Healthcare workers are street-level bureaucrats (H-SLBs) who are expected to perform according to specific roles. The COVID-19 pandemic has strained healthcare systems to unprecedented levels. The acute scarcity of medical resources has left H-SLBs exposed to a higher risk of personal harm and has them making an increased number of decisions in the apportionment of scarce life-saving treatment. The article studies the case of H-SLBs in Mexico to understand the impact of the crisis on their roles. The pandemic provides an opportunity to observe role changes during crisis. Their roles, derived from two policy guidelines, and from the de facto roles that H-SLBs shared in the storytelling interviews, are coded, analyzed, and compared. Findings suggest two main roles, client-processing and resource-rationing, guide the set of sub-roles H-SLBs perform to cope with the challenges brought by the COVID-19 pandemic.Note: In the interests of space, street-level theory and the pandemic context underpinning the articles for this Special Issue are discussed in detail in the Introduction to the Issue.

This article constructs a grounded framework to study how corruption is consolidated in local governments. We focus on the fine‐grained texture of corrupt practices that can only be achieved by looking at rich contextual studies. We argue that neglecting the way corruption becomes the ‘rule of the game’ has led to the creation of anti‐corruption policies that tend to be overly reliant on formal institutions, addressing only dyadic and venal types of corruption, and have therefore proven ineffective. Based on a two‐staged, mixed methods research design—including 50 in‐depth interviews in two Mexican cities and three surveys applied to citizens and public officials—this article's framework focuses on how networks are shaped and organized to perform corrupt practices, and how opacity and weak checks and balances grant them impunity. Results show corrupt schemes to be outstandingly malleable and resilient, able to circumvent formal anti‐corruption strategies.

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This article explores the role of trust in corrupt networks and networks that facilitate corruption. Specifically, we ask what is the role of particularized trust in the operation of systemic corruption? How is the basis of trust reflected in the logic of corruption and with which effects? Based on the analysis of 50 in‐depth interviews in two Mexican cities, we analyze two types of particularized trust that bind actors in informal networks: trust based on political affiliation and/or personal relationships and trust derived from complicity, or the co‐participation in illicit activities. Analysis suggests that the basis of trust and the dynamics that arise thereof have different effects on the functioning and stability of the informal networks and that these, in turn, reflect the informal governance systems in place. This article provides further empirical evidence to the central role that particularized trust plays in contexts of systemic corruption, highlighting the importance of understanding these dynamics for the design of anti‐corruption efforts.

While American political development scholars tend to focus on national or state-level politics, late nineteenth-century cities provided the lion's share of services: clean water, paved and lighted streets, and sanitation. How did cities innovate and build municipal capacity to do these things? We answer this question by looking at municipal responses to the garbage problem. As cities grew and trash piled up in the 1890s, cities explored ways to effectively collect the garbage. A government requires not just resources, but also the ability to marshal those resources. Corruption could provide such abilities. Looking at four corrupt cities—Pittsburgh, Charleston, New Orleans, and St. Louis—we consider whether corruption, and what type of corruption, fostered innovation and capacity. We compare these corrupt cities with a shadow study of the reformist government of Columbus. We found the following: (1) The logic of corruption is the most important factor to explain why municipal governments chose particular garbage strategies. Corrupt regimes chose garbage collection and disposal strategies that would benefit themselves—but these varied depending on what type of corruption dominated a city. (2) Corruption sometimes promoted innovation and capacity, but at other times, corruption hindered them. For better or worse, cities ruled by corruption gained the capacity that these informal regimes held.