Grassroots Governance and Political Engagement in Community Organizations

Abstract

Grassroots leaders act as a bridge between poor communities and the services they deserve. Electoral mobilization provides an opportunity for neighborhoods to get access to resources from outside the community that they can use for development projects, community events, and assistance accessing state services. Yet, communities employ very different tactics to achieve their development goals and some communities are better able to leverage their vote record for resources than others. My dissertation explores grassroots neighborhood politics in three parts using data from Juntas de Accíon Comunal (CAB) records, surveys, and original interviews in Colombia. The dissertation fills important gaps in the literature on clientelism, local politics, and community development by providing a theoretical framework to understand community leader motivations and applications to the Colombian context. The typology in Chapter 2 highlights institutional diversity in community brokers that can help explain contradictory findings in the clientelism literature, backed by in-depth interviews and survey results with social leaders from the mountains and lowlands in Colombia's Caribbean coast. In the third chapter, I utilize surveys and interviews with CAB presidents in Santa Marta, Colombia to demonstrate the connection between social leader elections and leader choices when acting as political brokers. While democratic elections for community leaders may have other normative benefits, they often push leaders to acquire funding for projects through mobilizing voters in support of candidates for public office, even at the expense of undesirable candidate characteristics like corruption records. The final chapter explores how community leaders signal the strength of their vote bloc at polling places using spatial maps of CAB neighborhood headquarters and results from the 2018 Senate race in Bogotá, Colombia. I introduce a new way of thinking about broker monitorability at the polling station level and find that polling places with more dense brokerage networks are more competitive and are more likely to see votes for down-ballot candidates that lack name recognition, suggesting that CAB leaders are actively mobilizing voters in dense neighborhoods in direct contrast with expectations in existing literature.