The Most Vulnerable Voters: Clientelism, Vulnerability, and Voting Behavior among Slum Dwellers

For logistical, budgetary, and security issues, residents of slums are typically excluded from nationally representative surveys conducted in Argentina and, indeed, most developing countries. An important omission considering that, according to estimates from international agencies, at least 24 percent of the urban population in Latin America and the Caribbean live in informal settlements. In Argentina, one in ten people live in informal settlements. (TECHO, 2016). To fill this gap, M. Victoria Murillo (Columbia University), Rodrigo Zarazaga (Centro de Investigación y Acción Social, Argentina), and I field a slum survey simultaneously to a national representative survey around the 2015 presidential election in Argentina. The research I proposed to pursue as a Kellogg Institute Visiting Fellow uses this data to call attention to this important omission and to start studying the consequences of this omission for our understanding of clientelism and voting behavior among slum dwellers.