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Accepted Paper:
" Social capital, weak ties and patronage as alternative paths for poor communities to get access to collective goods"
Antonio Prates
(Federal University of Minas Gerais)
Paper short abstract:
This paper deals with collective efficacy of channels'types of social demand articulation between poor urban communities and public local bureaucatic agencies.
Paper long abstract:
This paper deals with the issue of the relationship between social capital and "weak ties" in the poor communities' context. I suggest that weak ties (Granovetter, 1973) can be defined as connections between the poor community and the institutional actors as local public agencies, politicians and altruistic NGOs (Non Governmental Organizations). These connections (weak ties) relating the community with the public local agencies may be of two kinds: the first one is the connection made by the civic associations coming from the community. In this case, it is clear that there is a stock of social capital being used; the second one, are the connections (weak ties) articulated by "rent-seeking" leaderships or politicians, through patron-client ties, looking for winning, for example, elections. In this case we think that there is no social capital in action, but individual social capital that is being used for providing collective goods or public benefits to poor communities. In this sense, our hypothesis confronts the main stream assumption of social capital literature saying that patronage is always an amoral social arrangement at the service of the patron (Putnam, R., Nanetti, R. and Nanetti, L., 1993). On the contrary to this assumption we found that patronage may be seen as an alternative path to social capital for poor communities getting efficient results from larger society.
Populism and clientelism within political practices in Latin America
Session 1