Tesalia Rizzo Reyes - Between Citizens and the State: How Bureaucratic Transaction Costs Sustain Clientelism
My book project, Between Citizens and the State: How Bureaucratic Transaction Costs Sustain Clientelism, develops a new theory about the conditions under which clientelism flourishes, as well as those under which it is weakened. Across developing countries like Mexico, the rapid growth of social assistance policies provides a wide variety of new welfare programs for a population that highly depends on it. Yet dealing with the welfare bureaucracy can be difficult and fraught with confusion. In this book, I argue that the hurdles and costs involved in navigating the bureaucracy —or what I call bureaucratic transaction costs— have far reaching political consequences. I argue that high bureaucratic transaction costs coupled with high demand for social welfare create arbitrage opportunities for better informed and connected intermediaries that exchange access to benefits for political loyalty —a practice also known as clientelism. Although potentially an efficient way of claiming welfare, relying on intermediaries can limit accumulation of useful bureaucratic experience and know-how, weaken autonomous political participation, and limit opportunities to make policy demands on the state, further entrenching a clientelist equilibrium. A key implication of the argument in my book is that bureaucratic transaction costs are the lynchpin that sustains clientelism and reducing these costs should impact the market for clientelism. In this talk, I will present evidence for this implication from a large-scale field experiment in rural Mexico that reduces the costliness of claiming social assistance programs by providing a facilitator trained to assist citizens in the application process. This book contributes to the literature by highlighting the role the bureaucracy plays in feeding clientelist practices and further suggesting that clientelism may not necessarily disappear as countries get richer.
Tesalia Rizzo Reyes is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Merced. She is also a Research Affiliate at MIT Governance Lab and at the Stanford Governance Project. She received her Ph.D. in Political Science in 2020 from MIT.
She studies topics in comparative political behavior and political economy using a variety of techniques such as field experiments, surveys, interviews, and observational data. Her book project, titled “Between Citizens and the State: How Bureaucratic Transaction Costs Sustain Clientelism,” explores how bureaucratic transaction costs prevent individuals from directly claiming welfare benefits. Instead, these costs create a market for clientelist intermediaries, disincentivizing governments from creating sound social policy, and preventing citizens from engaging with the state effectively. The policy instrument she developed through her research was awarded the 2017 Innovations in Transparency award by the Mexican Government’s Transparency Institute. Her dissertation received an honorable mention in the 2020 Best Dissertation Award in Experimental Research from the American Political Science Association.
She studied Political Science at the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México (ITAM) and have been a pre-doctoral fellow at the Center for US-Mexican Studies at the University of California, San Diego, and a post-doctoral fellow at CDDRL at Stanford University.
She is a proud native of Monterrey, Mexico and an adopted child of Mexico City. As most Mexicans, she has two family names: the first is Rizzo and the second is Reyes. She mostly goes with Rizzo for simplicity, but both ways are appropriate.