Mediating and getting ‘burnt’ in the gap: Politics and brokerage in a Recife slum, Brazil

Abstract

This article takes a fresh look at political brokerage as a complex, provisional and contested phenomenon. Although brokerage has received little recent attention, I show how it remains critical to understanding the urban poor’s involvement in electoral politics. The article focuses on how local community leaders in a Recife slum, Brazil, operate as brokers during elections. Here, they have to deal with the different interests of their patrons (politicians) and their clients (their fellow slum dwellers), and also with the latter’s contradictory views on electoral politics. Slum dwellers combine a positive image, in which electoral politics provides access to resources, with a negative image, in which it contaminates all those involved, including the brokers. Further, by showing how these slum dwellers perceive electoral politics as coming from ‘another world’, this study counters the still prevalent functionalist understandings of brokerage which depict brokers as the forgers of a shared moral universe.