Analytical perspectives on varieties of clientelism

ABSTRACT

This article explains the varieties of clientelistic vote exchange in contemporary electoral democracies. It distinguishes two commonly recognized modes of exchange according to their capacity to overcome the problem of opportunism – relational clientelism and spot-market “vote buying” clientelism – and relates them to attributes along which clientelistic varieties have been distinguished. It develops a metric of clientelistic profile differences that characterize parties’ choices of clientelistic strategies and advances hypotheses about the conditions under which parties pursue different strategies. Drawing on an 88 country/506 party expert survey of clientelistic practices, more relational politics thrives in middle-income countries with simultaneously more programmatic competition. But there is also intra-country variance according to party capabilities: Parties with more formal organizational reach, slight less reliance on external local notables, and government incumbency deploy more relational clientelism, net of parties’ electoral size or ethnocultural base. Even once all of these differences are accounted for, parties in Sub-Saharan Africa rely more on spot-market clientelism than those of any other global region. Unmeasured variables – such as state capacity and party institutionalization, as well as the persistence of traditional tribe-based modes of social coordination that endow polities with order and stability may account for the more ephemeral character of clientelism in this region.

KEYWORDS:

• Clientelism
• patronage
• economic development
• party organization
• programmatism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Kerem Yıldırım http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2421-9109

Notes

1 For this consensus, see widely cited field introductions by Hicken, “Clientelism”; Kitschelt and Wilkinson, “Citizen-Politician Linkages”; Stokes, “Political Clientelism.”

2 See the introduction to this special issue, Berenschot and Aspinall, “How Clientelism Varies?.”

3 Scott, “Corruption, Machine Politics, and Political Change”; Schmidt et al., Friends, Followers, and Factions.

4 Two review studies suggest that temporal dimension is key to understand varieties, see Hicken and Nathan, “Clientelism’s Red Herrings”; Pellicer et al., “Clientelism from the Client‘s Perspective.”

5 For research on the introduction of secret and Australian Ballot, see Mares, From Open Secrets to Secret Voting; Kam, “The Secret Ballot and the Market for Votes”; Kasara and Mares, “Unfinished Business”; Teorell, Ziblatt, and Lehoucq, “An Introduction to Special Issue.”

6 For a quantitative overview, see, Kitschelt and Rozenas, “Contingent Exchange and Contractual Opportunism” find that experts in DALP 2009 report modest monitoring that varies with organizational capabilities. On relevant qualitative illustrations, see Mares and Young, Conditionality and Coercion.

7 Trail-blazer in emphasizing the contrast between electoral and relational clientelism is Nichter, “Politics and Poverty”; Nichter, “Conceptualizing Vote Buying.”

8 Hicken and Nathan, “Clientelism’s Red Herrings.”

9 Pellicer et al., “Clientelism from the Client‘s Perspective.”

10 For the notion of relational clientelism, see Nichter, Votes for Survival, pp. 8–12 and 74–8 for conceptualization.

11 Examples of relational clientelism come mostly from Latin America: Auyero, Poor People’s Politics; Diaz-Cayeros, Estévez, and Magaloni, The Political Logic of Poverty Relief; Nichter, Votes for Survival; Szwarcberg, Mobilizing Poor Voters; Weitz-Shapiro, Curbing Clientelism in Argentina.

12 Finan and Schechter, “Vote-buying and Reciprocity”; Duarte et al., “Networks, Information, and Vote Buying.”

13 Aspinall and Berenschot, Democracy for Sale; Kramon, “Electoral Handouts as Information”; Muñoz, Buying Audiences; Weghorst and Lindberg, “Effective Opposition Strategies.”

14 Muñoz, Buying Audiences.

15 Finan and Schechter, “Vote-buying and Reciprocity”; Lawson and Greene, “Making Clientelism Work.”

16 On the “leaky bucket” argument, see Hicken and Nathan, “Clientelism’s Red Herrings.”

17 Gay, Popular Organization and Democracy; Hale, “Correlates of Clientelism”; Holland and Palmer-Rubin, “Beyond the Machine”; Thachil, “Elite Parties and Poor Voters.”

18 Auyero, Poor People’s Politics; Larreguy, Marshall, and Querubin, “Parties, Brokers, and Voter Mobilization”; Stokes et al., Brokers, Voters, and Clientelism; Szwarcberg, Mobilizing Poor Voters.

19 Kenny, Populism and Patronage; Kitschelt and Kselman, “Clientelistic Party Organization.”

20 Hale, “Correlates of Clientelism”; Gay, Popular Organization and Democracy; Gottlieb, “Explaining Variation in Broker Strategies.”

21 Shefter, “Party and Patronage.” On quantitative estimates, see Dahlström and Lapuente, Organizing Leviathan. On party networks facilitating distribution of state resources, see Calvo and Murillo, “When Parties Meet Voters.”

22 Nichter, “Vote Buying or Turnout Buying?”; Gans-Morse, Mazzuca, and Nichter, “Varieties of Clientelism” who use the notion of “varieties” of clientelism first, following Hall and Soskice, Varieties of Capitalism.

23 Mares and Young, “Buying, Expropriating, and Stealing Votes”; Mares and Young, Conditionality and Coercion.

24 Robinson and Verdier, “The Political Economy of Clientelism.”

25 Shefter, “Party and Patronage”; Kopecký, Mair, and Spirova, Party Patronage and Party Government.

26 Keefer, “Clientelism, Credibility, and the Policy Choices.”

27 As a case, where public works projects are key to clientelistic networks, consider Japan; Scheiner, Democracy without Competition.

28 An example practice is “forebearance” (selectively disregarding clients’ rule violations), see Holland, “Forbearance.”

29 We conceptualize vote-buying in a narrow sense as an election time activity. Sometimes, the literature uses vote-buying more generically for various clientelistic exchanges without specification of timing and duration of the relationship (e.g. Zarazaga, “Party Machines and Voter-customized Rewards Strategies”; see also Schaffer, Elections for Sale).

30 Hicken, “Clientelism”; Stokes et al., Brokers, Voters, and Clientelism.

31 Kao, Lust, and Rakner, “Money Machine.”

32 Kitschelt and Kselman, “Economic Development, Democratic Experience.”

33 Kitschelt and Wang, “Research and Dialogue on Programmatic Parties”; Kitschelt et al., “Research and Dialogue on Programmatic Parties – Case Study Report”; Kitschelt, “Social Policy, Democratic Linkages”; Kitschelt, “Political Economy of Pure Programmatic Partisan Politics.”

34 Berenschot, “The Political Economy of Clientelism”; Driscoll, “Why Political Competition Can Increase Patronage?” Vote-buying, by contrast, may be prevalent under conditions of weak state capacity: Heath and Tillin, “Institutional Performance and Vote Buying.”

35 Nooruddin and Rudra, “Are Developing Countries Really Defying?”

36 Kitschelt and Kselman, “Economic Development, Democratic Experience.”

37 This argument has been advanced by Magaloni, Diaz-Cayeros, and Estévez, “Clientelism and Portfolio Diversification”; Diaz-Cayeros, Estévez, and Magaloni, The Political Logic of Poverty Relief; Kitschelt and Singer, “Diversified Partisan Linkage Strategies.”

38 Alternative specifications with institutional variables and economic openness yield nothing resilient/substantive and have been set aside to preserve degrees of freedom. Results can be obtained from the authors.

39 BGI ethnic inequality measure is based on Baldwin and Huber, “Economic versus Cultural Differences” and Wang and Kolev, “Ethnic Group Inequality, Partisan Networks.”

40 DALP is available on https://sites.duke.edu/democracylinkage.

41 Pellicer et al., “Clientelism from the Client’s Perspective.”

42 We also employed a mathematically more demanding ratio index: division of the average b1 score by the average b2–b5 scores. The results we report below for PRC are consistent with that alternative and can be obtained from the authors.

43 Gerring et al., “Democracy and Economic Growth.”

44 Kitschelt and Freeze, “Programmatic Party System Structuration.”

45 We lose some marginally informative cases – Belgium, Greece, Italy, Japan and possibly the US – their inclusion would have only strengthened what emerges as the main predictors of PRC, economic development and programmatism. Additionally, BGI cannot be calculated for 6 countries (Angola, Georgia, Lebanon, Lithuania, Mauritius, Niger) which reduces the number of observations from 66 to 60.

46 Kitschelt and Singer, “Diversified Partisan Linkage Strategies.”

47 In 2008, for the 60 developing democracies, the correlation between GDP and the WBGI government effectiveness index is 0.86.

48 This finding is in line with previous research on relational clientelism (Nichter, Votes for Survival) and vote-buying (Muñoz, Buying Audiences).

49 Recent research that separates handouts, patronage and pork shows that expectations about distributive, “non-policy endowments” matter and patronage and pork are more effective. See, Calvo and Murillo, Non-policy Politics, pp. 107–8.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kerem Yıldırım

Kerem Yıldırım is a postdoctoral associate in the Department of Political Science at Duke University. His research focuses on the effect of various institutions and socioeconomic structures on party-voter linkages, political competition, and political communication. He is the co-author of Political Consequences of Welfare Regimes: Social Assistance and Support for Presidentialism in Turkey (2019) and Party competition in the Middle East: Spatial Competition in the Post-Arab Spring Era (2019).

Herbert Kitschelt

Herbert Kitschelt is professor of political science at Duke University. He published on the configuration of party systems in advanced democracies (e.g. The Transformation of European Social Democracy, 1994; The Radical Right in Western Europe, 1995; co-edited The Politics of Advanced Capitalism, 2015), post-communism (Post-Communist Party Systems, 1999, with co-authors) and Latin America (Latin American Party Systems, 2010). One major concern has been the role of clientelism in party systems (co-editor, Patrons, Clients, and Policies, 2007), also documented in data and publications within the framework of the Democratic Accountability and Linkage Project (DALP).