The Origins of Political Brokerage in India's Urban Slums

Capability, Connectivity, and Co-Ethnicity: The Origins of Political Brokerage in India’s Urban Slums Adam Auerbach and Tariq Thachil1 How do the political brokers essential to clientelistic politics emerge? Political brokers operate in an informal space between citizens and the state in which they facilitate the exchange of electoral support for access to goods, services, and protection. Studies of clientelism largely take these actors as a static given and cannot address how they initially build the following of voters that make them attractive to political elites. We address this question through a study of a pervasive broker across cities in the developing world—informal slum leaders. To identify the citizen preferences that guide slum leader selection, we conducted an ethnographically informed conjoint survey experiment with 2,194 residents across 110 slum settlements in two north Indian cities. Our analysis finds that shared ethnicity—the overwhelming focus of contemporary scholarship on political selection in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa—is often trumped by non-ethnic indicators of a broker’s connectivity to urban bureaucracies and capacity to make claims on the state. These findings shed important light on the origins of patron-client hierarchies and the political changes engendered by rapid urbanization across the developing world. 1 Authors listed alphabetically. Adam Auerbach is an Assistant Professor in the School of International Service, American University. Tariq Thachil is the Peter Strauss Family Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science, Yale University. This study was pre-registered with Evidence in Governance and Politics (20150619AA) and received IRB approval from American University (15098) and Yale University (1504015671). The authors thank the School of International Service, American University, and the MacMillan Center, Yale University, for funding this study. Ved Prakash Sharma and the MORSEL survey team provided excellent research assistance. 1 1. Introduction Pavan’s home is set deep within the narrow, serpentine alleyways of Ganpati, one of eastern Jaipur’s largest slums. With exposed brick walls, chipping white paint, and a corrugated steel roof held down by stones, the shanty is almost indistinguishable from other structures in the settlement. What makes it distinct is the inscription on Pavan’s front door. The sign displays his name, the title adyaksh (president), and a lotus flower—the symbol of the Bharatiya Janata Party—providing an unambiguous signal of his authority in the settlement. Pavan is an informal slum leader. He helps residents to secure ration cards, resolve disputes, and demand public services from the state. In a handful of dusty boxes and folders, Pavan keeps copies of petitions for development, correspondence with officials, and notes from local party meetings, collectively documenting his efforts to improve the slum. Through these activities, Pavan has built a large following of residents in Ganpati. And as a seasoned member of the Bharatiya Janata Party, he is expected to translate this support into crowds at rallies and votes during elections. A large and burgeoning literature in comparative politics examines the role of political brokers like Pavan. Brokers operate in an informal space between citizens and the state in which they facilitate the clientelistic exchange of electoral support for access to goods, services, and protection. Models of clientelism predominantly take the presence and intermediary position of these actors as a static given. The emergence of brokers, and the factors that sustain, diminish, or enhance their position in patron-client hierarchies is rarely endogenized. The question of broker emergence is especially compelling because of a chicken-and-egg dilemma these actors face. To gain public support, brokers must successfully pressure politicians to deliver goods and services. Yet, to exert such pressure, they must first command public 2 support. Brokers thus require both a popular following and political connectivity with elites, each functionally demanding the other as an antecedent condition. How then do they emerge? We address this question through a study of a substantively important and theoretically appropriate class of political intermediaries: informal slum leaders. Substantively, urban slums are home to an alarmingly high proportion of the world’s urban population.2 As countries across the developing world rapidly urbanize, leaders of these settlements are increasingly central figures in distributive politics.3 For residents, they are focal points of efforts to fight eviction and demand development from the state. For politicians, they are uniquely positioned to sway residents, encourage turnout, and organize rallies in vote-rich slums. Theoretically, slums are valuable settings in which to examine how informal authority takes shape, because their leadership is emergent, contested, and rapidly constructed. In villages, local leaders often emerge through longstanding social hierarchies. By contrast, urban slums settled by poor rural migrants lack pre-established forms of local authority and linkages with political elites. Instead, informal hierarchies form as migrants gravitate towards particular residents they perceive as likely to get things done on their behalf. Our key analytical concern is identifying the underlying social preferences that inform such patterns of initial support. We begin by distinguishing two concerns that jointly structure a resident’s preferences for slum brokers. The first is efficacy oriented: how likely is an aspiring broker to secure goods and services for their settlement? We argue such efficacy hinges on perceptions of an aspirant’s capability in making claims, as well as their connectedness to local 2 It is estimated that 863 million people live in slums worldwide (2014 UN World Urbanization Report), suggesting that nearly one-fifth of the global urban population lives in slums. 3 Informal leadership has been widely documented in slums across the developing world. See Gay 1994, Auyero 2000, and McCann 2014 for examples in Latin America; Barnes 1986 and Resnick 2013 for Sub- Sahara Africa; and Jha et al. 2007 and Auerbach 2016 for South Asia. 3 government officials. The second are distributive concerns centered on how likely an aspiring broker is to channel secured benefits to a resident’s household within the slum. Existing literature has primarily focused on shared positions in partisan or ethnic networks as determinants of such distributive expectations. To assess the relative salience of such concerns in shaping resident preferences, we conducted an ethnographically informed conjoint survey experiment with 2,194 individuals across 110 slums in two north Indian cities.4 Survey respondents were asked to select between two hypothetical candidates for the position of slum adyaksh, or president. The characteristics of candidates were randomly assigned, and selected as locally salient indicators of a leader’s capability, connectivity, ethnicity, and partisan affiliation. A parallel experiment asked respondents to choose between two hypothetical families as potential neighbors, allowing us to further compare vertical preferences for leaders with horizontal preferences for neighbors. Our findings challenge conventional wisdom on Asian and African politics, which predict that distributive expectations based on co-ethnicity will dominate leadership selection.5 Instead we find non-ethnic indicators of a slum leader’s efficacy, such as their educational capability and the occupational connectivity, often match or trump the value of co-ethnicity. Further, we find the salience of capability and connectivity increases relative to co-ethnicity when residents have spent more time in the city, have acquired more education, or are primed to think of settlement- wide goods. We discuss how these findings illustrate ethnicity’s shifting role in cities, where dense, fluid, and diverse slums offer new possibilities for the formation of political networks. 4 On combining ethnography and survey experiments, see Thachil 2015. 5 See Chandra 2004 and Posner 2005. See Habyarimana et al. 2009 for a discussion on the mechanisms linking ethnicity with outcomes in cooperation and public goods provision. 4 This study contributes to our theoretical understanding of clientelism, ethnic politics, and urbanization. First, we make an original contribution by identifying the social preferences that generate support for emerging brokers in an iconic developing democracy. While brokers’ upward relationships with political elites have been extensively analyzed, the roots of their downward ties with citizens remain poorly understood.6 Second, we contribute to substantive knowledge of the political consequences of rapid urbanization. Slums now house nearly one billion people worldwide, and are rife with informal leadership.7 Identifying the determinants of support for these leaders is central to understanding the evolution of urban distributive politics. Indeed, our findings suggest theories of ethnic politics and political linkages may require significant recalibration in the expanding cities of the developing world. Third, understanding informal authority within poor urban communities is essential for designing community driven development efforts. Practitioners look to local leadership as a crucial component of pro-poor targeting, induced participation, and project sustainability.8 This paper is organized as follows.

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