To gather fine-grained information about the preferences and behaviors of political brokers, we surveyed elected city councilors and non-elected activists who work for those councilors in the Argentine provinces of Córdoba, San Luis, and Misiones, as well as the Conurbano area of greater Buenos Aires. In this book, we refer to both councilors and non-elected activists as “brokers.” This is appropriate, as councilors may work as operatives for mayors or other politicians at higher levels of the political system, whereas many councilors also had worked as neighborhood operatives before rising to elected office. The non-elected activists we surveyed, meanwhile, work directly as political operatives for councilors. We therefore believe that both elected councilors and their non-elected operatives should be considered local brokers. Surveying them gives us important insights into their preferences and behaviors.

The major difficulty involved in surveying brokers involves how to generate a representative sample. Previous researchers working in Argentina, such as Auyero and Levitsky, have generated valuable insights into the political function and behaviors of brokers. Yet it is difficult to know how results from these convenience samples may or may not extend to the many tens of thousands of political operatives who comprise the population of interest. Generating a probability sample of these operatives is challenging, however, because a readymade sampling frame – that is, a list of brokers from which one could draw a random sample – does not exist.