Clientelism and ideological competition: the impact on ideological overlapping

ABSTRACT

Clientelism is a widespread and persistent practice in Latin America with significant ramifications for political actors and systems. This paper analyses its impact upon ideological overlapping, which is one of the aspects of ideological competition that has received disparate levels of attention depending on the region of study. The hypothesis examined is that clientelism reduces the ideological differentiation of political parties because, firstly, a clientelist environment makes it difficult for political actors to use left/right categories, thereby contributing to a reduction in parties’ ideological identities. Secondly, the use of clientelist practices by parties fosters ideological overlapping with other parties, given the lack of incentives for them to differentiate themselves ideologically from one another. To test this relationship, a multilevel regression analysis was performed of 86 Latin American parties since 2009.

Acknowledgements

The authors are very grateful for the help and support offered by Juan Antonio Rodríguez Zepeda. We also wish to thank the helpful critique and encouragement from the editor and several anonymous reviewers.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The degree of specialisation may give a clue as to the similarities between parties with regard to the demands they hope to represent, as well as to the type of segmentation of a political system’s electorate. If a political party belongs to a small ideological niche, it is likely that its survival will be dependent upon being successful with a well-defined electorate.

2 Nevertheless, with a view to optimising their electoral performance, parties often strategically combine different types of political linkages with voters (Luna 2010).

3 We have tested for any possible endogeneity of this relationship with a simultaneous equation model (Baltagi 1981). Its results are consistent with multilevel model as presented, such that, even when corrected for potential endogeneity, the effect of clientelism at a party level on overlapping is sustained. This model is available in the Online Appendix. Also tested was a model with lagged independent variables, which does not alter the main findings. This test is available upon request.

4 Overlapping can be studied for just one group of parties within a party system—between parties in a coalition, for example—to identify the similarities between their positions and predict the policies the coalition will promote.

5 The University of Salamanca’s Parliamentary Elites of Latin America (PELA) project has been carrying out surveys of the region’s parliamentarians since 1994 (https://oir.org.es/pela/). The Online Appendix provides details of the cases included.

6 In the selection of parties, we have included those that have achieved at least four seats in the relevant election.

7 See Online Appendix for an example of the calculations.

8 This dataset contains the results of surveys of experts on the region’s political parties between 1900 and 2019 (Lührmann et al. 2020). See https://www.v-dem.net/vpartyds.html.

9 Additionally, we have ascertained the impact of parties’ clientelism on overlapping on the basis of another indicator sourced from the DALP (Democratic Accountability and Linkages Project) (2009) and Wiesehomeier, Singer, and Ruth (2019) Political Representation, Parties and Presidents Survey datasets. In these datasets, each party's clientelism is measured on a scale from a minimum of 1 to a maximum of 20, arising from the sum of the scores associated with five questions on the frequency of clientelism-related practices. The correlation between V-Party clientelism and DALP/PREPPS party clientelism is 0.70 (sign. 0.001). The main results of this explanatory model stand.

10 At origin, the ideological variable in the DALP dataset is measured on a scale from 1 to 10 and in PREPPS from 1 to 20. To make them comparable, the latter have been recoded from 1 to10 (with 1 being left and 10 right). LAPOP data is available in LAPOP (2021).

11 This dataset contains the results of surveys of experts on the region’s political parties (Lührmann et al. 2020).

12 All the estimations were carried out with the STATA 15 program.

13 Bootstrapping provides different ways of calculating the confidence intervals for the parameters obtained in estimated models (Huang 2018). It is recommended when the sample for carrying out multilevel regression is small, and the analysis focuses on the fixed part of the model, as is the case with this study.

14 The scale runs from zero (clientelist linkages) to one (programmatic linkages).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the project “Más allá del organigrama: centros de poder en los partidos latinoamericanos” (Beyond the organization chart: Centres of power in Latin American parties) by the Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad (Spain) under Grant PID 2019-104787RB-I00.

Notes on contributors

Mikel Barreda

Mikel Barreda Associate Professor at Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (Spain) and Director of the Degree in International Relations. Doctor in Political Science by Universidad de Deusto (Spain). His current lines of research deal with the quality of democracy, political representation and party systems from a comparative perspective, especially in Latin America. He has published articles on these topics in various academic journals, such as Canadian Journal of Political Science, Revista de Ciencia Política (Chile), Política y Gobierno, Perfiles Latinoamericanos, Revista del CLAD Reforma y Democracia, Revista Mexicana de Sociología, and América Latina Hoy.

Patricia Otero-Felipe

Patricia Otero-Felipe Tenured Associate Professor at the University of Burgos (Spain), She holds a PhD in Political Science and a master’s degree in Latin American Politics from the University of Salamanca. She has been a visiting scholar in the Departments of Political Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the University of Pittsburgh. Her research interests are political parties, political behavior, and political representation from a comparative perspective. She has published in Latin American Politics and Society, Electoral Studies, Revista de Ciencia Política (Chile), Política y Gobierno, Colombia Internacional, and Revista Española de Investigaciones Sociológicas.

Leticia M. Ruiz Rodríguez

Leticia M. Ruiz Rodríguez Associate Professor at Universidad Complutense de Madrid (Spain). Vicedean of Doctoral Studies and Research. Doctor in Political Science by Universidad de Salamanca (Spain). Master in Comparative Politics by University of North Carolina (USA). Diploma in Data Analysis and Collection by University of Essex (United Kingdom). Her work is focused on party dynamics, ideological competition, and parliamentary elites from a comparative perspective. She is leading a three-year Project, funded by Spanish government, on spheres of power within Latin American political parties. Author of different books, she has published in Czech Journal of Political Science, Perfiles Latinoamericanos, Revista Mexicana de Sociología, Revista de Ciencia Política (Chile), among others. She was recently awarded with the Prize for Best Congress Paper (2021) by the Asociación Española de Ciencia Política.