Criminal Governance in Unexpected Contexts: the Role of the Welfare State in Latin America

2026-07-22

The impact of criminal organisations—gangs, mafias, drug cartels—in otherwise democratic societies can be severe. With the goal of profiting from illicit markets, they can control communities’ lives through criminal governance. As a result, they affect the quality of democracy by exacerbating vulnerabilities and forging anti-democratic preferences. Yet, we have a limited understanding of how criminal governance operates in these settings. CRIMLATAM breaks new ground in political science by developing a new theory and empirical analysis to show how states’ capacity to provide welfare constrains criminal governance. Current theories, devised for weak, absent, or repressive states, cannot explain why criminal organizations operate in states with high capacity for welfare provision, nor can they make predictions about the nature of criminal governance in these unexpected places. This project posits that when there is an expansive welfare state, residents rely on its services and can also manage everyday life without resorting to criminal groups. Expansive welfare constrains criminal organizations’ actions limiting the scope of criminal governance. Methodologically pioneering, the project relies on the systematic in-depth analysis of three unexpected cases: the cities of Puerto Limón in Costa Rica, Rosario in Argentina, and Santiago in Chile. It combines qualitative fieldwork with network-scale-up methods and list experiments embedded in a survey. It focuses on accessing hard-to-reach populations who experience criminal governance but whose voices and perspectives are largely missing from research, resulting in limited validity, reliability and impact of current knowledge. The project will significantly improve our understanding of one of the most serious and persistent challenges for democracies today by demonstrating that governments can make choices, largely related to social welfare and security policy, that reduce the societal impact of criminal organisations.

Ireland, United States

2026-01-01