Information and Clientelism

• In Event: Poster Session: Perspectives on Political Economy

Abstract

An informed citizenry is considered a cornerstone of a well-functioning democracy. In new democracies in particular, lack of information and political knowledge may adversely affect voters’ ability to sanction corruption and bad governance and hold governments accountable for their performance in office. At the same time, new democracies are often challenged by parties’ use of clientelist modes of redistribution – which figures prominently on the menu of mobilization strategies employed both during and in between elections. In this paper, we examine how voter information matters for parties’ use of clientelist mobilization strategies. Using individual-level survey data from South Africa – a country that has received comparatively little attention in the clientelism literature – we employ a novel instrumental variables (IV) approach to examine the impact of information on electoral and relational clientelism. Our IV approach relies on features of the local technological environment in which interviews are conducted to isolate exogenous variation in voter knowledge of politics. Specifically, we use computer-based information on the automatically captured time gap between when an interview ends and when it is automatically uploaded into the cloud – which is contingent on the speed and quality of the local mobile broadband connection. This time difference reflects the quality of the local technological environment – which may impact voters’ level of information – and serves as our instrument for voter knowledge of politics. Against this background, our paper contributes to the literature on the link between democracy, voter information, and clientelism by providing causal evidence on how differences in voter information conditions parties’ use of clientelist strategies to mobilize voter support.

Authors

• Mogens K. Justesen, Copenhagen Business School

• Jacob Gerner Hariri, Department of Political Science, University of Copenhagen