Social Brokerage: Accountability and the Social Life of Information

• Author: Gabrielle Kruks-Wisner
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/00104140221089644
• Published date: 01 December 2022
• Date: 01 December 2022
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article

Comparative Political Studies

2022, Vol. 55(14) 2382–2415

© The Author(s) 2022

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DOI: 10.1177/00104140221089644

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Social Brokerage:

Accountability and the

Social Life of Information

Gabrielle Kruks-Wisner

1



Abstract

Social accountability initiatives seek to empower citizens to hold off‌icials to

account between and beyond elections, yet often meet with mixed results.

This article highlights a neglected dimension in the study of accountability:

intermediation by brokers who share and frame information. In contrast to

literature that focuses on political brokers in clientelist networks, I introduce

the concept of social brokerage: efforts to motivate and to link action by

citizens and off‌icials, without the expectation of an electoral return. I illustrate

the practice of social brokerage in India, through study of a network of citizen

journalists who attempt to mobilize citizen claim-making and to encourage

off‌icial responsiveness to those claims. I argue that effective social brokerage

requires both vernacularization (giving information meaning in local contexts)

and interlocution (speaking to and between multiple audiences). This, in turn,

rests upon a powerful—but often elusive—combination of community

embeddedness and ties to bureaucracy.

Keywords

accountabilty, local governance, information, community media, India

1

University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, USA

Corresponding Author:

Gabrielle Kruks-Wisner, Department of Politics, University of Virginia, 1540 Jefferson Park Ave,

S183 Gibson Hall, Charlottesville, VA 22904, USA.

Email: gkk5x@virginia.edu

Introduction

A community without lights, despite a village electrif‌ication scheme; homes

without toilets, despite a “total sanitation”campaign; missing wages on a gov-

ernment worksite. These are but a handful of the pro blems that residents of rural

India regularly face in accessing public resources and entitlements. Such expe-

riences are common across the Global South, where economic and social rights are

unevenly realized despite commitments enshrined in law and policy. This distance

between rights and their realization ref‌lects an accountability gap in which citizens

struggle to ensure that off‌icials make good on the promises of the state.

This article highlights a set of practices that seek to narrow the ac-

countability gap: social brokerage, understood as efforts to motivate and link

action by both citizens and off‌icials. While partisan brokerage, which seeks to

facilitate the exchange of votes for public resources, is well-studied in cli-

entelist settings, less is understood about intermediation that operates beyond

a partisan quid pro quo. Rather than mobilizing voters, social brokerage seeks

to activate citizen claim-making between elections, and to motivate the re-

sponsiveness of appointed rather than elected off‌icials. The practices involved

require both framing information to give it meaning in local contexts (ver-

nacularization) and engagement of multiple audiences along both horizontal

(citizen-facing) and vertical (off‌icial-facing) dimensions (interlocution).

These acts are non-partisan but not a-political, as they seek to shift the be-

havior of both citizens and off‌icials.

I explore the practice of social brokerage in India, through the study of a

network of citizen journalists (“Community Correspondents,”or CCs) who,

supported by a community media NGO, use video to document local problems

and needs. The CCs share their videos with both community members and

off‌icials, making accompanying calls to action. To explore this work, I draw

on qualitative research (interviews with approximately 1/3 of the network, and

over 1000 hours of ethnographic research with a selected group of 19 CCs), as

well as a database tracking the CCs’videos (n= 17,380). The CCs’efforts, I

show, meet with mixed success: some are well-placed to mobilize community

members, others are effective at engaging off‌icials, but only a sub-set are true

interlocutors who do both. Ref‌lecting on these patterns, I suggest that effective

social brokerage rests upon a powerful—but often elusive—combination of

community embeddedness and ties to the bureaucracy. Building from the rural

Indian case, I consider the broader practice of and motivations for social

brokerage in efforts to enhance accountability.

The social life of information

Social accountability is understood as a “nonelectoral yet vertical mechanism

of control of political authorities”(Peruzzotti & Smulovitz, 2006, p.10).

Kruks-Wisner 2383

Citizens’bottom-up (“vertical”) efforts to hold off‌icials to account are par-

ticularly important in settings where “horizontal”accountability mechanisms

within the state (checks and balances, internal monitoring, and oversight) are

inadequate (Brinkerhoff & Wetterberg, 2016). In democratic societies, vertical

accountability is most often associated with elections; citizens discipline

politicians through the ballot box who, in turn, discipline bureaucrats—the so-

called “long route”to accountability (World Bank, 2004). Yet scholars,

policymakers, and practitioners increasingly recognize the importance of

social accountability beyond the electoral arena, in particular where demo-

cratic representation is weak, and where frontline off‌icials exercise substantial

discretion (making the long route to accountability more tenuous).

Social accountability initiatives, the likes of which have proliferated

worldwide,

1

rest on the presumption that better informed citizens will more

effectively scrutinize and pressure off‌icials, making information and trans-

parency key features(Kosack & Fung, 2014). However, the observedeffects of

information provision are ambiguous at best (Tsai et al., 2019), oftenproducing

null results (Dunning et al., 2019;Lieberman et al., 2014), or even leading to

lesser engagement if information simply conf‌irms citizens’low expectations

(Chong et al., 2015). A large part of this puzzle, I suggest, is rooted inthe fact

that information is often treated in studies of accountability as simply factual

and procedural—something to be disseminated through transparency and

media campaigns. This article, in contrast, explores the social life of infor-

mation as it is generated, framed, and consumed in local communities.

Scholars have long recognized the role of social networks in shaping the

f‌low of information (Granovetter, 1973), the situated nature of knowledge

(Haraway, 1988), and the cultural framing of repertoires of action (Swidler,

1986). Information is not simply injectable, but is interpreted through social

frames (Snow et al., 1986). Social movement scholars have noted the im-

portance of injustice framings (Tarrow,1994), and of the social construction of

grievances in both protest (Simmons, 2014) and legal mobilization (Taylor,

2020). Through a more quotidian lens, urban sociologists have probed how

neighborhood frames inf‌luence the decision-making and political activity of

individuals (Rosen, 2017;Small, 2004).

It is clear, then, that residents who are the targets of social accountability

initiatives are not tabula rasa recipients of information, but rather come to

engage, reject, or reinterpret information through the f‌ilter of existing local

narratives. As Rosen (2017, p. 275) succinctly states: “As stories, told and

retold, narratives help people make sense of their world and develop strategies

to thrive within it.”The stories that circulate about the accessibility and

responsiveness of the state play a critical role in shaping how citizens conceive

of their needs and of available repertoires of action (Kruks-Wisner, 2018a;

2018b). Public off‌icials are also not immune to narrative framings. As Joshi

and McCluskey (2017) note, organizational cultures and local settings

2384 Comparative Political Studies 55(14)