A Theory of Group-Based Clientelism

• In Event: Dominant Parties and Voters

Abstract

Work on clientelism is at a crossroads. Known as an electoral strategy in which politicians buy votes, clientelism research has been plagued by the problem that in most democracies, politicians cannot observe how individuals vote. This leaves researchers in the peculiar position of studying a practice on account of its threat to democracy, yet having to concede that democratic institutions are configured in ways that make this practice inherently unlikely. In response, recent contributions have made the case that clientelism be redefined to do away with the requirement that politicians observe individual votes. Scholars have argued that any distribution of targeted material benefits around the time of elections qualifies as clientelistic. In this paper, I point out that in many democracies, votes in national elections are counted at a disaggregated geographic unit within each electoral district. When geographically targetable resources are available and targetable at these same units, politicians will have the tools to implement clientelistic exchanges at the level of the small group, thereby jettisoning the need to observe individual votes. Specifically, they will be able to make the amount of money groups receive contingent upon how much electoral support they provide. Using original cross-national data on the universe of democracies, I report descriptive statistics on the number of democracies in which the conditions for what I call “group-based clientelism” hold. I then use in-depth analyses of the relationship between votes and resources in three countries to probe the plausibility of the theory. These findings open up new lines of inquiry for scholars interested in clientelism, pork-barreling, the electoral strategies of dominant parties, and the form and function of democracy.

Author

• Amy Louise Catalinac, New York University