Conclusions: Perverse Social Capital as a Cause of High Violence in the Barrios of Caracas

Do international rents bolster democratic backsliding under populist governments? Evidence from Latin America

“…Clientelist mechanisms, such as employment patronage in public enterprises or particularistic cash transfers before elections to financially co-opt an essential portion of the electorate, can produce economic inclusion at large scales, which high revenues of direct rents like natural resource rents make possible (Corrales, 2014; Leon, 2020; Mazzuca, 2013). Clientelist spending can mobilize sectors of the population unreached by affective populist strategies when socioeconomic conditions are relatively adverse.…”

“…Furthermore, the region's role in the international political economy incentivized rural-to-urban migration as workers and their families sought to benefit from the perceived higher wages of the cities, which along with increasing populations, resulted in swollen cities by the 1990s. Increased urbanization in Latin America, as in many other countries of the Global South, resulted in the swelling of urban poverty, as their growth models relied upon capital-intensive extractive export industries that are not labor-intensive (Fox, 2012; Leon, 2020). The swelling of urban poverty provided a sizable pool of relatively inexpensive supporters to co-opt by populist powers through the clientelist distribution of international rent revenues (Gandhi and Przeworski, 2006; Mazzuca, 2013).…”

Density and pandemic urbanism: Exposure and networked density in Manila and Taipei

“…A ‘networked density’ then is a distinct socio-spatial phenomenon from closely related ideas like ‘social capital’, ‘social infrastructure’, ‘community resilience’ and even ‘social network density’ (e.g. Klinenberg, 2018; Leon, 2020; Putnam, 2001; Simone, 2004). While all of these, in different ways, refer to social connections beyond the family and close friends, they tend to focus on particular places and/or position the density of social relations across space as passive background rather than active in the making of urban provisions and everyday life.…”