Party Strategy and Public Opinion: How Patronage Undermines Democratization

• In Event: Clientelism

Abstract

How do party linkage strategies affect public opinion toward governing institutions and democratization? Political elites in developing democracies and competitive autocracies often rely on clientelism — quid pro quo exchanges creating two-way accountability between voters and their representatives — to attract electoral support. Though a form of redistribution, this strategy may have a number of additional implications for governance, including lower public goods provision, increased corruption, and increased exploitation of poor and rural voters. Yet even in an environment where clientelism is common, some political parties attract support using programmatic appeals, developing platforms based in ideology or using the authorities of their office to deliver public goods without resorting to patronage.

These competing strategies may influence public attitudes toward governance. Partisan behavior might shape citizen perceptions through a variety of channels, including direct experience with representatives or their local brokers, performance assessments produced by NGO observers, and observable outcomes such as the type or quantity of public or private goods distributed within a community. I posit that parties engaging in programmatic political appeals improve citizen attitudes toward elected representatives, while parties relying exclusively on patronage create perceptions that government is corrupt and decrease trust in governing institutions and elections. I use geocoded public opinion data along with administrative metrics and data on party mobilization strategy to test these predictions in the Moroccan context — a setting with both programmatic and clientelist parties. I further validate the within-case evidence with original focus group data as well as a cross-national exploration of citizen attitudes across a range of developing democracies and hybrid regimes in Africa.

I find that supporters of parties that rely on clientelism to attract votes have lower levels of trust in their representatives and express more concern about corruption, while supporters of parties that use programmatic and legal appeals are more likely to report that their elected representatives are responsive to constituents. And this pattern extends to attitudes toward a broader range of governmental and democratic indicators: supporters of clientelist parties expressed more distrust in government institutions and lack of faith in the free and fairness of elections.

The results add to our understanding of how the behavior of political elites maps onto the public consciousness. The strategic choices of political elites have reputational ramifications not just for those directly concerned, but for the government as a whole. There are also important implications for our understanding of regime transition: clientelism may adversely affect prospects for bottom-up democratization in autocratic settings by undermining faith in existing institutions and public belief in government accountability. Conversely, the presence of parties adopting institutionalized, above-board strategies for serving constituents strengthens those same institutions in the eyes of the public.

Author

• Erin York, Vanderbilt University