The Contingency of Clientelism: Do We Study What We Say We Do?

• In Event: Clientelism and Corruption

Abstract

How do we identify and measure clientelism? With democratization and advances in technologies that have opened new means of data gathering in developing countries, an explosion of scholarly work claiming to empirically identify cases of clientelism has appeared in recent decades. In this paper we conduct a systematic review of the measurement of clientelism in the literature and identify a key factor that is often assumed and rarely explicitly established: contingency. We use automated textual analysis to identify the key writings on clientelism, implement a systematic, questionnaire-driven review of the concepts invoked, measurements employed, and conclusions drawn. We find that although authors overwhelming agree that clientelism involves an exchange, a quid-pro-quo, a tit-for-tat, they all too often do not directly measure the key ingredient in such relationships – the contingent nature of it. This paper considers how the failure to capture contingency results in conceptual stretching and draws into question findings in the extant literature. It concludes with ideas for how scholars can refine the measurement of clientelistic exchanges by focusing on contingency.

Authors

• Kristen Kao, University of Gothenburg

• Ellen M. Lust, University of Gothenburg