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From Drug Lords to Police State: The Effects of Order Transition on Local Economies
Abstract
What is the effect on local economies when the state intervenes to capture its own territories back from non-state actors? In 2008, the government of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, implemented a policy to take control of favelas that were previously dominated by organized crime groups (OCGs). We use day and night luminosity to assess the effects of this program on economic growth. The difference-in-differences design shows that state intervention has a significant and negative average treatment effect on the favelas that received the intervention. We further test a mechanism to explain this economic downturn: institutional replacement. Based on crime data, we demonstrate that this effect is caused by the destruction of local markets, especially illicit activities. The data highlight the perils of order transition, even when OCGs are removed by state actors. Furthermore, this paper reinforces the need for policies that are mindful of the externalities of institutional shifts.
O presente artigo se propõe a auxiliar, através de método de apoio multicritério à decisão, na seleção de modelos de helicópteros mais adequados à atividade aérea policial no estado do Rio de Janeiro, de forma a proporcionar embasamento técnico robusto para a definição dos requisitos essenciais de uma aeronave, além de indicar soluções disponíveis capazes de garantir o desenvolvimento eficaz e seguro das missões. O método utilizado na análise foi o WASPAS, do inglês Weighted Aggregated Sum Product Assessment, que a partir da aplicação de um processo de soma ponderada combinado com um processo de produto ponderado, apresenta um ranqueamento para as alternativas, da mais àmenos favorável. As avaliações dos modelos em relação aos critérios predefinidos, bem como a atribuição dos pesos desses critérios, foram definidas com base em questionário aplicado, por amostragem, a pilotos e operadores aerotáticos de Unidades Aéreas Públicas (UAP) de diversos estados da federação. A observação dos resultados obtidos em decorrência da metodologia empregada permitirá que decisores realizem boas escolhas, as quais contribuirão para uma melhor performance das polícias em suas atribuições, impactando sobremaneira na segurança da sociedade.
Using a multi-criteria decision support method (WASPAS) to analyze and rank alternatives, this article proposes a method to assist in the selection of helicopter models that are the most suitable for police air activity in the State of Rio de Janeiro. A robust technical basis for defining the essential requirements of an aircraft is established, and solutions that can ensure the effective and safe execution of missions are indicated. Helicopter models were evaluated by considering predefined criteria, and the weights of these criteria were attributed using a questionnaire that was administered to pilots and aerostatic operators of Public Air Units (UAP) in several states of the federation. As a result of the evaluation of the 15 helicopter models used by police services in the State of Rio de Janeiro, the modeling with the WASPAS method ranked the Sikorsky UH-60 (Black Hawk) model in first place, the Leonardo AW 139 model in second place, and the Bell 412 model in third place. Based on the available data, we suggest that a comparative study integrating the Entropy and CRITIC methods be conducted to measure the weights of the criteria associated with the application of other multi-criteria techniques, such as COMET, MACAB, SPOTIS, VIKOR, SAPEVO, and PROMETHEE.
Governments in the Americas rely on aggressive policing tactics to fight crime, despite scant evidence of impact. While recent studies depict militarized policing as a driver of violence, few governments have reconsidered their use of it. What impact does a restriction on aggressive policing have on violence, and why? This paper examines limits on police use of force and how they can be implemented to reduce both police and civilian violence. I argue that reforms that require internal, non-police oversight can be effective institutional constraints, minimizing police violence. In settings where organized crime is widespread, these limits can have spillover effects and further decrease civilian violence by (1) slowing the territorial diffusion of criminal conflict and (2) making conflict more predictable. I test these claims by examining an abrupt limit on police raids in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. I find that limiting raids – militarized police strikes targeting criminal gangs and communities under their control – led to a 66% decrease in police killings and a 58% decrease in homicides. The effects were concentrated in police precincts where rival criminal groups are in close proximity. Limiting raids did not lead police to be more violent during ordinary patrolling duties, and did not affect property crimes. The implication is that restraining police use of force in high-violence settings may save lives and be no worse than hard-on-crime strategies.
Over the past two decades, most Latin American countries have struggled to create or reform their police forces while simultaneously confronting sharp increases in violent crime. Reformers have gravitated towards community-oriented policing practices, which aim to rely on preventive tactics and build closer ties between police officers and the public. The implementation of such policing practices can be daunting, particularly for countries with authoritarian histories of policing and/or military repression. When confronting rising crime rates, some new democracies are tempted to revert to authoritarian policing practices and circumvent constitutional safeguards on human rights and civil liberties. Still, some countries have resisted such temptations, and seriously invested in community-oriented policing practices. However, do these community-oriented policing practices lead citizens to trust the police more? Or does public trust depend more heavily on results – particularly in countries undergoing crises in public security? To answer these questions, we analyze public trust in the police in 17 Latin American countries through a series of regression analyses of the Latin American Public Opinion Project’s (LAPOP) 2016–2017 survey data. We find that community-oriented policing practices tend to garner more public trust, but that perceptions of police effectiveness are equally important.
Resumo Este artigo analisa as estratégias de legitimação utilizadas pelos agentes do campo do Estado em ação nas favelas, com vistas a trazer luz às disputas no campo. Com base na perspectiva teórica de Pierre Bourdieu, em uma pesquisa de campo de inspiração etnográfica realizada em duas favelas cariocas, foi possível investigar, por meio de análise retórica, o discurso dos agentes do campo, buscando acessar as estratégias de legitimação por eles utilizadas. O trabalho avança ao apontar as lógicas por trás dos discursos dos agentes como forças que impulsionam e moldam a dinâmica do campo. Ainda, o uso de argumentos de presença por todos os agentes do campo aponta a necessidade da apresentação de resultados materiais derivados de ações desempenhadas por agentes do Estado. Acima de tudo, a existência de disputas, guiadas por lógicas diversas, revelam que há uma liberdade fundamental para pensamentos e premissas diferentes, em nome de um mesmo Estado.
While Mexico is widely considered as an example of consolidated statehood, the deepening of drug-related violence and insecurity has corroborated the existence and expansion of ‘dark spaces’ governed by coalitions of state and non-state actors driven by criminal and political interests. In contrast to the prevailing interpretations and public narratives, I will argue that it is historically and conceptually flawed to understand such expressions of limited statehood solely in terms of the proliferation of criminal organisations and the exacerbation of the so-called war on drugs only. Instead, I will examine the historical patterns in Mexican state-making, in which actors and practices of political ordering outside the state properly speaking exercise multiple forms of de facto sovereignty and governance. These arrangements, including caciquismo, accommodate distinct crime-governance manifestations. The article substantiates its claims by looking at the examples from different periods and regions such as Sinaloa, Sonora and Michoacán.
The difference in difference (DID) design is a quasi-experimental research design that researchers often use to study causal relationships in public health settings where randomized controlled trials (RCTs) are infeasible or unethical. However, causal inference poses many challenges in DID designs. In this article, we review key features of DID designs with an emphasis on public health policy research. Contemporary researchers should take an active approach to the design of DID studies, seeking to construct comparison groups, sensitivity analyses, and robustness checks that help validate the method's assumptions. We explain the key assumptions of the design and discuss analytic tactics, supplementary analysis, and approaches to statistical inference that are often important in applied research. The DID design is not a perfect substitute for randomized experiments, but it often represents a feasible way to learn about casual relationships. We conclude by noting that combining elements from multiple quasi-experimental techniques may be important in the next wave of innovations to the DID approach. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Public Health Volume 39 is April 1, 2018. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.
Over the past two decades, the armed forces have increasingly been asked to take an active role in the fight against the rampant crime in Latin America. Since the militaries in this region are not always trained to conduct themselves with restraint, the possibility of excesses and human rights violations is always latent. Despite that prospect, there is a high level of public support for military counter-crime interventions throughout the region. The key argument in this article is that when the Latin American public supports military interventions to combat crime, it makes a comparative judgment call about the relative efficacy of military vs. police conduct in domestic security roles. Latin American citizens have very low confidence in the capacity of the police to fight crime effectively and to respect human rights. They place more trust in the armed forces as an institution capable of performing effectively and in accordance with human rights standards and the rule of law. This study develops these arguments in greater detail and then turns to recent Americas Barometer surveys that clearly show that Latin American citizens place more trust in the armed forces than the police as an institution capable of effectively and humanely fighting criminal violence. Manuscript
Criminal violence can be used to sustain and construct local political orders that undermine democratic processes. In this article, I conceptualize how criminal violence and clientelism are jointly used at local levels (e.g. neighborhoods, municipalities) to influence electoral outcomes in Brazilian urban peripheries. I call this criminalized electoral politics. With the help of two dimensions–the nature of the relationship between political and criminal actors, as well as the type of activity that provides a criminal group’s primary source of income–I construct a descriptive typology that allows me to classify different forms of criminalized electoral politics prevalent in urban spaces. Throughout the text I use examples from the metropolitan area of Rio de Janeiro to illustrate cases of criminalized electoral politics. In this way, this article offers a conceptual foundation to understand how criminal violence can affect the electoral linkages between citizens and politicians and, therefore, the quality of democracy and forms of local order in developing countries.
Interrupted time series (ITS) analysis is a valuable study design for evaluating the effectiveness of population-level health
interventions that have been implemented at a clearly defined point in time. It is increasingly being used to evaluate the
effectiveness of interventions ranging from clinical therapy to national public health legislation. Whereas the design shares
many properties of regression-based approaches in other epidemiological studies, there are a range of unique features of time
series data that require additional methodological considerations. In this tutorial we use a worked example to demonstrate
a robust approach to ITS analysis using segmented regression. We begin by describing the design and considering when ITS is
an appropriate design choice. We then discuss the essential, yet often omitted, step of proposing the impact model a priori.
Subsequently, we demonstrate the approach to statistical analysis including the main segmented regression model. Finally we
describe the main methodological issues associated with ITS analysis: over-dispersion of time series data, autocorrelation,
adjusting for seasonal trends and controlling for time-varying confounders, and we also outline some of the more complex design
adaptations that can be used to strengthen the basic ITS design.
The present article reviews how policing illegal drug markets has evolved in Rio de Janeiro over the last 30 years. It begins with the traditional paradigm, based on the concept of the ‘war on drugs’, that uses militarized and confrontational strategies. Next, it assesses the impact of recent developments, such as the spread of so called ‘militias’, composed of corrupt law enforcement agents who dominate many communities, and the introduction of the Police Pacification Unit programme (UPP) in 2008. This new programme sets as its main goals the recovery of territorial control from criminal groups and the reduction of violence rather than the end of drug trafficking. Advances, contradictions and limitations of this intervention are discussed.
This article explores the social representations of youngsters from favelas in Rio de Janeiro on
police practices in the context of the implementation of ‘Pacifying Police Units’. Drawing from
fieldwork, participant observation and interviews, the authors analyse the narratives and practices
which influence relations between young people and the police in the Complexo do Alemão
area of the city. The interviewees expressed a demand for further public security and social
services. Young people noted some progress in police practices, although these changes appear
to be unstable. The permanence of violent practices and prejudice by the police was verified in
youngsters’ narratives. Any change in this scenario should be based on the replacement of the
war logic of ‘pacification’ for another logic, that of participation.
Emerging from the global city literature of the 1980s and 1990s, a vast scholarship has developed that embraces the ‘dual city’ concept as a useful analytical tool for explaining how global transformations produce polarization within cities. However, less is known about how local policies shape uneven patterns of development. Through an examination of Rio de Janeiro's Favela Pacification Program, we argue that state-level public policies play a significant role in institutionalizing duality. The recent military occupation of the slums in Rio de Janeiro demonstrates how the historically and politically contextualized public policy of confrontation has exacerbated tensions between the city's elites and poor residents along a number of social, economic, and political dimensions. Local policymakers can influence the impact of globalization on social polarization by considering the effects of public policies on spatial justice.
Since Charles Tilly made the comparison between state making and organized crime, it has often been assumed that illicit markets necessarily contain parallel, coercive governance structures: mafias. I argue that some illicit markets have mafias while others do not, and identify as the source of this variation the costliness of the use of force and the imperatives of territorial control. When the use of force is too costly and there is no need to control territory to conduct business, illicit entrepreneurs will not invest in the development of mafias or use violence to protect their property. I evaluate theories of both organized crime and new institutional economics to explain the relationship between the authority structures of the state and the authority structures of illicit markets. Because mafias and their use of violence can undermine state sovereignty and public order, understanding the origins of violent mafias can inform policy choices.
Improving human well-being is increasingly recognized as essential for movement toward a sustainable and desirable future. Estimates of different aspects of human well-being, such as Gross Domestic Product, or percentage of population with access to electric power, or measuring the distribution of income in society are often fraught with problems. There are few standardized methods of data collection; in addition, the required data is not obtained in a reliable manner and on a repetitive basis in many parts of the world. Consequently, inter-comparability of the data that does exist becomes problematic. Data derived from nighttime satellite imagery has helped develop various globally consistent proxy measures of human well-being at the gridded, sub-national, and national level. We review several ways in which nighttime satellite imagery has been used to measure the human well-being within nations.
Many governments target leaders of violent groups, but consequences of this strategy are unclear. Additionally, most studies examine political groups such as terrorists, ignoring criminal organizations—even though they can represent serious threats to security. This article presents a theoretical framework for how political and criminal groups differ and uses the framework to explain how group type should condition leadership removal’s effects. Decapitation should weaken criminal organizations, temporarily reducing violence. However, as groups fragment and newer groups emerge to address market demands, violence increases in the longer term. Empirical analysis using original data on Mexican criminal organizations generally supports the argument. Interestingly, the short-term violence reduction is only associated with leaders arrested (not killed) and when the target is a midlevel leader as opposed to the top leader. These results differ markedly from those found in studies of political groups.1
For more than forty years the U.S. Air Force Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP) Operational Linescan System (OLS) has been the only system collecting global low light imaging data. A series of twenty-four DMSP satellites have collected low light imaging data. The design of the OLS has not changed significantly since satellite F-4 flew in the late 1970's and OLS data have relatively coarse spatial resolution, limited dynamic range, and lack in-flight calibration. In 2011 NASA and NOAA launched the Suomi National Polar Partnership (SNPP) satellite carrying the first Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) instrument. The VIIRS collects low light imaging data and has several improvements over the OLS' capabilities. In this paper we contrast the nighttime low light imaging collection capabilities of these two systems and compare their data products.
Since 1994, NGDC has had an active program focused on global mapping of nighttime lights using the data collected by the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program's Operational Linescan System (DMSP-OLS) sensors. The basic product is a global annual cloud-free composite, which averages the OLS visible band data for one satellite from the cloud-free segments of individual orbits. Over the years, NGDC has developed automatic algorithms for screening the quality of the nighttime visible band observations to remove areas contaminated by sunlight, moonlight, and the presence of clouds. In the Stable Lights product generation, fires and other ephemeral lights are removed based on their high brightness and short duration. Background noise is removed by setting thresholds based on visible band values found in areas known to be free of detectable lights. In 2010, NGDC released the version 4 time series of Stable Lights, spanning the years 1992-2009. These are available online at <http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/dmsp/downloadV4composites.html>.
We make a socio-historic examination of the community police efforts undertaken by the Polícia Militar do Rio de Janeiro (PMERJ) from 1983 to 2012, and emphasize the differences between the distinction of community and the actual practices employed, which in no way reflect the underlying terminology or nature. Despite the mismatch of jargon to reality, the actions have been beneficial insofar as they have made it possible to institutionalize traditional police measures in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, and lay the foundations for the emergence of a modern police force.
In this article, we aim to identify and analyze key factors impacting trust in the Minas Gerais State Police. To achieve this goal, we used the survey "Victimization and Fear Perception in Belo Horizonte and Minas Gerais", 2009, conducted in 29 cities. Apart from Belo Horizonte, the survey covered 5 cities in its metropolitan area, 7 cities considered regional poles and 16 other towns with less than 10,000 inhabitants. Some of the results are: individuals confuse police's functions with criminal justice's system's functions; individuals with lower socioeconomic status, that suffer greater police repression, are those who most trust the police; in smaller towns, where the police has closer contact to citizens and criminality is reduced, the police receives more trust than in larger ones; the perception of efficiency in solving problems related to violence produces the biggest positive effects on the level of institutional trust.
This article intends to go beyond the use of individual and aggregate socioeconomic variables related to poverty, incorporating factors referred to the urban space dimension, which is considered today part of the sociological explanation of crime. The ecological analysis of criminal offenses seeks to understand the complex nature of violence in order to identify factors influencing behavior, increasing or decreasing the risk of perpetrating violence or being victimized by it in the same or similar socioeconomic conditions. Since several indicators are barely measurable, ethnographic research becomes indispensable, what implies the necessary replacement of some concepts, in order to include embodied social practices (ethos) allowing for an articulation between the objective and the subjective, the macro and the micro. Aiming at tracing the complex processes that promote and consolidate such social practices, the research employed the method of extended cases, what made possible to link the local to other spheres of social life in an historical approach involving a plurality of sources. The mapping out of the different dominions in the favelas (militias, factions of the drug trafficking, and other groups) allowed the identification of conflict areas concentrated in the proximity of major highways, ports and airports, what shows a geopolitical configuration of the armed conflicts along the drug trafficking territories. Such outcome is highlighted by the high rate of homicides reported in official databases and in the perceptions of victimization revealed by surveys.
It has become a commonplace that Rio de Janeiros guerra do tráfico is entirely unique within Brazil. In fact, this is inaccurate. Drug trafficking organizations that in many respects resemble Rios facções do exist in other urban contexts. What differentiates them is less the ability to establish a local monopoly on the drug trade than the resilience of their internal structure, and consequently the duration of their existence and domination. During field research in nine peripheral communities in three cities, I observed not only high variation in the degree of concentration between local drug markets, but also variation over time within single communities. In this light, the stability of Rios highly concentrated drug market can be seen as a unique equilibrium in which the fragmentary forces at work in other cities are neutralized by specific traits of Rios factions. These traits, I argue, stem from the dominion these factions have exerted over the states prison system since before the period of their original expansion into the drug trade.
Latin American countries pursue a variety of reforms to reduce and prevent violent crime, ranging from new penal codes to restructured police forces. The most promising and popular approach to crime reduction is community-oriented policing which, in contrast to most forms of traditional policing, seeks to empower citizens by building police-community partnerships. Similar reforms in two cities in Brazil and four in Honduras show that community policing will be most effective where executive and security officials engage with social groups, either through direct contact with civil society or through state institutions that address the concerns of highly violent poor areas.
Until recently, dominant theoretical paradigms in the comparative social sciences did not highlight states as organizational structures or as potentially autonomous actors. Indeed, the term 'state' was rarely used. Current work, however, increasingly views the state as an agent which, although influenced by the society that surrounds it, also shapes social and political processes. The contributors to this volume, which includes some of the best recent interdisciplinary scholarship on states in relation to social structures, make use of theoretically engaged comparative and historical investigations to provide improved conceptualizations of states and how they operate. Each of the book's major parts presents a related set of analytical issues about modern states, which are explored in the context of a wide range of times and places, both contemporary and historical, and in developing and advanced-industrial nations. The first part examines state strategies in newly developing countries. The second part analyzes war making and state making in early modern Europe, and discusses states in relation to the post-World War II international economy. The third part pursues new insights into how states influence political cleavages and collective action. In the final chapter, the editors bring together the questions raised by the contributors and suggest tentative conclusions that emerge from an overview of all the articles. As a programmatic work that proposes new directions for the analysis of modern states, the volume will appeal to a wide range of teachers and students of political science, political economy, sociology, history, and anthropology.
In informal urban areas throughout the developing world, and even in some US and UK neighborhoods, tens if not hundreds of millions of people live under some form of criminal governance. For them, states’ claims of a monopoly on the use of force ring hollow; for many issues, a local criminal organization is the relevant authority. Yet the state is far from absent: residents may pay taxes, vote, and even inform on gangs as punishment for abusive behavior. Criminal governance flourishes in pockets of low state presence, but ones that states can generally enter at will, if not always without violence. It thus differs from state, corporate, and rebel governance because it is embedded within larger domains of state power. I develop a conceptual framework centered around the who, what, and how of criminal governance, organizing extant research and proposing a novel dimension: charismatic versus rational-bureaucratic forms of criminal authority. I then delineate the logics that may drive criminal organizations to provide governance for non-members, establishing building blocks for future theory-building and -testing. Finally, I explore how criminal governance intersects with the state, refining the concept of crime–state “symbiosis” and distinguishing it from neighboring concepts in organized-crime and drug-violence scholarship.
State interventions against organized criminal groups (OCGs) sometimes work to improve security, but often exacerbate violence. To understand why, this article offers a theory about criminal governance in five types of criminal regimes—Insurgent, Bandit, Symbiotic, Predatory, and Split. These differ according to whether criminal groups confront or collude with state actors, abuse or cooperate with the community, and hold a monopoly or contest territory with rival OCGs. Police interventions in these criminal regimes pose different challenges and are associated with markedly different local security outcomes. We provide evidence of this theory by using a multimethod research design combining quasi-experimental statistical analyses, automated text analysis, extensive qualitative research, and a large- N survey in the context of Rio de Janeiro’s “Pacifying Police Units” (UPPs), which sought to reclaim control of the favelas from criminal organizations.
Organized intergroup violence is almost universally modeled as a calculated act motivated by economic factors. In contrast, it is generally assumed that non-economic factors, such as an individual’s emotional state, play a role in many types of interpersonal violence, such as “crimes of passion.” We ask whether non-economic factors can also explain the well-established relationship between temperature and violence in a unique context where intergroup killings by drug-trafficking organizations (DTOs) and other interpersonal homicides are separately documented. A constellation of evidence, including the limited influence of a cash transfer program as well as comparisons with both other DTO crime and suicides, indicate that economic factors only partially mitigate the relationship between temperature and violence that we estimate in Mexico. We argue that non-economic psychological and physiological factors that are affected by temperature, modeled here as a “taste for violence,” likely play an important role in causing both interpersonal and intergroup violence.
States, rebels, and mafias all provide governance beyond their core membership; increasingly, so do prison gangs. US gangs leverage control over prison life to govern street-level drug markets. Brazil’s Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC) gang goes further, orchestrating paralyzing attacks on urban targets, while imposing a social order throughout slums that sharply reduces homicides. We analyze hundreds of seized PCC documents detailing its drug business and internal disciplinary system. Descriptively, we find vast, consignment-based trafficking operations whose profits fund collective benefits for members’ families; elaborate bureaucratic procedures and recordkeeping; and overwhelmingly nonviolent punishments for debt-nonpayment and misconduct. These features, we argue, reflect a deliberate strategy of creating rational-bureaucratic legitimacy in criminal governance. The PCC’s collectivist norms, fair procedures, and meticulous “criminal criminal records” facilitate community stigmatization of infractors, giving mild sanctions punitive heft and inducing widespread voluntary compliance without excessive coercion. This has aided the PCC’s rapid expansion across Brazil.
Insurgent organizations have become major players in criminal enterprises around the world. However, research examining why some participate in crime while others do not remains underdeveloped. Analyzing newly collected annual data on 140 insurgent groups from 1998 to 2012, we examine the conditions driving insurgents’ participation in drug crimes, extortion, smuggling, kidnapping for ransom, and robbery. We find that control of territory positively affects involvement in all types of crime. However, we also find notable differences in the conditions driving participation in episodic crimes versus crimes that require institutional investments. Institutional crimes are, with the exception of smuggling, more likely to occur as insurgent groups age, whereas efforts to cultivate legitimacy—as indicated by the ongoing provision of social services— substantially reduces the probability of involvement in episodic crimes. We discuss how this latter effect is reflective of a legitimacy trade-off that emerges for groups pursuing both social support and material resources. © 2019 by the Southern Political Science Association. All rights reserved.
Conventional wisdom portrays war zones as chaotic and anarchic. In reality, however, they are often orderly. This work introduces a new phenomenon in the study of civil war: wartime social order. It investigates theoretically and empirically the emergence and functioning of social order in conflict zones. By theorizing the interaction between combatants and civilians and how they impact wartime institutions, the study delves into rebel behavior, civilian agency and their impact on the conduct of war. Based on years of fieldwork in Colombia, the theory is tested with qualitative and quantitative evidence on communities, armed groups, and individuals in conflict zones. The study shows how armed groups strive to rule civilians, and how the latter influence the terms of that rule. The theory and empirical results illuminate our understanding of civil war, institutions, local governance, non-violent resistance, and the emergence of political order. Sheds light on how war can transform communities, local governance, and political order Challenges the popular perception of war zones being chaotic and anarchic.
Over the last decade, organized criminal violence has reached unprecedented levels and has caused as much violent death globally as direct armed conflict. Nonetheless, the study of organized crime in political science remains limited because these organizations and their violence are not viewed as political. Building on recent innovations in the study of armed conflict, I argue that organized criminal violence should no longer be segregated from related forms of organized violence and incorporated within the political violence literature. While criminal organizations do not seek to replace or break away from the state, they have increasingly engaged in the politics of the state through the accumulation of the means of violence itself. Like other non-state armed groups, they have developed variously collaborative and competitive relationships with the state that have produced heightened levels of violence in many contexts and allowed these organizations to gather significant political authority. I propose a simple conceptual typology for incorporating the study of these organizations into the political violence literature and suggest several areas of future inquiry that will illuminate the relationship between violence and politics more generally.
This article explains why Mexican drug cartels went to war in the 1990s, when the federal government was not pursuing a major antidrug campaign. We argue that political alternation and the rotation of parties in state gubernatorial power undermined the informal networks of protection that had facilitated the cartels’ operations under one-party rule. Without protection, cartels created their own private militias to defend themselves from rival groups and from incoming opposition authorities. After securing their turf, they used these militias to conquer rival territory. Drawing on an original database of intercartel murders, 1995 to 2006, we show that the spread of opposition gubernatorial victories was strongly associated with intercartel violence. Based on in-depth interviews with opposition governors, we show that by simply removing top- and midlevel officials from the state attorney’s office and the judicial police—the institutions where protection was forged—incoming governors unwittingly triggered the outbreak of intercartel wars.
Between 2005 and 2015, organized criminal groups murdered 209 politicians in Mexico. This paper explains why. It argues that the two interwoven trends of political and criminal pluralization in Mexico fostered the conditions for a new type of criminal violence against politicians. Mexican politicians are now targeted for accepting illicit money as well as for standing up to criminals. Moreover, this violence is evidence of an alarming and persistent pattern in Mexico of politicians enlisting criminal organizations to eliminate their political competition. Using a zero-inflated negative binomial model, this paper shows there is a strong statistical relationship between the increase in assassinations and the increases in political pluralization and criminal fragmentation. The article concludes that the failure to protect local public officials creates greater opportunities for the emergence of subnational authoritarian enclaves and threatens democratic consolidation. © 2017, GIGA German Institute of Global and Area Studies. All rights reserved.
For the past generation scholars have written about violence, crime, and conflict in Rio de Janeiro’s favelas. While this scholarship has developed an extensive understanding of the problem of violence and criminal control of the city’s favelas it has not yet effectively engaged in a discussion of the implications of differential types of crime creating local security orders. Building on research in two different city regions in Rio de Janeiro, this article examines how different types of crime groups emerge from varied forms of social disorganization and contribute to particular models of social control and order. The article examines the varying relationships and exchanges built by drug gangs in Rio de Janeiro’s Zona Norte (Northern Zone) and milícias in the city’s Zona Oeste (Western Zone). The actions of these criminal organizations emerge from and promote orders that affect the lived political, social, and economic experiences of residents of favelas.
Based on evidence from national data, Henderson et al. (Am Econ Rev 102(2):994–1028, 2012) suggest that growth of night lights can proxy reliably for growth of regional GDP in low-income countries where GDP data is frequently lacking or of poor quality. Using regional data in two large emerging economies, Brazil and India, this paper finds, however, that the relationship between night lights growth and observed GDP growth varies significantly—in both statistical and economic terms—across regions. The same applies to advanced economies like the United States and Western Europe. The paper accounts for measurement issues with regard to the night lights data and considers several extensions of the empirical model in order to analyze if and under which circumstances the relationship between night lights and GDP growth is stable. Yet parameter instability typically persists, while the stable relationship among urban counties in Brazil represents the major exception.
This now-classic examination of the development of viable political institutions in emerging nations is a major and enduring contribution to modern political analysis. In a new Foreword, Francis Fukuyama assesses Huntington's achievement, examining the context of the book's original publication as well as its lasting importance. "This pioneering volume, examining as it does the relation between development and stability, is an interesting and exciting addition to the literature."-American Political Science Review. "'Must' reading for all those interested in comparative politics or in the study of development."-Dankwart A. Rustow, Journal of International Affairs.
This article provides empirical evidence showing that when a multilevel government is well coordinated, organized crime can be more effectively controlled. Using a time-variant data set of Mexico’s cocaine markets at the subnational level and Cox proportional-hazards regressions, I show that when Mexico’s democratization decreased the probability of government coordination—the same party governing a municipality at every level of government—drug traffickers were more likely to violate the long-standing informal prohibition on selling cocaine within the country. It was this decrease in government coordination that would set the conditions for a violent war between drug cartels to erupt in the mid-2000s.
We complement the literature on distributive politics by taking a systematic look at regional favoritism in a large and diverse sample of countries and by employing a broad measure that captures the aggregate distributive effect of many different policies. In particular, we use satellite data on nighttime light intensity and information about the birthplaces of the countries’ political leaders. In our panel of 38,427 subnational regions from 126 countries with yearly observations from 1992 to 2009, we find that subnational regions have more intense nighttime light when being the birth region of the current political leader. We argue that this finding provides evidence for regional favoritism. We explore the dynamics and the geographical extent of regional favoritism and show that regional favoritism is most prevalent in countries with weak political institutions and poorly educated citizens. Furthermore, foreign aid inflows and oil rents tend to fuel regional favoritism in weakly institutionalized countries, but not elsewhere. JEL Codes: D72, R11.
In the West are the 'haves', while much of the rest of the world are the 'have-nots'. The extent of inequality today is unprecedented. Drawing on an extraordinary range of contemporary and historical examples, Why Nations Fail looks at the root of the problems facing some nations. Economists and scientists have offered useful insights into the reasons for certain aspects of poverty, such as Jeffrey Sachs (it's geography and the weather), and Jared Diamond (it's technology and species). But most theories ignore the incentives and institutions that populations need to invest and prosper: they need to know that if they work hard, they can make money and actually keep it - and the key to ensuring these incentives is sound institutions. Incentives and institutions are what separate the have and have-nots. Based on fifteen years of research, and stepping boldly into the territory of Ian Morris's Why the West Rules - For Now, Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson blend economics, politics, history and current affairs to provide a new, persuasive way of understanding wealth and poverty. And, perhaps most importantly, they provide a pragmatic basis for the hope that those mired in poverty can be placed on the path to prosperity.
This paper explores the importance of processes in institutional change and the relationship between processes and patterns of change. Using an ongoing case of police reform in Rio de Janeiro, the police pacification units (Unidades de Polícia Pacificadora) as an illustration, we develop two claims. First, the concept of reflective planning, developed by urban planning scholars, may help development scholars understand processes of institutional change. Second, some patterns, such as the institutional bypass, when combined with particular processes, such as reflective planning, may reinforce each other and further the objectives of reform processes.
This article proposes a new measure of tail risk spillover: the conditional coexceedance (CCX), defined as the number of joint occurrences of extreme negative returns in an industry, conditional on an extreme negative return in the financial sector. The empirical application provides evidence of significant volatility and tail risk spillovers from the financial sector to many real sectors in the U.S. economy from 2001 to 2011. These spillovers increase in crisis periods. The CCX in a given sector is positively related to its amount of debt financing and negatively related to its valuation and investment. Therefore, real economy sectors—which require relatively high debt financing and whose value and investment activity are relatively lower—are prime candidates for stock price volatility and depreciation in the wake of a financial sector crisis. Evidence also suggests that the higher the industry’s degree of competition, the stronger the tail risk spillover from the financial sector.
How do drug trafficking organizations organize? Drug trafficking organizations continue to operate effectively despite incentives for members to defect, pressure from damaged communities, and government interdiction efforts. This paper identifies the problem of defection in this context and applies insights from the literatures on club goods and extralegal governance institutions to explain the puzzling organization and activities of one of Mexico’s most dangerous drug trafficking organizations, La Familia Michoacana. The group uses a reward and punishment scheme to prevent defection from members and to elicit cooperation from the community and government.
Purpose
– Previous literature has clearly demonstrated the need for sound government policies or “institutions” to promote and support entrepreneurship in a country. The purpose of this paper is to explore the role of one such institution – political stability – in boosting entrepreneurial endeavors. A politically stable nation will have lower risk and transaction/contracting costs, and higher levels of government transparency, predictability, and accountability. Thus, the paper should expect that with greater political stability there should be a greater degree of entrepreneurial activity.
Design/methodology/approach
– Using dynamic panel estimators (System GMM estimators) and considering multiple proxies of political risk, our results confirm this hypothesis. Such estimators handle challenges associated with panel data efficiently.
Findings
– The paper's results show that greater political stability for a country does indeed lead to an increased rate of entrepreneurship and wealth creation.
Originality/value
– Entrepreneurship is critical to the process of economic growth and development. To prosper, countries must unleash the creative talents of their citizens through the decentralized process of formal private sector entrepreneurship. New legal businesses create jobs, opportunities, wealth, and goods and services that make a nation grow. Sadly in many nations, this process is stifled and poverty is the result. While previous research has examined which types of specific policies matter for promoting entrepreneurship, the paper considers the different question of how the stability of political institutions impacts the rate of entrepreneurship.
By analytically decoupling war and violence, this book explores the causes and dynamics of violence in civil war. Against the prevailing view that such violence is an instance of impenetrable madness, the book demonstrates that there is logic to it and that it has much less to do with collective emotions, ideologies, and cultures than currently believed. Kalyvas specifies a novel theory of selective violence: it is jointly produced by political actors seeking information and individual civilians trying to avoid the worst but also grabbing what opportunities their predicament affords them. Violence, he finds, is never a simple reflection of the optimal strategy of its users; its profoundly interactive character defeats simple maximization logics while producing surprising outcomes, such as relative nonviolence in the 'frontlines' of civil war.
DELEGATIVE DEMOCRACY Guillermo O'Donnell Guillermo O'DonneU, an Argentine political scientist, is Helen Kellogg Professor of lnternational Studies and Academic Director of the Kellogg Institute of International Studies at the University of Notre Dame. His books include Modernization and Bureaucratic-Authoritarianism (1979); Bureaucratic-Authoritarianism: Argentina, 1966-1973, in Comparative Perspective (1988); and, with Philippe Schmitter and Laurence Whitehead, Transitions from Authoritarian Rule (1986). Here I depict a "new species," a type of existing democracies that has yet to be theorized. As often happens, it has many similarities with other, already recognized species, with cases shading off between the former and some variety of the latter. Still, I believe that the differences are significant enough to warrant an attempt at such a depiction. The drawing of neater boundaries between these types of democracy depends on empirical research, as well as more refined analytical work that I am now undertaking. But if I really have found a new species (and not a member of an already recognized family, or a form too evanescent to merit conceptualization), it may be worth exploring its main features. Scholars who have worked on democratic transitions and consolidation have repeatedly said that, since it would be wrong to assume that these processes all culminate in the same result, we need a typology of democracies. Some interesting efforts have been made, focused on the consequences, in terms of types of democracy and policy patterns, of various paths to democratization. I My own ongoing research suggests, however, that the more decisive factors for generating various kinds of democracy are not related to the characteristics of the preceding authoritarian regime or to the process of transition. Instead, I believe that we must focus upon various long-term historical factors, as well as the degree of severity of the socioeconomic problems that newly installed democratic governments inherit. Let me briefly state the main points of my argument: 1) Existing Journal of Democracy Vol. 5, No. 1 January 1994 56 Journal of Democracy theories and typologies of democracy refer to representative democracy as it exists, with all its variations and subtypes, in highly developed capitalist countries. 2) Some newly installed democracies (Argentina, Brazil, Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia, Philippines, Korea, and many postcommunist countries) are democracies, in the sense that they meet Robert Dahl's criteria for the definition of polyarchy. 2 3) Yet these democracies are not -- and do not seem to be on the path toward becoming -- representative democracies; they present characteristics that prompt me to call them delegative democracies (DD). 4) DDs are not consolidated (i.e., institutionalized) democracies, but they may be enduring. In many cases, there is no sign either of any imminent threat of an authoritarian regression, or of advances toward representative democracy. 5) There is an important interaction effect: the deep social and economic crisis that most of these countries inherited from their authoritarian predecessors reinforces certain practices and conceptions about the proper exercise of political authority that lead in the direction of delegative, not representative democracy. The following considerations underlie the argument presented above: 3 A) The installation of a democratically elected government opens the way for a "second transition," often longer and more complex than the initial transition from authoritarian rule. B) This second transition is supposed to be from a democratically elected government to an institutionalized, consolidated democratic regime. C) Nothing guarantees, however, that this second transition will occur. New democracies may regress to authoritarian rule, or they may stall in a feeble, uncertain situation. This situation may endure without opening avenues for institutionalized forms of democracy. D) The crucial element determining the success of the second transition is the building of a set of institutions that become important decisional points in the flow of political power. E) For such a successful outcome to occur, governmental policies and the political strategies of various agents must embody the recognition of a paramount shared interest in democratic institution building. The successful cases have featured a decisive coalition of broadly supported political leaders who take great care in creating and strengthening democratic political institutions. These institutions, in turn, have made it easier to cope with the social and economic problems inherited from the authoritarian regime. This...
How can people who lack access to effective government institutions establish property rights and facilitate exchange? The illegal narcotics trade in Los Angeles has flourished despite its inability to rely on state-based formal institutions of governance. An alternative system of governance has emerged from an unexpected source—behind bars. The Mexican Mafia prison gang can extort drug dealers on the street because they wield substantial control over inmates in the county jail system and because drug dealers anticipate future incarceration. The gang's ability to extract resources creates incentives for them to provide governance institutions that mitigate market failures among Hispanic drug-dealing street gangs, including enforcing deals, protecting property rights, and adjudicating disputes. Evidence collected from federal indictments and other legal documents related to the Mexican Mafia prison gang and numerous street gangs supports this claim.