Grassroots Politics:
Bloc Voting and Demand-Making by Neighborhood Associations in Brazil
Organized civil society groups – even those as seemingly small as neighborhood associations – can use coordinated voting to shift power dynamics between marginalized residents and local politicians in places we least expect it.
Contrary to stereotypes of disengaged, coerced voters, this mixed methods study shows the impact of grassroots bloc voting and community organizing on public service provision, especially water resources, in rural Brazil. While many scholars argue that bloc voting represents a coercive form of collective clientelism, I argue that bloc voting can also be an effective grassroots strategy at the neighborhood level.
Still, bloc voting strategies are not always feasible, and benefits are not shared universally. Based on in-depth mixed methods fieldwork, I show that politicians and residents keep track of the vote totals at rural polling stations, and if politicians fail to deliver on their promises of public service provision, the organized neighborhood association can switch its bloc of votes to a different candidate in the next election. However, some groups are better able to do this than others, since bloc voting requires coordinating group members and monitoring the group’s votes, and those who cannot use the strategy are left further behind. The stakes could not be higher when the effects of community organizing and political engagement shape whether residents have clean, reliable drinking water. By studying the places where scholars least expect strategic, highly engaged voters, this book shifts our notion of community organizing and how we understand local democracy.
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Grassroots Politics combines empirical evidence and a detailed description of the process of almost two cumulative years of field research. My study takes place in rural, semi-arid Northeast Brazil and evaluates community-level, sub-municipal variation that is difficult to measure. I focus on household water service, which is an essential and often scarce resource that requires public investment and is prone to political manipulation.
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My fieldwork involved inductive theory design, an iterative process of over a hundred qualitative interviews that informed future surveys and interviews, three original household surveys across 224 rural communities in Northeast Brazil, and triangulation with electoral, administrative, and social media data. The surveys provide previously unknown systematic information about collective action and community associations and incorporate conjoint experiments to evaluate causal mechanisms.
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The mixed methods study analyzes big data on election results from the lowest level of aggregation – the electoral section (approx. 50-300 voters) – for over 15,000 sections in 5 election years. In a case study of a rural municipality (Canindé-CE), I triangulate interviews with rural residents and association leaders (2017, 2022) with local election results (2008-2020), archives of city councilors’ legislative actions targeting services to neighborhoods (2013-2023), systematic analysis of social media (Instagram) behavior of local politicians (2020-2023), and interviews with election officials and bureaucrats in municipal and state government (2022).
