Rio de Janeiro’s Metropolitan Region: Clientelism, Distributive Goods, and Political Disincentives for Growth.
Whereas state corporatism, as demonstrated in the previous section, is an artificial pattern of cooperation among private and public actors that eventually leads to patterns of severe group conflict and weak bridges connecting the market and the state, political machines and clientelist institutions have been more effective in managing and mitigating conflict. It is commonly acknowledged that the “efficient secret” of clientelism is its proclivity to prioritize distributive politics above regulatory and redistributive politics. Furthermore, clientelist political machines are effective at resolving conflict because they initiate simultaneous processes of demand fragmentation and aggregation, which are vertically processed using the logic of individual favors. To a considerable extent, clientelism results in a dual process of group demobilization and accommodation.
Nonetheless, some political machines have been considered as capable of promoting developmental politics. According to Ferman’s study, this was true of Chicago’s political Richard Daley was able to satisfy both voters and businessmen by pursuing a policy of favor exchange and economic growth: “[…] the machine practiced an individual policy based on a material exchange of jobs for votes and ethnic loyalties.” Issues were avoided because they had the potential to divide and generate strife. With an abundance of discretionary resources, the machine was able to retain a compelled army of patronage workers as well as a sufficient cadre of voters. This method of obtaining the vote gave the machine the freedom to pursue an elitist policy agenda. Typically, bankers, businessmen, and labor leaders benefited the most from the machine policy process, which focused on massive economic development initiatives” (1996, p. 32).
If Chicago’s political machine, as outlined in Ferman’s research, appears to not only not prohibit, but also promote growth politics, this result contradicts the Brazilian literature on the institutional and economic consequences of clientelism.
Even when not explicitly stated, scholarly analyses in Brazil agree that clientelism stifles economic growth and that development plans demand a different institutional framework, such as bureaucratic insularity or corporatism.6
In this section, a second case study at a local level is presented – the policy orientation of city council members in the municipalities of the Metropolitan Region of Rio de Janeiro, in which the institutional grammar of clientelism is so pervasive that political actors seem exclusively concerned about pursuing and providing distributive goods to their localities �and constituents. In this example, unlike in Chicago, clientelism plainly impedes local development efforts.
It must be noted that, when compared to similar areas in other Brazilian states, the Metropolitan Region of Rio de Janeiro (MRRJ) occupies an undeniably significant position: almost all of the region’s municipalities7 have socioeconomic characteristics that, from a structural perspective, provide them with both the “spending capacity” and the “administrative capacity” required for the implementation of significant policies. Thus, it is reasonable to predict that municipalities endowed with such structural assets will behave as autonomous actors capable of formulating and implementing growth programs.
A survey of 68 elected council members in seven municipalities of the MRRJ, as well as legislative output from the Rio de Janeiro and Japeri municipal assemblies, show that local development and growth policies are not a priority for legislators.
⦁Attitudinal data reveal a notably parochial feature among council members in the MRRJ. Distributive policies are clearly prioritized, with a concentration on assistive casework activities. Mandates that are sustained and renovated based on “social centers”8 show a high level of specialization in this activity.Although municipal councils in the MRRJ have the ability to legislate on major areas of policy, including as land use, taxes, transportation, and urban development, council members forego this.
possibility, limiting themselves to only providing “recommendations”9 – following distributive politics guidelines.
To summarize, based on the survey results regarding both the perceptions and attitudes of city councilmen in several municipalities of MRRJ, it is possible to state, in accordance with previous national research, that the grammar of clientelism constitutes an undeniable institutional barrier to local development. Distributive politics absolutely dominates developmental concerns and strategies.
Perception of council members’ mandate and legislative actions in the MRRJ.
In 2014, 68 council members from seven municipalities in the MRRJ (Mesquita, Duque de Caxias, Belford Roxo, São João de Meriti, Nilópolis, Nova Iguaçu, and Niterói) completed a questionnaire to assess their mandates, legislative activities, and parochial orientation in exercising their mandates.
It is vital to note the environment in which the investigation of agenda power and policy direction (parochialism or universalism) of city councils was conducted. After the 1988 constitution, Brazil’s city councils gained significant power, particularly in regulating urban property use. This became a legal issue for local administrative and legislative bodies. In addition, council members now have the authority to act on municipal taxes and set regulatory standards for transportation, the environment, municipal postures, and city zoning restrictions on their own.
Based on these institutional and structural indicators, it is reasonable to assume that council members from the MRRJ’s municipal assembly participated in policy development through the conventional legislative process. However, attitudinal evidence gathered from a survey of council members reveals a quite different conclusion. Table 3 shows that activities strictly related to legislation, such as drafting laws and amendments, come in second. What the literature refers to as casework, or non-legislative tasks, is the primary activity of legislators in local legislatures in the MRRJ.
The level of acquaintance with specific policy topics might provide significant indirect indications of council members’ disengagement with developmental initiatives. Table 4 shows that the areas in which council members can legislate to support local development, namely urban policy and economic policy, are ranked fourth and last, respectively, in terms of council members’ familiarity. As essential as the observation that these sectors have been pushed to the background is the recognition that the primary importance is given to measures under the generic category of “social policy,” which may be undertaken outside of legislative procedures.