project. I cannot thank you enough for your time and your help over the years; this clearly would not have been possible without you. In addition to the formal committee, I have benefited from scholars who kept me going with feedback and encouragement over the years. Many, many thanks to Wendy Hunter, John Ger- ring, Cathy Boone, Merike Blofield, Diana Kapiszewski, Alisha Holland, Skip Lupia, Candelaria Garay, Bethany Albertson, Scott Moser, John Patty, Maggie Penn, David Rueda, Shelby Grossman, Sally Roever, and Dan Brinks for support and advice. I am also indebted to my undergraduate mentors Angelina Godoy, Lisa Glidden, and Tuna Kuyucu, who helped me develop the very early stages of this project. I benefited immensely from all of the faculty at UT, as well as IQMR, ICPSR, and EITM and I appreciate all of your time and effort. None of us can write dissertations without amazing peers. I am forever grate- ful to my amazing cohort and the students around us. Thank you to Kim Guiler, Rodolfo Disi Pavlic, Dana El-Kurd, Ken Miller, Andy Stravers, Caitlin Andrews, Joe Tafoya, Jake Dizard, Katie Putnam, Clare Brock, Roberto Armijo, Gio Altamirano, Omar Awapara, Ahmed Siddiqi, Hadill Calderon, Iasmin Goes, Cathy Wu, Robert Shaffer, Maraam Dwidar, Elizabeth Rennick, Ayca Arkilic, Mike Denly, Thomas El- liot, Michael Gibbs, Kristie Kelly, Louise Liebskind, Johnny Meyer, German Petersen, vi Julie Phillips, Luai Abdul Rauf Allarakia, Ryan Lloyd, Tommy Burt, Henry Pascoe, Josiah Marineau, Dan McCormack, Daniel Weitzel, Paula Muñoz, Danilo Contreras, and Nathalia Sandoval; let’s please all stay friends and colleagues. I was incredibly fortunate to live in a house full of amazing role models for most of graduate school and am lucky to count Ina Taneva, Christina Frederick, Christina Noriega Bambrick, Chris Yarng, and Rachel Sternfeld as friends. I also benefited immensely from the friends I made at IQMR, EITM, and ICPSR. Let’s take over academia together Laila Wahedi, Paul DeBell, Brian Palmer-Rubin, Chris Schwarz, Max Eriksson, Gökhan Çiflikli, Andrew Brooks, Laura Gamboa, Eric Dunford, Chao-yo Cheng, Amanda Alvarez, Rebecca Cordell, Meneviş Ciliso¸glu,Asli Cansunar, Alisha Kim, Aseem Ma- hajan, Andrew McCall, Renato Lima de Oliveira, Eoghan McGreevy-Stafford, Yuree Noh, Christy Phillips, Tara Buss, Chase Foster, Sarah Bouchat, Chelsea Estancona, Chrissy Ladam, Josh Lerner, and Jaira Harrington. Finally, thanks to my nonacademic support network for keeping things in per- spective. Thanks to way too many friends to list, but especially Katherine Strandberg, Marcela Bonfim, Renata Wrobleski, Mari and Tiffany, Ana Kelson, Susi and Dane and all of your crew, William, Emma Perry, Maggie Burger, Jenna Haggard, Dev Nambi, Rachelle Robinson, Moni, Sam and Eva and Julho, Fabio, Britt, Marie and Jenna, Matt Tong, Belén, and Phil Redman. Thanks to everyone who let me pet their dog when I was stressed out. I owe a deep debt to the staff of too many cafés, but especially Shane, Jenn, and crew at Cherrywood, Khatti and team at Flightpath, and Gilda and everyone at Magick. I’d also like to thank Beyoncé, The Gossip, Sleater- Kinney, Shakira, Angel Haze, White Lung, Rihanna, and Waxahatchee for albums that got me through grad school. Finally, my mom, dad, sister, aunts, uncles, and cousins have supported me through every stage of my education and I am extremely lucky to have grown up with highly-educated feminist role models like Nana Jo and vii Aunt Maureen, to whom this dissertation is dedicated. A big thank you to everyone from the bottom of my heart. viii Disobedient Markets: Street Vendors, Enforcement, and State Intervention in Collective Action by Calla Marie Buzy Hummel, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Austin, 2017 Supervisor: Raúl Madrid Under what conditions do informal workers organize? Contrary to conven- tional wisdom, informal workers organize in nearly every major city on every conti- nent and officials often encourage them to do so. I demonstrate that under certain conditions, governments offer private benefits to informal workers who organize self- regulating associations, which solves the workers’ collective action problem. This leads to another puzzle: why do governments pay people to organize, especially peo- ple who routinely violate the law? I argue that where the state cannot stop violators, it may prefer to pay violators to organize a self-regulating group rather than enforce the law itself. The state can then bargain over legalization, regulation, and enforce- ment with a representative group. The project challenges assumptions about collective action in marginalized communities and offers a new theory of collective action where informal workers in- teract strategically with the state. I argue that where enforcement is costly, states may take an active role in encouraging potential violators to organize and, once orga- nized, regulate themselves. Recent work on the politics of enforcement demonstrates ix that governments reap political benefits by not enforcing laws against poor citizens in informal work and housing. However, foregoing enforcement can create additional political, public health, and material costs. I extend this work by using enforcement costs to explain why informal workers organize. I suggest that where governments successfully encourage potential violators to organize, governments keep the political benefits of forgoing enforcement while civil society organizations assume partial re- sponsibility for enforcement. My fieldwork included 14 months in Bolivia and Brazil working as a street vendor, gathering 92 interviews, and administering two surveys. Chapter 1 of the project develops the puzzle—why do informal workers organize, given barriers to col- lective action—in the context of current research. Chapter 2 presents the theory and then formalizes it in a game theoretic model of collective action. Chapter 3 justifies the model’s assumptions and demonstrates how its dynamics work in an ethnography of street vendor organizations and their interactions with the city government in La Paz, Bolivia. Chapter 4 illustrates how the model explains variation across people and places by comparing street vendors in La Paz to their counterparts in the neigh- boring city of El Alto. I then compare the highly organized street vendors in La Paz to the sparsely organized vendors in São Paulo, Brazil. Chapter 5 tests the theory on out-of-sample data: 26,304 self-employed respondents in 17 countries from the Latin American Public Opinion Project. I analyze the data with logistic regressions and then move to a nonparametric machine learning framework to address concerns about identifying assumptions.