St Comp Int Dev

https://doi.org/10.1007/s12116-018-9269-y

State, Society, and Informality in Cities

of the Global South

Adam M. Auerbach 1 & Adrienne LeBas 2 &

Alison E. Post 3 & Rebecca Weitz-Shapiro 4

# Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2018

Abstract Contemporary urbanization in the Global South merits greater attention from
scholars of comparative politics. Governance, associational life, and political behavior
take distinctive forms in the social and institutional environments created by rapid
urbanization, particularly within informal settlements and labor markets. In this special
issue, we examine forms of collective action and claims-making in these spaces. We also
consider how the state assesses, maps, and responds to the demands of informal sector
actors. Tackling questions of citizen and state behavior in these informal urban contexts
requires innovative research strategies due to data scarcity and social and institutional
complexity. Contributors to this symposium offer novel strategies for addressing these
challenges, including the use of informal archives, worksite-based sampling, ethno-
graphic survey design, enforcement process-tracing, and crowd-sourced data.

Keywords Cities . Urbanization . Urban politics . Informality . Governance . Complexity .

Informal institutions . Methods . Developing world

Rapid urbanization raises important questions for our understanding of politics in the
Global South. As of 2014, almost half of the developing world’s population resides in
urban areas (United Nations 2015, p. 21); Latin America has been majority urban since the
1970s, and urban majorities are predicted for Africa and Asia by 2030 (Montgomery 2008,

* Adam M. Auerbach
aauerba@american.edu

1
School of International Service, American University, 4400 Massachusetts Avenue, NW,
Washington, DC 20016, USA
2
School of Public Affairs, American University, 4400 Massachusetts Avenue, NW, Washington,
DC 20016, USA
3
University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA
4
Brown University, Providence, RI, USA
 St Comp Int Dev

p. 762). A remarkable 86% of future population growth is forecast to occur in cities in the
developing world (Montgomery 2008, p. 762). While much of this growth will occur in
sprawling megacities, the world’s most quickly expanding urban centers are small and
medium-sized cities with fewer than one million inhabitants (United Nations 2015, p. 20).
Alongside these dramatic demographic changes, political decentralization has
established independent municipal governments and local elections in cities across
much of the developing world, expanding the scope and significance of urban gover-
nance in the process.1 Greater political contestation and governmental autonomy at the
local level has been accompanied by shifts in resources and responsibilities. A large
number of countries have empowered local governments to raise revenue and control
the distribution of resources (World Bank and United Cities and Local Governments
2008, p. 174). In addition, administrative responsibilities regarding water, sanitation,
land market regulation, transportation, primary education, and policing often now
reside with city governments or metropolitan agencies (World Bank and United
Cities and Local Governments 2008).
Contemporary urbanization in the Global South merits greater attention from scholars
of comparative politics both because of the scale of such changes and also because these
urban areas represent distinctive political spaces. Cities of the Global South are typically
more diverse in ethnic, religious, and class terms than the towns or villages from which
new residents originate. Urban residents engage with a wider array of associations and
institutions than their counterparts in the countryside, and interactions between citizens,
associations, and state entities generate complex social and political networks in cities.
The study of these distinctive political and social landscapes produces acute methodo-
logical and data collection challenges that demand innovations in research design. In
addition, a focus on urban spaces in developing countries may require us to significantly
refine—or even altogether reconfigure—many core theories in comparative politics.
While many aspects of this urban transformation deserve attention, we suggest that it
is particularly important for scholars to examine the politics of Binformal^ urban actors
and spaces.2 Most prominently, these include informal sector workers and the un-
planned, largely unregulated informal settlements—often referred to as Bslums^—
where substantial portions of the population in developing cities live. Informality is
perhaps the distinguishing feature of contemporary urban life in the Global South, as it
distinguishes these urban areas both from rural areas and from urban areas in high-
income countries. A stunning 862 million people now reside in slums worldwide (UN-
1
Constitutional reforms in India, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Thailand have increased local government
autonomy, and mayors are now elected in these and several other Asian countries (World Bank and United
Cities and Local Governments 2008, pp. 57–58). In Latin America, all countries except for Cuba hold
municipal elections (World Bank and United Cities and Local Governments 2008, p. 181). In sub-Saharan
Africa, the majority of countries that hold regular national elections convene local government elections as
well (Ndegwa 2002).
2
The informal sector is generally understood as economic and development activities that are untaxed and
unregulated by the state. This would include unregulated or unregistered businesses, as well as settlements and
infrastructure that were built outside of state regulations. The term Binformal economy^ was first used by Hart
(1973) in his description of the Ghanaian economy, and as Castells and Portes (1989, p. 11) note, it is a
Bcommon-sense notion^ with Bmoving social boundaries,^ which makes precise definition difficult. A broader
conception of informality could incorporate informal institutions (see Helmke & Levitsky 2004), unofficial or
unregulated practices (e.g., Roy 2009; McFarlane 2012), or Bflexibility, negotiation, or situational spontaneity
that push back against established state regulations and the constraints of the law^ (Boudreau & Davis 2017, p.
155).
St Comp Int Dev

HABITAT 2013), and much of this population lacks tenure security and access to basic
services (de Soto 2000; UN-HABITAT 2003). Large segments of the urban poor toil in
informal economies that are characterized by wage insecurity and a lack of social
benefits; informal sector employment comprises more than half of total employment in
the developing world (see Bacchetta et al. 2009, p. 27).3
Conducting research in such settings presents methodological and theoretical chal-
lenges, which are the focus of this special issue. These challenges are twofold. First,
scholars conducting research in the urban informal sector must develop research
strategies that are appropriate to settings characterized both by social and institutional
complexity and by acute data scarcity. For instance, measuring the degree of ethnic
diversity in a city or neighborhood, which some might expect to be straightforward, can
pose problems due to shifts in the definition and salience of particular identities in
urban contexts. Similarly, representative sampling is difficult when there are few
reliable data sources with which to construct sampling frames and when high rates of
population mobility quickly render existing information obsolete.
Second, these novel empirical terrains may challenge existing theories about the
causes and consequences of political action. For example, much of the literature on
collective action and social movements stresses how long-entrenched informal institu-
tions, shared identities, and social capital translate latent grievances into collective
action (Woolcock & Narayan 2000; Krishna 2002; Bowles & Gintis 2004; Tsai 2007).
The factors that explain citizen coordination may differ in urban contexts characterized
by rapid population turnover and high levels of social diversity. Absent common
identity or a shared political language, political action may depend to a greater degree
on individual self-interest (Portes 1972; Roberts & Portes 2006).
This symposium takes up these methodological and theoretical challenges. This
introductory essay sets out a research agenda on the politics of urban informality in the
contemporary Global South and argues that such research can generate theoretical
insights of broad relevance to scholars of comparative politics. It illustrates the potential
analytic gains of such research with examples from Africa, Latin America, and Asia.
The primary aim of each of the component papers that follow is methodological. These
four essays describe new research strategies generated in the context of research on
urban informality, each of which has applicability in comparative politics outside the
empirical setting where it was developed. These strategies include consulting informal
archives; conducting worksite-based sampling of hard-to-reach populations; engaging
in process tracing of government efforts to enforce laws; and using crowd-sourced data
to track service provision by bureaucrats. In addition, each component paper delves
into an example of either Bbottom-up^ or Btop-down^ politics as it relates to urban
informality. Drawing on research in India, Colombia, and Turkey, these papers vari-
ously examine the forms of collective action and claims-making that emerge from
within informal settlements and labor markets, or they consider how the state assesses,
maps, and responds to the demands of informal sector actors.
In the remainder of this introductory essay, we first show how urbanization in the
Global South has generated a distinct environment characterized by great social and
institutional complexity—complexity that takes on a particularly stark form in informal

3
In countries as diverse as Bolivia, Pakistan, the Philippines, and Tanzania, informal employment makes up
more than 75% of total non-agricultural employment (International Labor Organization 2014, p. 9).
 St Comp Int Dev

settlements and labor markets. We then illustrate how considering urban informality
can help scholars of comparative politics pose new research questions and revisit
classic theoretical debates from new perspectives. Next, we outline the serious meth-
odological challenges presented when conducting research in the urban informal sector
and introduce the innovative research strategies developed by symposium contributors
to address these difficulties. We conclude by highlighting the broad potential applica-
tions of these strategies.

Rapid Urbanization and Social and Institutional Complexity

Between 2005 and 2010, the average annual urban population growth rates in Africa,
Asia, and Latin America were 3.55, 2.79, and 1.55%, respectively (United Nations
2015, pp. 253, 255, 259). If such rates continue, the urban population in these regions
will double in approximately 20, 25, and 45 years, respectively. This rapid urbanization
generates great social and institutional complexity in the Global South. By social
complexity, we mean heightened ethnic and linguistic diversity, fluid population
movement, and social and economic differentiation. By institutional complexity, we
refer to environments in which governance and services are provided by overlapping
institutions and across multiple jurisdictions, by large and complicated bureaucracies,
and by both state and non-state actors. Both social and institutional complexity take on
especially stark forms in the proliferating slums and informal labor markets of these
cities, where varied institutional and associational arrangements have emerged to
articulate and meet citizens’ demands for representation and basic services. Below,
we elaborate on how the nature of rapid urbanization in today’s Global South generates
social and institutional complexity and explain why these phenomena are especially
acute in the informal sector.

Urban Population Growth and Social and Institutional Complexity

Rapid population growth contributes to social complexity through several avenues.

According to classic social theory, urbanization prompts social and economic special-
ization (Wirth 1938, pp. 20–21; Simmel 1950, pp. 416–417, 420). Whereas individual
behavior and interactions with non-community members may be tightly regulated in
villages, Btraditional^ forms of social control are often weaker in cities, facilitating the
emergence of new identities.4 Cities also pull migrants from what are often large and
diverse hinterlands, resulting in greater social diversity than observed in rural areas.5
And while village economies are typically too small to support significant economic
specialization, larger urban economies support differentiated markets and allow for
employment mobility over a worker’s lifetime.
Rapid population growth also fuels institutional complexity in cities in the Global
South. As cities expand in size, they often spread outwards, spilling over existing
4
In some settings, traditional identities and modes of social control may be adapted to urban settings and
retain much of their force (e.g., Cohen 1969).
5
These observations date back to the Chicago School of Sociology and have been noted across world regions
(see Erdentug & Colombijn 2002). Note, however, that cities vary in levels of ethnic and racial mixing at the
neighborhood level (e.g., Schensul & Heller 2011).
St Comp Int Dev

municipal boundaries into adjacent villages or towns. Over time, this process creates
politically fragmented metropolitan areas, as existing jurisdictions tend to resist efforts
at amalgamation or the creation of metropolitan regional authorities that would curb
their political power. For example, 350 urban areas in East Asia contain multiple
political jurisdictions, 135 of which have no overarching city authority (World Bank
2015, p. 56). Metropolitan areas are also highly fragmented in Latin America (Nickson
1995). These political divisions complicate efforts to regulate urban development and
deliver basic services (Stren & Cameron 2005). Parallel efforts to create legally
independent service providers focusing on particular sectors—a common product of
state reform programs promulgated by development banks and international aid agen-
cies during the 1990s—further fragment metropolitan areas in the Global South (see
Herrera & Post 2014).
Urbanization also encourages governments to develop more complex bureaucracies
to deliver basic services. Kuznets (1966, p. 103) famously argued that urbanization
necessitated a bigger governmental apparatus, especially to regulate and provide the
services underpinning markets. Relatedly, urban population densities require infrastruc-
ture of greater scale and sophistication, which in turn require more elaborate bureau-
cracies to administer them. For instance, cities need highly developed infrastructure to
extract, treat, and transport water from multiple sources, as compared to the relatively
simple well technologies typically used in rural areas.

Social and Institutional Complexity under Urban Informality

The social and institutional complexity produced through rapid urbanization takes
on a particularly stark form in informal labor markets and settlements. Informal
labor markets and settlements in cities of the Global South commonly experience
rapid population turnover and movement, which accentuates the complexity of
urban social life.6 Seasonal migrants often arrive in cities to work for fixed periods,
only to return to their rural homes at harvest time or when urban employment
opportunities diminish. Thachil (this volume) notes that the seasonal migrant
population is estimated to exceed 100 million people in India alone. China is home
to a similarly large Bfloating population^ of migrant laborers; of the estimated 750
million city dwellers in China, approximately 250 million lack the registration
(hukou) that allows for legal urban employment and residence (Li et al. 2014).
Sub-Saharan African countries also exhibit robust circular migration between cities
and rural areas (e.g., Ferguson 1999; Potts 2011). Informal labor and commercial
markets within cities can bring together workers, buyers, and sellers from diverse
regional and/or ethnic origins (Grossman & Honig 2017; Thachil 2017). In such
contexts, low-skilled migrants often intensely compete, for work in construction,
street vending, and other trades (e.g., Thachil 2017).
Even when migrants settle permanently in urban areas, they do not necessarily stay
rooted in one place within a city.7 In Latin America, for example, even though

6
Extensive population movement can also occur in rural settings (see World Bank 2009, p. 153).
7
For example, a large survey of economically diverse residents in 11 Nigerian cities found that 30% of
respondents had moved within the past 5 years (December 2010 data collected by Adrienne LeBas; see Bodea
& LeBas (2016) for more details).
 St Comp Int Dev

permanent migration to cities is common (Nelson 1976; Gilbert 1998, p. 41), poor
residents are increasingly forced to migrate within urban areas, often as a result of crime
and violence (Sánchez 2013; Cantor & Rodríguez Serna 2017). Both within and
outside Latin America, rising housing and land prices, as well as evictions by the state
or non-state actors, displace poorer residents to peripheral areas, destabilizing social
networks and access to labor markets in the process. Settlements are often located on
marginal land vulnerable to natural or manmade hazards such as landslides, earth-
quakes, and industrial pollution, which can prompt sudden and substantial shifts in the
social composition of neighborhoods. Finally, communal conflict can generate move-
ment and increased segregation within urban spaces, perhaps undermining those
features of urban life that promote ethnic integration (e.g., Field et al. 2008).
Urban population growth and movement also fuels institutional complexity in
informal labor markets and settlements. Informal economies are characterized by an
extremely diverse set of market governance institutions and trade networks.8 While
some of these institutions have written charters and rules, others constitute informal
institutions according to Helmke and Levitsky’s (2004) definition: rules are unwritten,
yet members are aware of them and sanction violations. These institutions arise to
facilitate contracting and economically beneficial exchange between strangers in a
chaotic, often changing urban environment. This is in contrast to the formal sector,
where formal institutions and the rule of law facilitate exchange, and also in contrast to
rural or village settings where direct personal relationships are possible (Mitchell 1969;
Greif 1993; Clark 1994). In addition, informal economic activity by definition lies at
the margins of the tax and regulatory reach of government agencies (Castells & Portes
1989). As informal economies are not officially Bseen^ by the state, attempts to tax and
regulate these businesses are likely to be unofficial, less predictable, and more uneven
that the state’s efforts in formal areas of the economy (Joshi et al. 2014; Goodfellow
2015). In addition, informal businesses may face attempts at regulation and extraction
from non-state actors, such as community organizations and criminal gangs.
Informal settlements also lie largely outside the regulatory reach of the state,
contributing to institutional complexity. Land in slums is typically occupied rather than
purchased on the legal market, and structures are built without legal permissions or
approvals. Service providers, already stretched thin in developing cities, often refrain
from making infrastructure investments in informal settlements that may be razed by
future governments. For these reasons, O’Donnell (1993) famously classified slums—
along with peripheral provinces and other areas with little effective state penetration—
as Bbrown areas.^
This uneven and intermittent formal state presence creates an opportunity for a wide
variety of non-state actors to emerge to channel or meet citizens’ needs for basic
services. For example, in many slums in the developing world, policing is carried out
by vigilante groups, private militias, and gangs operating alongside and/or in compe-
tition with one another and government security forces (Davis 2010; LeBas 2013;
Hidalgo & Lessing 2015; Moncada 2016). Private entrepreneurs and cooperatives
commonly provide households with water and electricity, often siphoned off from state
networks (see Post et al. 2017). NGOs (Brass 2016), organizations with informal ties to
political parties (Thachil 2014), and community developments associations (Stacey &

8
See Breman (1996); Gill (2012); Grossman (2016).
St Comp Int Dev

Lund 2016; Auerbach 2017) can also step in to substitute for or supplement state
services. In less coordinated ways, residents of informal settlements sometimes even
generate illicit and haphazard patchworks of water and electricity connections to link
themselves to city grids. Just as improvised service provision arrangements vary
significantly from community to community, so do organized efforts to pressure
political authorities (e.g., Gay 1994; Stokes 1995; Jha et al. 2007; Heller et al. 2015;
Auerbach 2016). As Lund (2006) points out, the existence of multiple authority
claimants, services providers, and taxing entities generates a context of intense institu-
tional competition—with uncertain effects on citizens’ orientation to the state itself.

The Politics of Urban Informality

The complex social and institutional environments found in informal settlements and
labor markets in the Global South provide fertile terrain for revisiting important themes
in comparative politics. In the first instance, studying slums and informal labor markets
can lead us to think differently about bottom-up forms of collective action and claims-
making, such as mobilization and clientelistic exchanges for public services. In addi-
tion, considering state responses to urban informality can shed new light on top-down
politics, such as the politicized allocation of services and infrastructure, regulatory
enforcement, and the behavior of government bureaucracies. In this section, we argue
that the distinctive features of urban informal environments may require scholars to
revisit conventional approaches to a variety of bottom up and top down processes, as
well as interactions between them. We provide a number of examples of how a focus on
urban informality could shape the study of key scholarly questions; a few of these are
explored in depth in the constituent papers of this special issue.

Urban Informality, Claim-Making, and Collective Action

Informal settlements and labor markets provide key settings in which to examine
classic questions of bottom-up politics, including collective action, political organiza-
tion, and claims-making. We take as points of departure some of the distinctive features
of these informal settings, both social and institutional. Focusing on these factors points
to ways in which we might reconsider many debates within comparative politics.
A central feature of informal urban spaces is ethnic diversity. Scholars have recently
devoted a great deal of attention to the effects of diversity on local public goods
provision, but we know less about the ways in which diversity and the new identities
that emerge in urban settings shape social organization and claims-making. Does
diversity hinder collective mobilization (Banerjee et al. 2005; Habyarimana et al.
2009; Khwaja 2009), or are there conditions under which differences can be bridged
or simply made less important? Recent studies find that ethnic preferences are often
contingent, shaped by election timing, class status, and neighborhood diversity (Marx
et al. 2015; Michelitch 2015; Grossman & Honig 2017). This may be especially true in
informal urban areas. Thachil speaks to this question by examining the degree to which
informal sector workers in urban India are willing to cooperate across ethnic lines. His
community of focus—circular migrants who reside in their home villages part of the
year and also spend months at a time living in large urban areas—are a large and
 St Comp Int Dev

heretofore understudied group in the Global South. He shows how these migrants work
and live across traditional ethnic divisions when they are in the city.
A focus on urban informality also prompts us to consider how the fluidity of social
and political hierarchies in these spaces affect patterns of collective action. Is it more or
less difficult for communities to mobilize to obtain benefits from the state when
traditional social hierarchies are less strictly followed, as is frequently the case in urban
areas? How does diversity and population movement impact the structure of patron-
client networks and party-voter linkages? Under what circumstances do political elites
intentionally foment collective action challenging the status quo? Recent experimental
work, for instance, shows that residents of India’s impressively diverse slums wield
substantial agency and choice in selecting their informal leaders and are willing to seek
help from and follow non-coethnic slum leaders, especially those who have the
capacity to successfully petition the state for public services (Auerbach & Thachil
2017). Branch and Mamphilly (2015) suggest that shared economic grievances can knit
together diverse groups in urban Africa and allow for the organization of large-scale
urban protests. Auyero (2006, 2007), meanwhile, illustrates how elites may encourage
collective action among the urban poor when they feel it will help them gain the upper
hand in factional struggles or will allow them to avoid blame for disruptions to the flow
of clientelistic handouts.
The complex and variegated institutional environments in the urban informal sector
also create an opportunity to enrich existing theories of citizen claims-making. For
example, one key source of institutional complexity—land tenure insecurity in informal
settlements—suggests a new approach to the study of clientelism. Standard models of
clientelism focus on Bpositive^ inducements for voters to support particular politicians
(see Mares & Young 2016), yet negative inducements may have significant effects on
urban voters. For example, a voter who fears eviction may find it harder to sanction a
poorly performing politician than a voter without those fears. To date, the few scholars
who have engaged with this point offer contrasting accounts. Studying poor Mexico
City neighborhoods during the 1970s, Eckstein (1977, p. 80) found that the urban poor
mobilized more effectively and secured more benefits when they lacked title, as their
needs were greater and neighborhood organizations had not yet been coopted by the
dominant party, the PRI. More recently, however, Larreguy et al. (2015), find that rates
of clientelism dropped following land titling in Mexico because voters were less
susceptible to threats and thus freer to vote according to policy preferences. Although
much contemporary work on clientelism examines urban environments, more work is
needed to understand how informality itself affects the nature and prevalence of
clientelism. Although not the focus of the essays in this symposium, we consider this
a fruitful avenue for future research.
A further consequence of slums’ great institutional complexity is that citizens can
approach a wide array of institutions, intermediaries, and associations in their efforts to
solve individual and collective problems. Notably, these institutional configurations can
vary dramatically across informal settlements. In his classic study of political partici-
pation in PRI-dominated Mexico City during the 1970s, Cornelius (1975, p. 130)
explicitly compared patterns of political participation and demand-making across
neighborhoods, observing dramatic variation across them. Contemporary comparative
politics scholarship on political participation in settings with more robust party com-
petition could usefully examine whether community-level institutional characteristics
St Comp Int Dev

explain variation in how citizens approach the state and the sorts of benefits commu-
nities extract from governments and political leaders.9 A pending question is whether
institutional complexity makes it more or less difficult for residents to pursue remedies
for their grievances.10

State Responses to the Informal Sector

Focusing on urban informality in the Global South also prompts a reexamination of

classic questions about how governments understand and respond to citizen grievances
and pressures. Here, it is important to consider the actions not only of elected officials
but also those of employees in large urban bureaucracies. Once again, we argue that
distinctive features of informal settlements and labor markets, such as ethnic diversity
and land tenure insecurity, may prompt reformulations of familiar questions in com-
parative politics.
We might consider, for instance, how high levels of ethnic diversity in cities affect
incentives for politicians to engage in ethnic targeting when distributing state resources.
While a large literature in African politics documents the prevalence of ethnic targeting,
it is unclear whether these practices are effective in urban areas, since relatively
integrated neighborhoods may make it harder to withhold goods from non-coethnics.
In the short run, increasing ethnic diversity in urban areas may result in strategic action
by both politicians and voters. For instance, minorities are more likely to abandon
ethnic voting and support a rival ethnic group’s party when ethnic demography would
make their exclusion from clientelistic rewards difficult (Ichino & Nathan 2013).
Meanwhile, politicians in diverse constituencies can respond to this problem of non-
excludability by shifting from the provision of public goods to private transfers to
coethnics (Ejdemyr et al. 2015).11 In the long run, however, increasing urban diversity
may erode ethnic clientelism. In Africa, urban voters are increasingly drawn to populist
candidates who rely on cross-ethnic campaigns (Koter 2013; Resnick 2013). If politi-
cians rely less on ethnicity in their search for support, there is a need to understand the
strategies that may replace ethnic mobilization in urban areas.
The prevalence of tenure insecurity and informal employment also suggests that the
politicized enforcement of zoning and labor law merits more attention from political
scientists.12 Politicians’ decisions to grant titles or recognize slums can significantly
affect the security and stress experienced by the urban poor, as well as their access to
basic services (Heller et al. 2015). Government decisions to not enforce existing laws
(against squatting, for example)—or Bforebear^—can similarly affect citizens’ liveli-
hoods and politicians’ careers (Holland 2016). Under what circumstances do politicians
have incentives to push bureaucrats to enforce regulations, and under what
9
Scholars can also examine the extent to which state-sponsored venues for citizen participation at the
community and city level affect political participation by the urban poor (e.g., Heller & Evans 2010).
10
Studying a Buenos Aires slum suffering from toxic exposure, Auyero and Swistun (2009) find that
institutional complexity makes it difficult for community members to understand to whom they can direct
their complaints, while in Santiago, Chile, community leaders in a slum point to the usefulness of NGOs,
rather than political parties, in advancing environmental concerns (Roberts & Portes 2006, pp. 67–68).
11
Reliance on these strategies may vary even within a single city (Nathan 2016).
12
This question has attracted greater attention from other fields; see for example Cross (1998) and Davis
(2013) on the role of government officials under a one-party regime and business elites, respectively, in
regulating street vending in Mexico.
 St Comp Int Dev

circumstances do they face incentives to forebear? To what extent does community

mobilization affect the state’s willingness to enforce laws? Bozçağa and Holland tackle
these questions, investigating how electoral institutions affect the incentives for politi-
cians and bureaucrats involved in different stages of the enforcement process to either
enforce or refrain from enforcing existing laws in urban informal spaces.
Finally, it is important to consider how government bureaucracies that deliver public
services in cities in the Global South relate to informal settlements. How can the heads of
large, complex agencies effectively monitor their employees and their contacts with
citizens, especially when there is little information about who receives services and
when? Can they establish more direct links with citizens to learn about their preferences
and the perceived performance of their organizations? This is the focus of the paper by
Post, Agnihotri, and Hyun in this symposium. The chain linking service providers and
citizens is even more complicated in informal settlements that lie outside formal service
delivery networks. In Sub-Saharan Africa and Indonesia, for example, utility employees
or elected officials often accept payoffs in exchange for arranging for utility bulk water
to be informally Bsold^ to private firms, which distribute water in informal settlements
(Kjellén & McGranahan 2006, p. 13; Keener et al. 2010, p. 18; Kooy 2014, pp. 43–47).
This points to ways in which bottom-up efforts by local actors affect the activities of
state agencies in informal settlements. While such relationships have received some
attention in anthropology, geography, and urban studies (see Post et al. 2017, p. 959),
political scientists have devoted far less attention to them. In sum, scholars of compar-
ative politics could gain new perspectives on classic questions regarding collective
action, linkage strategies between politicians and citizens, and the politics of local public
goods provision by considering urban informality and its defining features.

Research Design and Methodological Challenges in the Study of Urban

Informality

In the previous section, we pointed to two large conceptual arenas, citizen claims-
making and state responses to that claims-making, in which greater attention to urban
informality may generate new theoretical insights. But how exactly should researchers
go about studying these dynamics? Low levels of state capacity and limited state
engagement with the informal sector mean that states generally collect little data that
could assist research on these themes. Meanwhile, the causes and manifestations of
social and institutional complexity found in cities of the Global South—rapid urban
population growth and movement, multi-focal institutional environments, and urban
informality itself—present significant challenges for researchers collecting their own
data. Scholars therefore must devise creative strategies to address these obstacles. We
outline these challenges in this section and preview efforts by our special issue
contributors to address these challenges.

Research Challenges Stemming from Social Complexity

Rapid population movement, ethnic diversity, and a weak state presence contribute to
the great social complexity observed in informal settlements and labor markets in the
Global South. State data collection efforts—rarely exemplary in the developing
St Comp Int Dev

world—are particularly lacking in these contexts. The combination of social complex-

ity and acute data scarcity presents significant challenges for researchers interested in
studying informal sector politics.
Population data for the developing world is of poor quality, and data inadequacy is
particularly acute for rapidly growing cities. Censuses are conducted infrequently and at
highly irregular intervals, especially in much of Africa, so state data on urban populations
quickly becomes obsolete. Even where states conduct regular censuses, data quality for
informal labor markets and settlements is poor, since many informal sector workers and
slum dwellers are not officially recognized by the state. Any official data that exists is
likely to exhibit a dramatic downward bias (e.g., Tripp 1997, p. xii).13 When researchers
try to collect data on these populations independently, population movement, poor
information on the size or density of settlements, and lack of the basic data needed to
stratify samples makes it difficult to identify subjects, develop sampling strategies, and
capture representative samples. Thachil’s paper underscores these difficulties. The circu-
lar migrants he studies are absent from state registries both because they move back and
forth between the city and the countrywide and because they are informal sector workers.
The locations of spot labor markets where they work are not officially recorded, making it
difficult to construct an exhaustive list of locations from which to sample.
Informal urban settlements are also rarely mapped or surveyed by government
agencies, presenting significant challenges for researchers. Both qualitative and survey
researchers must devote time to establishing the informal boundaries that separate
neighborhoods within settlements, as well as the distinct demographics associated with
those neighborhoods. For survey researchers, the lack of baseline data makes it difficult
to draw representative samples, and the absence of reliable maps means that sampling
protocols can be prone to bias in favor of wealthier residents who live closer to main
entrances and roads. Slum designation practices can be uneven across and within cities
too, frustrating attempts to compare and combine data. For instance, Indian state and
municipal governments sometimes only collect data on officially Brecognized^ slums,
an older and more established subset of the full slum population (Krishna 2013).
Rapid population movement speeds the obsolescence of state data and fuels social
complexity, which complicates efforts at independent data collection. Settlements can
appear suddenly through land invasions, often scheduled for politically opportune
moments when authorities are less likely to engage in eviction (Gilbert 1998) or
through what Holston (2009) refers to as processes of Binsurgent citizenship,^ in which
poor citizens remake the urban environment so as to demand inclusion and advance
their rights and material interests. The scale and pace of these changes can frustrate
even relatively capable state authorities attempting to regulate their populations. In their
study of Bogotá, for instance, Bozçağa and Holland note that officials are able to
identify illegal land occupations from satellite images; however, when they arrive at the
location, officials often find that new construction has changed the physical landscape
too markedly to identify the original violation.
The rapid pace of population change in slums presents particular problems for both
comparative and longitudinal research designs. Where spot labor markets can pick up

13
The most extreme example of this can be found in China, where labor migrants often do not appear in
official counts. This sampling problem is not limited to urban populations: transient and migratory popula-
tions, such as African pastoralists, are also difficult to sample. See Randall (2015).
 St Comp Int Dev

and follow mobile construction projects, where informal settlements can be reshaped
by state actions, or where street vendors can be pushed out of public spaces, standard
case selection procedures are difficult to employ. Spatial units selected for particular
similarities or differences at one moment in time can therefore quickly change,
undermining the logic of the original comparison and our ability to hold local factors
constant over time. Alternatively, social networks may disregard neighborhood and
administrative boundaries, complicating the assignment of treatments in experimental
designs, as Post, Agnihotri, and Hyun describe in this special issue.
Because informal urban spaces and activities are vulnerable to state sanctions and
removal and because the individuals who occupy these areas are often illiterate and
transient, it is also difficult to gather the historical data necessary to trace temporal
change. As Auerbach discusses in this special issue, the collection of historical
information on informal urban settlements is difficult due to these volatile conditions
and the absence of documentation in conventional state archives. These features of
urban informality generate considerable obstacles to understanding how settlements
diverge in terms of political order and development over time.
Ethnic diversity in informal settlements and labor markets also poses challenges for
measuring the nature and the political salience of social identities over time and space.
Standard questionnaires often focus on ascriptive identities but ignore class-based or
other Bcosmopolitan^ identities that can emerge and inform political behavior in cities.
For instance, survey instruments in Africa typically ask respondents about their ethnic
identity, religiosity, and marital status but rarely collect information on cross-ethnic
marriage or the diversity of respondents’ social networks. In India, the predominant
focus on caste (jati) and religion ignores a range of identities in urban areas that flow
from heterogeneity in language and even state of origin.
The contributors to this special issue employ a number of strategies in response to
these challenges. Thachil’s essay illustrates a creative response to the research design
challenges posed by rapid population change in urban informal labor markets. Most
rural migrants who work in construction find day jobs in specific marketplaces, leading
Thachil to develop workplace-based sampling that uses an innovative lottery compo-
nent. Since identities are often in flux for recent rural-to-urban migrants, he engaged in
extensive ethnography to identify both an effective way to measure attachment to
identity and the forms of cooperation for which ethnic and religious identities might
be important for these individuals. Auerbach discusses the utility of Binformal
archives^ to document slum politics. These are unmapped and non-systematized
collections of materials held by individuals and groups in the spaces under study. They
include community meeting notes, political pamphlets and posters, correspondence
from officials, newspaper clippings, photographs of public events, and petitions for
local development. These informal archives open possibilities for historical process
tracing in marginalized urban environments and could be used to study a variety of
phenomena that would not be documented in conventional archives.

Research Challenges Tied to Informal Sector Institutional Environments

Weak state capacity and dense, interlocking webs of institutions in the urban informal
sector present further challenges for researchers. Government agencies providing
services in urban areas often lack the resources to monitor the activities of their own
St Comp Int Dev

Bstreet level bureaucrats.^ For example, Post, Agnihotri, and Hyun describe how the
Bangalore water utility employs hundreds of water Bvalvemen^ to turn water on and
off, placing these actors at the center of water distribution in the city. The utility,
however, cannot afford sensors and therefore does not have accurate, real-time infor-
mation on water flows. Municipal governments faced with new responsibilities but
limited resources also rarely systematize data for publication or establish repositories
that can be consulted by researchers. Even when governments possess and make data
accessible to researchers, it may not be standardized and comparable with data pro-
duced by nearby municipalities.
This lack of information on the most basic forms of state activity is particularly stark
in slums and informal labor markets due to the tenuous and varied nature of the state’s
reach. Street-level bureaucrats may arrive at informal agreements with slum leaders or
worker associations regarding access to state services, which go unrecorded in official
databases and system maps. For example, slum associations may rig unofficial con-
nections to power lines, and they may pay electricity linemen to look the other way or
inform them in advance of inspections so lines can be temporarily removed (e.g.,
Sverdlik 2017). Researchers interested in understanding the on-the-ground activities of
state agents and real allocation of state resources thus need to engage in original data
collection, which may present special challenges due to citizens’ and state employees’
incentives to dissemble.
Researchers interested in understanding urban politics also contend with a prolifera-
tion of organizations and institutions within cities, which make it difficult to attribute
political decisions and actions to the correct actors. The prevalence of Bshared
responsibility^ between different tiers of government for numerous services described
above presents difficulties for analysts. Even when responsibilities for urban services are
not formally split, politicians from higher tiers of government may still influence
policymaking by withholding funds or exerting pressure through party hierarchies
(e.g., Dickovick 2005, pp. 190–191). To understand how decisions are made in such
contexts, researchers must understand the various ways in which politicians and bureau-
crats across different tiers of government intervene. For example, Bozçağa and Holland’s
paper on regulatory enforcement in Colombia provides a telling example of how
multiple, overlapping nodes of urban governance complicate our ability to understand
who is responsible for non-enforcement of laws regarding slum clearance. The attribution
of responsibility for services can be particularly difficult in the informal sector due to the
extensive participation of non-state actors in service delivery. When studying such
contexts, scholars must develop nuanced maps of the roles played by a variety of state
and non-state providers and must compile original data on their respective contributions.
The contributors to this special issue offer creative strategies to address some of these
challenges. Post, Agnihotri, and Hyun demonstrate the opportunities, as well as the
pitfalls, associated with using crowd-sourced data as a substitute for state data on public
service delivery in informal settlements and more broadly. Because the Bangalore water
utility itself does not know with precision where its water is being allocated, these authors
turn first to crowd-sourced data on water arrival times to establish patterns of water
allocation throughout the city. They also use these data to understand principal-agent
problems within the water utility’s elaborate bureaucracy. These crowd-sourced data are
then Bground-truthed^ with information from other sources, such as surveys and quali-
tative research. Bozçağa and Holland’s paper presents a method for reconstructing
 St Comp Int Dev

processes of legal enforcement of eviction laws that allows researchers to distinguish a

lack of enforcement due to political intent from that that which would be due to low state
capacity. BEnforcement process-tracing^ involves comparing levels of enforcement at
particular decision-making nodes with a hypothetical statistical distribution.

Conclusion

Cities in the Global South offer substantial opportunities for theoretical and methodo-
logical innovation by scholars of comparative politics. These dramatically changing
urban environments house a large and growing portion of the world’s population. They
frequently exhibit greater social and institutional complexity than rural areas. This is
especially true in slums and informal marketplaces, where institutions of urban gover-
nance collide with emergent non-state organizations that are built by urban residents to
mitigate the pervasive risks of living and working in cities. The rapid expansion and
variegated institutional landscapes of these spaces raise questions about whether central
theories in comparative politics—on political participation, associational life, and state
behavior, to name a few—retain explanatory power in urban settings.
In this introductory essay, we suggest that scholarship on two specific aspects of
politics in informal settings is likely to generate important theoretical and empirical
insights: patterns of association and claims-making among informal sector actors, and
government efforts to understand and respond to the needs and demands of informal
sector populations. These two themes motivate the four component papers that follow.
Auerbach’s essay probes why some informal settlements have developed a greater
political capacity to lobby the state for public services than others, while Thachil
examines the circumstances under which workers in the urban informal sector are
willing to collaborate across ethnic lines. Bozçağa and Holland’s essay studies the
enforcement of laws affecting informal settlements and informal sector workers. Post,
Agnihotri, and Hyun analyze the circumstances under which frontline workers within
large urban service bureaucracies comply with central mandates rather than taking their
cues from the residents of low-income neighborhoods. As the symposium contributors
highlight, there are important interactions between bottom-up and top-down processes.
Tackling such questions in informal spaces in the Global South not only raises new
substantive insights but also involves grappling with significant research design and
methodological challenges. Before research can be undertaken, scholars must confront
the complicated social and institutional environment found in cities in the developing
world. Data, especially on the existence and activities of informal sector actors, is also
scarce. The primary focus of the contributions to the symposium that follow is to
identify creative strategies for tackling these challenges. These include using crowd-
sourced data to understand patterns of service delivery; worksite-based sampling;
ethnographic survey design; the consultation of informal archives; and Btracing^ the
different stages of legal enforcement.
Though three of the four contributions to this symposium focus on urban India, they
highlight phenomena and research strategies that are of relevance for much of the Global
South. Informal settlements, as we have shown, are prevalent not only in India but
throughout the developing world. Informal employment is found throughout the Global
South as well, comprising approximately 52% of total employment in Latin America,
St Comp Int Dev

78% of total employment in Asia, and 56% of total employment in Africa between 2000
and 2010 (Bacchetta et al. 2009, p. 27). Collective action and claims-making by informal
sector workers and residents of informal settlements, as well as state responses to such
mobilization, are thus important objects of inquiry across much of the developing world.
We expect the research strategies introduced in this symposium to be useful not only to
scholars of urban informality but to researchers studying diverse questions in a variety of
contexts. Post, Agnihotri, and Hyun, for instance, highlight opportunities afforded by new
technologies such as crowd-sourced data. These data can substitute for absent or inaccu-
rate information on public service delivery, providing previously unavailable information
on the allocation of benefits and service quality. Social media posts or Twitter feeds can be
used to obtain new perspectives on contentious politics. Crowd-sourced data can also
potentially provide more accurate information about activities typically underreported to
state agencies, such as crime and requests for bribes. Post, Agnihotri, and Hyun outline
strategies that researchers can use to avoid inferential pitfalls when using such data and
illustrates how their use can generate important analytic payoffs.
Informal archives of the sort Auerbach describes can be used not only to study urban
subaltern populations, but also organizational evolution, bureaucratic politics, and
social movement dynamics. As Auerbach notes, informal archives must be utilized
with care, with researchers explicitly considering narrative biases and empirical gaps in
collected historical materials and addressing those biases and gaps through supplemen-
tal interviews and ethnographic fieldwork. He also presents and illustrates strategies for
the systematic consultation of informal archives that build upon, yet depart from,
common practices among scholars conducting research in formal archives.
Thachil’s article presents two research strategies, each of which could be employed
effectively outside of the urban informal sector. His worksite-based sampling approach
could be employed to study individuals engaged in other types of common activities,
such as participation in social organizations or religious establishments. His model of
how to use ethnography to refine survey experiments should be useful to scholars
examining marginalized or understudied populations. Though survey researchers often
conduct focus groups to identify flaws or unclear wording in their instruments, Thachil
shows the value of ethnography to develop new measures or adapt existing ones to
distinct contexts, especially for groups about which we know little or which possess
substantially different backgrounds from that of the researcher.
Finally, Bozçağa and Holland’s enforcement process tracing can be applied not only to
urban policy but also to other policy domains where officials may have an incentive to
manipulate outcome data, such as environmental or labor regulation. Their essay provides
a guide for the types of data that should be collected, as well as a procedure for identifying
the exact stage at which political influences upon regulatory enforcement occur. In sum,
insights from this volume are useful for a wide range of topics in comparative politics.
As these papers all highlight, the difficulties confronted by researchers in urban
settings spur innovation in theory and research design. Their substantive topics illus-
trate that important theoretical debates in comparative politics can be addressed
productively at the urban scale. Contributors address subjects as diverse as distributive
politics, regulatory enforcement, inter-ethnic cooperation, and local public goods
provision. Revisiting these classic questions at a different geographic or jurisdictional
scale can challenge existing theory, as scholars of subnational politics have suggested
elsewhere (e.g., Snyder 2001).
 St Comp Int Dev

Other questions and new directions for future research remain. As Diane Davis
suggests in her response in this special issue, the papers highlight the importance of topics
often neglected by political scientists, such as informality and bureaucratic action, but they
also downplay or possibly neglect other factors that independently shape the top-down or
bottom-up politics of informality. We highlight a few of Davis’s critiques as particularly
fruitful for thinking about future directions for research on the urban informal sector.
Davis argues for greater contextualization of the processes discussed in this set of
papers. She highlights that the papers place relatively little emphasis on the broader
development goals and strategies of states, the impact of party systems and clientelism,
and the roles played by time and space in shaping citizen strategies vis-à-vis- the state.
To some extent, the individual papers in this special issue often shed light on one of
these factors while ignoring others. Thus, Auerbach’s explicitly historical account of
contentious repertoires in informal settlements and Bozcaga’s and Holland’s analysis of
regulatory forbearance are embedded in particular theories of time and path depen-
dence, but neither engages with temporal discontinuities that may result from abrupt
shifts in national politics or in development priorities. Both Post et al. and Thachil
provide nuanced accounts of the different preferences and coping strategies of citizens,
arguing or implying that clientelism is not the main form of engagement between
citizens and the state. This raises the question of why clientelism appears to be less
important in these cases than elsewhere, given that political scientists focus overwhelm-
ingly on clientelism when analyzing state-society interactions in developing democra-
cies. The methodological innovations proposed in the papers in this special issue often
prioritize the local over the national and contingent processes over fixed background
features. How these different factors can be taken into account in research projects is a
question of interest to political scientists, sociologists, and anthropologists. We hope
that this issue’s articles make a case for cities in the Global South as especially
interesting and productive places in which to wrestle with this question.

Acknowledgments The authors thank Benjamin Allen for research assistance. The authors are also grateful
to special issue contributors for numerous insights, and to Leonardo Arriola, David Backer, Ravinder
Bhavnani, Karsten Donnay, Shelby Grossman, Alisha Holland, Katerina Linos, Aila Matanock, Jeffrey Paller,
Amanda Robinson, and members of the SCID editorial collective for helpful comments.

Funding Information The authors thank the Institute for International Studies at the University of
California, Berkeley, and the Schools of International Service and Public Affairs, American University, for
providing funding for two workshops focused on this special issue.

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 St Comp Int Dev

Adam M. Auerbach is an assistant professor in the School of International Service, American University. His
first book manuscript, Demanding Development: The Politics of Public Goods Provision in India’s Urban
Slums (under contract with Cambridge University Press), accounts for the variable success of India’s slum
residents in demanding and securing essential public services from the state. The book manuscript is based on
his dissertation, which won the American Political Science Association’s Gabriel Almond Award for best
dissertation in comparative politics. Auerbach’s articles appear or are forthcoming in the American Political
Science Review, Contemporary South Asia, Studies in Comparative International Development, World
Development, and World Politics.

Adrienne LeBas is Associate Professor of Government in the School of Public Affairs at American
University. She studies democratization, contentious politics, and the rule of law in sub-Saharan Africa. She
is the author of the award-winning From Protest to Parties: Party-Building and Democratization in Africa
(Oxford University Press, 2011) and articles in the British Journal of Political Science, Comparative Politics,
and the Journal of Democracy, among others.

Alison E. Post is Associate Professor of Political Science and Global Metropolitan Studies at the University of
California, Berkeley. She is the author of Foreign and Domestic Investment in Argentina: The Politics of
Privatized Infrastructure (Cambridge University Press, 2014) and articles in The Annual Review of Political
Science, Comparative Politics, Perspectives on Politics and other journals on the politics of urbanization and
urban infrastructure, social policy, and business-state relations in Latin America and South Asia.

Rebecca Weitz-Shapiro is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Brown University. Her research
examines the quality of representation and government accountability in Latin America. She is the author of
Curbing Clientelism: Politics, Poverty, and Social Policy in Argentina (Cambridge University Press, 2014) and
of numerous scholarly articles published in the American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, and
Comparative Political Studies, among others.