Outsiders Against the Machine: Programmatic Reform in Subnational Democracies

• In Event: Local Politicians and Public Goods Provision

Abstract

Subnational data reveal that cases of programmatic governance reform in clientelist contexts are empirically more frequent and episodic than existing explanations grounded in slow-moving processes of modernization theory and institutionalized parties would predict. To fill this explanatory gap, I argue that ‘outsider’ politicians systematically act as unlikely programmatic reformers. With shallow roots in their party and in local clientelist networks, outsiders stand to lose from perpetuating clientelist practices, which only serve to boost the resources and reputations of competing insider elites. Instead, outsiders face strong incentives to fight their own party machine, using programmatic governance to tilt the flow of public funds away from co-partisan elites. Evidence of the causal impact of electing outsider politicians is drawn from a new coding of tens of thousands of mayoral candidates in Brazil coupled with a close-election regression discontinuity comparing municipal governance where outsiders just won and lost elections. To substantiate the claim that outsiders are motivated by intra-elite resource competition, I also provide in-depth qualitative evidence of elites’ incentives from paired subnational case studies in Brazil, India and Nigeria. In contrast to the populist profile of outsiders in advanced economies, I find that outsiders in developing contexts are consistently more likely to reduce discretionary access to public resources by enforcing institutional rules and promoting new programmatic policies. These findings point to a new elite-led pathway towards programmatic politics in historically clientelist contexts.

Author

• Jonathan Phillips, University of São Paulo