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ABSTRACT
Studies of clientelism increasingly focus on the brokers, networks and party machines that make clientelism work in mass democracies. This article highlights the different forms clientelistic politics can take by looking at small, rather than large, democracies in the Caribbean and the Pacific. Countries in both regions experience considerable clientelistic politics, but without the same dependence on brokers, networks and party machines. Based on extensive fieldwork in 15 different Caribbean and Pacific small states, resulting in over 200 interviews, we uncover how clientelism is practised in these hitherto neglected cases. We find that the size of these states contributes to the emergence of clientelistic relations based on (1) the ‘face-to-face’ connections and overlapping role relations between citizens and politicians, (2) politicians’ electoral dependence on a very small number of votes, and (3) enhanced opportunities for monitoring and controlling clientelistic exchanges. Smallness is furthermore found to limit, albeit not entirely dispense with, the need for brokers, networks and party machines, and to amplify the power of clients vis-à-vis their patrons, altering the nature and dynamics of clientelism in important ways. In a final section we discuss how clientelism contributes to other dominant trends in small state politics: personalism and executive domination.
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank the editor and two anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments and suggestions. In addition, we are grateful to Edward Aspinall and Ward Berenschot for their feedback on earlier versions of this article.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1 Scott, Patron-Client Politics and Political Change in Southeast Asia; Stokes, Perverse Accountability; Auyero, “From the Client’s Point of View.”
2 Boissevain, Saints and Fireworks; Eisenstadt and Lemarchand, Political Clientelism; Schmidt et al., Friends, Followers and Factions.
3 Corbett and Veenendaal, Democracy in Small States.
4 Veenendaal and Corbett, “Why Small States Offer Important Answers to Large Questions.”
5 While the size of states can be measured on the basis of various indicators, population is almost always the variable of theoretical interest. Any threshold to separate small states from other states is arbitrary, but we apply the conventional cut-off point of 1 million inhabitants.
6 Sutton, “Democracy in the Commonwealth Caribbean”; Reilly, “Social Choice in the South Seas.” The largest countries in these regions (Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Haiti in the Caribbean and Fiji in the Pacific) forming the (partial) exceptions.
7 Barrow-Giles, “Democracy at Work”; Duncan and Hassel, “How Pervasive is Clientelist Politics in the Pacific”; Hinds, “Beyond Formal Democracy”; Wood, “The Clientelism Trap in Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea.”
8 Corbett and Veenendaal, Democracy in Small States.
9 See also Veenendaal, “How Smallness Fosters Clientelism”; Veenendaal, “Does Smallness Enhance Power-Sharing?”
10 A complete list of interviews can be found in Appendix.
11 Ryan, Winner Takes All.
12 Payne, “Westminster Adapted.”
13 Baldacchino, “Bursting the Bubble.”
14 Duncan and Woods, “What About Us?”; Payne, “Westminster Adapted”; Sutton “Democracy in the Commonwealth Caribbean.”
15 Barrow-Giles, “Democracy at Work”; Hinds “Beyond Formal Democracy”; Payne, “Westminster Adapted”; Peters, The Democratic System in the Eastern Caribbean; Sutton, “Democracy in the Commonwealth Caribbean”; Veenendaal, Politics and Democracy in Microstates.
16 Duncan and Woods, “What About Us?” 210–13.
17 Peters, The Democratic System in the Eastern Caribbean, 26.
18 For a review see Watson-Gegeo and Feinberg, Leadership and Change in the Western Pacific.
19 Sahlins, “Poor Man, Rich Man, Big-Man, Chief.”
20 Corbett, Being Political.
21 Wood, “The Clientelism Trap in Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea”; Duncan and Hassel, “How Pervasive is Clientelist Politics in the Pacific.”
22 Levine and Roberts, “The Constitutional Structures and Electoral Systems of Pacific Island States.”
23 Rich, Morgan, and Hambly, Political Parties in the Pacific Islands.
24 Fraenkel, “The Impact of Electoral Systems on Women's Representation in Pacific Parliaments”; and Baker “Great Expectations.”
25 The argument also applies to the few small states with proportional electoral systems; the median population size of Surinamese and Guyanese electoral districts is also below 10,000.
26 Aspinall and Berenschot, “How Clientelism Varies.”
27 Diamond and Tsalik, “Size and Democracy.”
28 Author interview.
29 Ott, Small is Democratic.
30 Cf. Auyero, “From the Client’s Point of View.”
31 Corbett and Veenendaal, Democracy in Small States.
32 Duncan and Woods, “What About Us?”; Sutton “Democracy in the Commonwealth Caribbean”; Duncan and Hassel, “How Pervasive is Clientelist Politics in the Pacific.”
33 Duncan and Woods, “What About Us?” 211.
34 These two paragraphs are drawn from Corbett, Being Political, with permission.
35 For a discussion on voter registration in Marshall Islands see Fraenkel, “Strategic Registration from Metropolis to Periphery.”
36 Corbett, Being Political.
37 Tmetuchl, “The Bai and the Chief in Palau,” 14.
38 Kenilorea, Tell As It Is, 203; 299.
39 Fraenkel, “The Atrophied State.”
40 Wood, “The Clientelism Trap in Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea.”
41 Baldacchino, “Bursting the Bubble.”
42 Ramsoedh, “Democracy and Political Culture in Suriname,” 33.
43 Author interview.
44 Griffith, “Political Change, Democracy, and Human Rights in Guyana.”
45 Crocombe, The Pacific Way.
46 Crocombe, The South Pacific, 643.
47 Corbett, “Democratic Innovations and the Challenge of Parliamentary Oversight in a Small State.”
48 Forsyth and Batley, “What the Political Corruption Scandal of 2015 Reveals.”
49 Firth, “Australia’s Detention Centre and the Erosion of Democracy in Nauru.”
50 Henry, “Political Accumulation and Authoritarianism in the Caribbean,” 3.
51 Babb, Political Party and Campaign Financing in Dominica, 2.
52 Author interview.
53 Ramsoedh, “Democracy and Political Culture in Suriname,” 32.
54 Griffin, “The Opposition and Policy Making in the Caribbean,” 233.
55 Duncan and Woods, “What About Us?”; Peters, “The Democratic System in the Eastern Caribbean.”
56 Lowe, “Examining Lijphart’s Favourable Factors,” 373.
57 Albaugh and Rolison, Democracy and Ethnicity in Belize, 5.
58 Faustmann, “Rusfeti and Political Patronage in the Republic of Cyprus”; Mitchell, “Corruption and Clientelism in a ‘Systemless System’”; Seibert, Comrades, Clients, and Cousins.
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Notes on contributors
Wouter Veenendaal
Wouter Veenendaal is an Assistant Professor at the Institute of Political Science at Leiden University, the Netherlands.
Jack Corbett
Jack Corbett is Professor of Politics at the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Southampton, United Kingdom.