Voting for Forbearance: The Politics of Property Law Enforcement in Latin America

Abstract

Conventional wisdom is that poor voters in Latin America have amorphous electoral interests that lead them to sell their votes, support anti-establishment politicians, or swing between parties. This paper argues that the urban informal sector poor have a coherent material interest in forbearance toward property laws that they tend to violate. Because informal welfare benefits are provided through inaction, politicians can send more credible electoral cues of their affinity with poor voters through forbearance than through traditional social policy promises. To demonstrate this, I develop an electoral model in which voters use enforcement as a way to learn about which politicians are likely to represent them in office, and politicians in turn avoid enforcement in poor districts due to the electoral consequences. I then test these implications using a survey experiment in Bogotá, Colombia and a database of campaign platforms from Lima, Peru. This paper suggests that forbearance functions as an informal mode of redistribution, and that it structures electoral behavior more clearly than traditional tax-based redistribution in Latin America.