Non-Policy Politics: Richer Voter, Poorer Voter & Parties’ Electoral Strategies

Session Submission Type: Author meet critics

Session Description

We propose a critics-meet-the-author panel on Ernesto Calvo and M.Victoria Murillo’s, “Non-Policy Policy: Richer Voter, Poorer Voter, and the Diversification of Parties’ Electoral Strategies” (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming February 2019). This book argues that parties do not focus narrowly on advertising policy proposals but rather use all the resources they have at their disposal to win elections. Parties advertise policies, such as lower taxes and improved access to health services, but they also offer non-policy benefits in the form of competent economic management (valence politics), constituency service (partisan networks), and patronage jobs (clientelism). The non-policy benefits that voters consider when deciding their vote shape politicians’ electoral strategies. This book provides a theory that brings together the interplay between different non-policy resources and policy offers by focusing on voters’ preferences and the opportunities and constraints they create for parties both in advanced and new democracies. Empirically, it is based on detailed survey and administrative data from Argentina and Chile, including a novel methodology for measuring partisan networks and their electoral effects. The book shows how voters of different socioeconomic status in each country not only differ in their policy and non-policy preferences, but also on the weight they assign to each of these dimensions in defining their vote. Those incentives are crucial in shaping the non-policy offers of political parties as well as politicians’ their ability to shift policy offers when seeking to maximize their vote share.
The invited critics have all produced distinguished work on electoral behavior emphasizing different non-policy dimensions in other countries and regions. Their different perspectives and cases of study will thus generate the opportunity for a fruitful conversation around the applicability and limitations of the theory proposed in the book. The critics are Beatriz Magaloni (Stanford), who has authored an important book on the impact of public and private good distribution on the Mexican electorate, Tariq Tachil (Vanderbilt), who has worked on the use of status and targeted distribution in explaining the fate of Indian electoral parties, and Jonathan Rodden (Stanford), who has studied the effect of geography, electoral institutions, and issues on electoral behavior in advanced democracies. Ernesto Calvo and M.Victoria Murillo will respond to their comments before opening a broader discussion about the importance of non-policy politics and how the concept can be extended to other areas, expanding our understanding of electoral behavior beyond policy and ideology, in line with the theme call of ‘populism and privileged’, which include the raising electoral impact of income, race, religion, gender, and nation, in addition to targeted distribution and economic performance in a world characterized by increasing economic volatility and income inequality (two features that have characterized the young Latin American democracies of the Third Wave).

Sub Unit

• DIVISION 12: Comparative Politics in Developing Countries

Chair

• Ernesto F. Calvo University of Maryland

Presenters

• Maria Victoria Murillo Columbia University

• Tariq Thachil Vanderbilt University

• Beatriz Magaloni Stanford University

• Jonathan Rodden Stanford University