Bates College SCARAB Honors Theses Capstone Projects 5-2017 Mi Bolivia está Cambiando: the effect of decentralization on ethno-political mobilization in Bolivia Tessa Holtzman Bates College, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: http://scarab.bates.edu/honorstheses Recommended Citation Holtzman, Tessa, "Mi Bolivia está Cambiando: the effect of decentralization on ethno-political mobilization in Bolivia" (2017). Honors Theses. 213. http://scarab.bates.edu/honorstheses/213 This Open Access is brought to you for free and open access by the Capstone Projects at SCARAB. It has been accepted for inclusion in Honors Theses by an authorized administrator of SCARAB. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Mi Bolivia está Cambiando: the effect of decentralization on ethno-political mobilization in Bolivia A Thesis Presented to The Faculty of the Department of Politics Bates College In partial fulfillment of the requirement for the Degree of Bachelor of Arts By Tessa Holtzman Lewiston, Maine March 24, 2017 Acknowledgments I would like to first thank my advisor at Bates College, Professor Jacob Longaker, for his support, encouragement, and comments on all of my drafts. I would also like to thank Professor Cody Eldredge, who guided me through the quantitative portion of my analysis and helped me work through the finicky STATA program. I extended my gratitude to both the entire Bates politics department and to the Bates Student Research Fund for supporting me both emotionally, academically, and financially throughout this project. Without the funding provided to me, the fieldwork that was essential to this project would have been impossible. Through this research, I was, fortunately, able to connect with the scholarly community both in the United States and in Bolivia. I would like to thank Carew Boulding from the University of Colorado at Boulder for both letting me use her dataset and for participating on my defense committee. I would also like the thank all of the scholars I talked to in Bolivia, whether it was in person, over the phone, or via email. Though I was not able to work with all of them, everyone was incredibly nice and accommodating. I would like to give special thanks to the incredible research organizations in Bolivia who were able to provide me with support and connections, CESU, CEDIB, and Ciudadanía. For all of the people who agreed to do interviews with me, many thanks. Finally, I would like to thank Carlos Carballo, the graduate student at New Mexico State University who worked with me to transcribed my 12 interviews after I returned from Bolivia. Finally, thank you to my family and friends who provided continuous support and care. i Abstract In 1994 Bolivia passed one of the most comprehensive political decentralization reforms in Latin America. It broke down a unitary government into 314 semi-autonomous municipalities. In the wake of this change, indigenous populations increased their political engagement. Did the 1994 decentralization reform affect ethno-political mobilization in Bolivia? Some political decentralization theorists argue that high levels of political decentralization create or increase ethnic political mobilization, while others argue that political decentralization reform decreases ethnic political mobilization. In this paper, I add to the conversation by exploring the effects of decentralization reform on ethno-political mobilization at the local level. I argue that, at the local level, decentralization triggered ethno-political mobilization by lowering barriers to participation and by giving local governments control of resources. Additionally, the level of pre-existing social organization has positive effects on the ability of indigenous groups to politically mobilize after decentralization occurred. To support my argument, I use a sequential exploratory research design. I test my argument through qualitative fieldwork including semi-structured interviews with academics and government officials in Bolivia and quantitative regression analysis to test for the impact of pre-existing levels of organization and rurality on ethno-political mobilization. Overall, I find evidence that decentralization incentivizes ethno-political mobilization, but that the outcome is participation in the formal political arena only when there are strong levels of pre- existing social organization. ii Table of Contents Introduction ..................................................................................................................................................1 Justification of the study ............................................................................................................................5 Why Bolivia? .............................................................................................................................................6 Roadmap ....................................................................................................................................................7 Literature Review ......................................................................................................................................10 Theories and definitions of ethnic mobilization ......................................................................................10 Institutional decentralization ...................................................................................................................19 Conclusion ...............................................................................................................................................24 Discussion of Methodological Approaches and Reflections ...................................................................26 Qualitative methods .................................................................................................................................26 Quantitative methods ...............................................................................................................................32 The Path to Decolonization: A Short Political History of Bolivia .........................................................33 Ethnic background ...................................................................................................................................33 A Brief History ........................................................................................................................................35 Post-independence and the Chaco War ...............................................................................................35 Neoliberalism and decentralization .....................................................................................................40 Outcomes following decentralization .................................................................................................46 Conclusion ...............................................................................................................................................47 Fighting for a Common Identity: The Effects of Decentralization on Ethno-Political mobilization in Bolivia .........................................................................................................................................................51 Decentralization Literature in Relation to the LPP .................................................................................55 The Effect of Political Mobilization on Movements ...............................................................................62 Outcomes following the Law of Popular Participation ...........................................................................67 Pre-existing Levels of Organization and Ethno-Political Mobilization ..................................................72 The Ruralizing of Politics in Relation to Ethno-Political Mobilization ..................................................80 Conclusions .............................................................................................................................................82 Measuring the Effect of Pre-Existing Levels of Organization and Rurality on Ethno-Political Mobilization ................................................................................................................................................84 Data and Model .......................................................................................................................................85 Results .....................................................................................................................................................95 Conclusions .............................................................................................................................................98 Conclusion ................................................................................................................................................100 Alternate Explanations for Ethno-Political Mobilization ......................................................................105 Contributions and Opportunities for further research ...........................................................................107 Bibliography .............................................................................................................................................109 Appendix A: Methods ..............................................................................................................................114