The Paradox of Recognition: Ecuador Indigenous Peoples Political Organization and Participation.

Indigenous organizations play a central role in shaping outcomes for their own ommunities, yet the reasons behind their formation remain underexplored. We argue that Indigenous leaders establish organizations when governments allocate collective benefits through these organizations. Effectively, leaders bear the cost of collective mobilization in exchange for a guaranteed material benefit for their communities. Furthermore, we argue that once established, these organizations endure---even when the strategic incentive that motivated their creation is withdrawn. We examine our argument using the case of Ecuador, a case where large-scale Indigenous mobilization has occurred through movements and a prominent ethnic political party, Pachakutik. We analyze the effects of an expansive social program, Prodepine, which provided financial resources and public goods to Indigenous communities. The program, however, was allocated exclusively through Indigenous social organizations. Leveraging exogenous variation in the implementation of Prodepine and over-time data on the formation of nearly 5,000 civil society organizations, we show that the number of Indigenous organizations in a given parish increases in response to material incentives offered by the program. We then explore implications of our findings, including how these organizations shape the long-term political roles of traditional Indigenous leaders.