Citizen security in Mexico: Examining municipal bureaucracy from the view of the intermediation-representation debate

The chapter examines citizen security in a south-eastern municipality in Mexico through the role of municipal front-line bureaucrats. The argument highlights that the degree of discretion of bureaucrats, the unequal power relations that they have in relation to citizen-users and their contribution to policy-making through service provision are characteristics that overlap with the three key dimensions of political intermediation addressed by the book. Bureaucrats make sense of their legitimacy (‘recognition dimension’); they negotiate with citizens to legitimize their job which is devalued in contexts of low levels of trust, corruption and violence (‘constraint dimension’); and they minimize conflict arisen from citizens’ attempts to achieve better quality of life (‘substantive-representation dimension’). With focus on the bureaucrat, juxtaposition is found between service implementation and electoral representation.