In this book, Alisha Holland takes a series of empirical facts that individually may not be surprising and weaves them into a new and useful framework for thinking about how enforcement decisions are made. She argues that politicians use “forbearance,” the intentional and revocable nonenforcement of the law, as a political strategy to win votes and support. As the title suggests, the book is focused on nonenforcement as a way to redistribute wealth in place of formal welfare policies, although her concept is designed to apply also to other forms of politically strategic nonenforcement. Holland supports her argument with qualitative and quantitative data collected during a year of fieldwork in Latin American cities. Although this book makes both theoretical and empirical contributions to the field, its real strength is the former, as Holland draws together disparate bodies of literature and inspires avenues for future research.
Holland’s motivating puzzle serves as a good example of how researchers should be open to unexpected opportunities. She was initially interested in understanding the paradoxes of the Latin American welfare state but discovered some anomalies that raised questions about enforcement against the poor. Conventional wisdom suggests that nonenforcement is a symptom of a weak state, either because resources are lacking or because leaders are unable to keep their enforcement agents from shirking. However, cases with arguably comparable levels of capacity often differ in their enforcement patterns; for example, illegal squatters are evicted in Ecuador and Rwanda but tolerated in Uganda and Peru. Holland was also motivated to challenge the assumption that the poor are not politically engaged and do not demand policies that could benefit them; she found a response to that assumption in this notion of forbearance.
Of course, there are many who would not be surprised by the claim that decisions about enforcement are often politically motivated. It is also not surprising that, all else equal, the urban poor prefer and support politicians who do not evict them or take away their opportunities for informal work. However, Holland clearly lays out both the conditions under which we could expect to observe forbearance and the mechanisms through which it operates. She takes something that the reader may have already vaguely suspected was true and articulates it in a coherent and parsimonious way.
Holland’s central argument is that politicians will choose not to enforce the law when nonenforcement will win them votes. She conceptualizes this strategic forbearance as varying along two distinct dimensions, progressive versus regressive and contingent versus noncontingent. Although she describes each of these four resulting ideal types in other work, this book primarily focuses on progressive, noncontingent forbearance.
Whether this redistributive form of forbearance is electorally beneficial is a function of two factors: whether state welfare alternatives exist to meet the needs of the lawbreakers (e.g., public housing or employment programs) and whether politicians depend on poor constituencies to win elections. Although forbearance is, by nature, a benefit targeted to specific offenders, Holland argues that a political platform based on forbearance can more generally signal commitment to the poor when formal welfare alternatives are unavailable. For example, because squatting laws are overwhelmingly violated by the poor, even those who do not live in informal settlements would identify a politician who promises not to evict squatters as supportive of their class interests.
Holland presents her work as drawing together two distinct literatures, one about the welfare state and one about state enforcement, but its relevance extends further. Although she does not directly study the compliance side of the coin, her work also has implications for the taxation literature, which largely draws on Margaret Levi’s concept of quasi-voluntary compliance from Of Rule and Revenue (1988). Holland’s work raises the question, what does it mean when compliance is not what maximizes the rule or revenue of political leaders? Her argument also speaks to the growing literature on the informal economy (beyond street vending), particularly in developing countries, and its implications for state building and government accountability. Additionally, the concept of forbearance could be usefully applied in the field of sociolegal studies, which is centrally concerned with the gap between de jure “law on the books” and de facto “law in action.”
Although Holland’s conceptual framework is the most compelling piece of her book, her empirical work serves to back up and illustrate her claims. The proposed scope of her theory is broad, but she tests her predictions in the Latin American context, where her questions originated. She focuses on two specific violations—squatting and street vending—within and across the cases of Bogotá, Colombia; Lima, Peru; and Santiago, Chile. One important exception to her focus on Latin America is a shadow case study of Istanbul, Turkey, which she proposes as a “postforbearance” comparison, tracing changing enforcement patterns from the 1960s.
Comprehensive, in-depth qualitative case analysis and creative measurement techniques are Holland’s strengths. However, given the inherent difficulties of measuring both enforcement and political motives, which she acknowledges, some attempts at isolating particular causes of nonenforcement leave the reader unconvinced. Through a preponderance of evidence, however, she effectively tells a story about the politics of forbearance as redistribution.
The crucial empirical task is to identify exogenous sources of variation in a politician’s incentives either to enforce or to forbear. Additionally, the conditions under which she expects to find forbearance—in largely poor areas where formal welfare provision is low—are the same conditions under which capacity restraints would also plausibly limit enforcement. One way Holland attempts to distinguish the two is by creatively borrowing the concept of elasticity from economics. If enforcement is simply a function of capacity, the “supply” of enforcement should respond to changes in available resources, such as budget increases or technological innovations that make enforcement cheaper or easier. She finds that while enforcement is inelastic to resources, enforcement levels do respond to fluctuations in electoral incentives. Other useful empirical tools in the book are the use of enforcement against violent crime as a “placebo” test (214) and analysis of the shifting enforcement preferences of mayors who move across districts of varying levels of poverty.
Although Holland explains variation mainly at the city or district level, she also seeks to establish the microfoundation of her theory, the claim that voters can recognize forbearance as a pro-poor issue and reward it with political support. Using a survey and vignette experiment about hypothetical candidates, she does find support for her claim that pro-forbearance political platforms credibly signal a pro-poor agenda. She supplements this original data, collected in Bogotá, with Latin American Public Opinion Project (LAPOP) data from 18 countries. This extension does provide an external validity boost, but because the survey is not designed for her research questions, she has to do some heavy statistical lifting to measure what she wants. For example, the survey question about squatting specifically poses it as an act of political protest. She carves out her concept by using support for other protest behaviors as an instrument; she then takes the remaining variation as the approval of land invasion that is not simply a function of support for contentious political activity more broadly. Although this approach is interesting and plausible, she gets more persuasive power from the carefully designed survey she administers in a single city. She does find that, consistent with her claims, the poor are more supportive of forbearing politicians.
Apart from the survey work, much of the support for Holland’s argument comes from interviews with politicians and bureaucrats. Holland assures the reader that because forbearance is publicly promoted, we should not fear that state actors would not admit to it. However, there could be important, unobserved variation in willingness to speak about forbearance, or even lack of capacity, which could also be politically sensitive to admit. How politicians and bureaucrats frame their decision-making is important in itself, but we should have reason to be skeptical of self-reported motivations. Thankfully, Holland is a shoe-leather researcher who is clearly invested in painting a convincing picture of how forbearance operates. In the absence of reliable off-the-shelf data, she works hard to validate her findings through triangulation. For example, at one point, she digs through historical government reports and newspaper articles in order to classify each successive administration’s enforcement policy and the concurrent incidence of street vending in order to compare the patterns of the two.
After reading Holland’s book, one is left feeling that the issue is somewhat unresolved, but in no way because of a lack in the quality of the work; simply because it raises intriguing questions about this political dynamic that could be explored by future researchers. For example, how, exactly, are politicians able to overcome principal-agent problems and ensure that enforcement agents comply? Holland also intentionally focuses on enforcement decisions “from above” (59), paying less attention to the motivations of the poor themselves. But it is unclear how groups are able to overcome collective action problems to pressure politicians to forbear. And if the poor do have the political power she suggests, why do they not demand more institutionalized solutions? Her explanation is that the poor do not view promises for formal welfare policies as credible, and therefore opt for forbearance instead, but the two are not necessarily mutually exclusive.
The examples she provides of exits from the “forbearance trap”—so called because interests in nonenforcement become entrenched—are due to the economic growth in Turkey and repression in Chile. Only when the state credibly provides formal substitutes do the poor raise their expectations and start to demand them. Additionally, the forbearance argument seems a bit fuzzy in cases in which the legitimacy of the law itself is in question. This is potentially an unexplored constraint on a leader’s ability to enforce. For example, in Turkey, squatting was not popularly considered a legal violation that would even require forbearance, and the national legislature criminalized it only in the 2000s. In Colombia, politicians faced court pressure not to enforce against squatters and street vendors. Laws themselves are often open to interpretation or in conflict with competing legal principles.
In addition, more work will be necessary to test how Holland’s claims hold up, or are adapted, in other contexts. As she points out, the data to test her predictions quantitatively on a large scale simply do not exist. Furthermore, given how much work clearly went into her analyses in the three cities, to do the same in many others would be beyond the scope of this book.
Although Holland avoids making normative claims about whether forbearance is good or bad, she is clearly motivated by a desire to see the lives of the urban poor improved. Her choice for the front cover of Forbearance as Redistribution is a photograph of a squatter settlement that the artist, Dionisio González, has edited to include modern architectural features, challenging our expectations about what these informal communities do, can, or should look like. In describing the image, Holland says that” art, perhaps more than political science, inspires people to see differently” (xii). This may be true of much of academia. However, Holland herself certainly cannot be accused of pursuing a narrow or unimportant research question. Much like the photograph, she gives her readers a new mental model for how the political world works for the urban poor.
