Citizen assessments of clientelistic practices in South Africa

Abstract

Research on political clientelism has provided conflicting findings on citizen perceptions and evaluations of clientelism. Survey as well as ethnographic research sometimes finds that citizens reject clientelism and politicians making clientelistic offers and at other times that citizens find clientelism acceptable and perceive clientelistic politicians as caring. We build on current literature on the characteristics of diverse types of clientelism and argue that the differences in evaluations result partly from differences in the type of clientelism that is studied. To investigate this idea, we conduct focus groups in low-income urban and rural areas in South Africa about how clients and citizens understand and evaluate different forms of clientelism in South Africa. We identify five distinctive exchange types across groups. Citizens evaluate vote-buying exchanges pragmatically but all other types negatively: relational forms of clientelism are seen as stirring welfare competition and coercive forms as unlawful. Patrons are mostly seen as selfish but views on clients vary across types. Citizens describe clients in vote-buying and coercive clientelism as victims and in relational types as egoistic. These findings suggest that citizens in communities where clientelism is prevalent have highly differentiated views on different types of clientelism and the actors involved in it.

Keywords:

• Clientelism
• citizen perspective
• moral evaluations
• focus groups
• South Africa

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Details on the recruitment strategy, venues and dynamics within each group are provided in the supplementary material, section S.B.

2 We received ethical approval (17-7849-BO) from the ethics committee (Ethik-Kommission) at the University of Duisburg-Essen.

3 The socio-economic characteristics of the locations are based on the 2011 population census.

4 We developed the three scenarios from ethnographic literature. The complete scenarios are presented in the FG guidelines in the supplementary material section, S.A.

5 The exception to this was initially the rural male group. The beginning of the transcript shows that answers are short and imply that nothing along the lines of the scenarios was happening. However, after half an hour the group became more vocal, and it turned out that they had experience with various forms of clientelism.

6 Table S.C1 in the supplementary material displays the frequencies of key codes in each group.

7 From these, we excluded nine exchanges that we judged too vague to contribute productively to the analysis.

8 We use hierarchical clustering, a method suitable when there is no a priori information on the number of clusters that there may be.

9 References to transcripts are given in the format site, gender, speaker ID (P1–P9) and time stamp.

10 ID cards are stamped at the polling station to prevent multiple voting. This practice enables politicians to check whether someone has voted.

11 We take this to be clientelism, as these are promises for personal benefit, contingent on political support.

12 We acknowledge that there is a degree of ambiguity about whether these ‘well-connected’ individuals and the councillor are in a patron–client relationship in the strict sense of the literature that looks at these as unequal relationships or whether they are part of a local elite who interchanges material goods and political support. There is also some ambiguity whether the campaigners should be classified as clients or as brokers. However, from the perspective of the FGPs, all these individuals appear to be clients of local politicians. Moreover, the campaigners were self-describing as entrepreneurial people who volunteered their services, which better fits the profile of someone seeking to become a client rather than being part of a local party machine.

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded by the the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG): Reference PE 2423/3-2 und WE 4253/5-1).

Notes on contributors

Eva Wegner

Eva Wegner is Professor of Comparative Politics at the Institute for Political Science at the University of Marburg, Germany. Her research focusses on political participation and accountability in the Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa. Her work has appeared in Perspectives on Politics, the Journal of Conflict Resolution, International Political Science Review, and Party Politics, among other journals.

Miquel Pellicer

Miquel Pellicer is Professor for Inequality and Poverty at the Center for Conflict Studies at the University of Marburg, Germany. He works on inequality, political behaviour and development. His articles have appeared, among other publiccations, in Perspectives on Politics, Quarterly Journal of Political Science, Political Research Quarterly and the Journal of Development Economics.

Markus Bayer

Markus Bayer is Senior Researcher at the Bonn International Centre for Conflict Studies (BICC), in Bonn, Germany. His main research areas are obedience and (non)violent resistance, democratisation, civil–military relations and arms control. His works thereon focus mainly on the African continent. His previous articles have been published in the Journal of Peace Research, Peacebuilding and Third World Quarterly, among other journals.

Christian Tischmeyer

Christian Tischmeyer is an independent researcher, based in Erfurt, Germany. He holds an MA in International Relations and Development Policy, obtained at the University of Duisburg-Essen. His research interests centre on the political economy of (neo)liberal practices of governance and the political culture they evoke.