Recentering Informality On The Research Agenda: Grassroots Action, Political Parties, and Democratic Governance

The three volumes reviewed here aim to bring informality to the center of the Latin American (and, for Kitschelt and Wilkinson, the broader) research agenda, pointing to the inextricable linkages between informality and the formal activities and structures of the state. They also identify the positive effects of informal activities, which have often been regarded as pernicious. Out of the Shadows uses the new economic sociology to show how informal economies are embedded in social structures. It also highlights the role of the state in generating informal economic and political activities at the grassroots level through exclusionary politics and policy. Informal Institutions and Democracy expands the scope of the new institutionalism, investigating the contingencies between formal and informal institutions, and revealing the real workings of democracy in Latin America. Patrons, Clients, and Policies employs an offshoot of political opportunity structures to uncover the effects of development, political competition, and ethnocultural mobilization on clientelist and programmatic citizen-politician links.

The schools of research favored in these books complement one another in that all contain actor-centered elements but focus on different contextual factors as crucial to explain action. As a result, they generate different types of information that, when taken together, present a more comprehensive vision of Latin America than any one type of data could do alone. In addition, these works draw attention to informality where it has sometimes been ignored; demonstrate that informality has both positive and negative effects for participants and the frameworks alongside which it exists; and show that, where there is widespread informality, imported laws and institutions do not have the desired result of copying "northwestern" legal-institutional processes.

Defining the Informal

The literature on informality is broad but diffuse. In the 1950s and 1960s, researchers studying developing countries discovered the importance of kinship, friendship, and patronage structures within political, economic, and social interactions. These structures were often explained functionally: where formal laws for regulating interactions did not exist, some basis for managing relations between individuals was necessary. To coexist, survive, and trade, individuals had to develop trust.¹ This initially inclusive approach to the study of informality soon broke apart, as social scientists began to concentrate on their particular fields of interest—culture, economy, politics, and so on—and then as political scientists lost interest. Sociologists and anthropologists continued to turn out excellent work on informality, but with a tendency to look at either political or economic dimensions, while political scientists largely turned to analyses of the state and its institutions or to new social movements that ostensibly opposed and remained independent of the state.²

As is argued cogently in the introductory essays of the three books reviewed here, much excellent work has been done, but our understanding of politics and economics in Latin America (and beyond) is suffering from the exclusion of informality as a key analytical factor. More than ten years ago, Guillermo O'Donnell wrote that "[p]articularism [informal exchange] is a permanent feature of human society; only recently, and only in some places and institutional sites, has it been tempered by universalistic norms and rules." ³ Recognizing this, the volumes reviewed here make the case that informal aspects should be brought into existing frameworks and that commonly accepted models and representations should be changed.

In keeping with these principles, in Fernández-Kelly and Shefner, the informal economy is defined as economic activities that are not actively regulated by the state, or that escape such regulation, functioning instead according to their own rules of trust and reciprocity (1...