Threats and Promises to Voters: A Typology of Clientelist Methods Across Regions

• In Event: Clientelism

Abstract

The democratic process can fail in numerous ways. An important failure occurs when voters are not expressing their preferences freely at the ballot box based on the programmatic policy proposals of the different candidates and their parties. Rather, they might be induced to vote a certain way through undemocratic threats and promises by political brokers. The existing literature in political science has extensively studied the positive inducements, i.e. the promises, made to voters in order to modify their intentions in undemocratic ways. This phenomenon has frequently been referred to as “vote buying” or, more generally, “clientelism”. However, much of the literature has been vague about those terms as different authors have used them differently. Sometimes the meaning assigned to these concepts has been radically different and even contradictory. A first goal of this paper is the develop sharp and concise definitions that can help distinguish the different meanings that have been so far confounded in the literature. Furthermore, the existing literature has neglected a complementary phenomenon which is equally worrisome, namely the negative inducements, i.e. the threats, made to voters in order to modify their intentions. Qualitative evidence from primary and secondary sources can show that such threats to voters are common across the developing world, including Mexico which is one of the main cases in this paper. This phenomenon could be referred to as “vote coercion” and should be understood as a complementary strategy to “vote buying”. Accordingly, a second goal of this paper is to elevate vote coercion at the same conceptual level as vote buying within the menu of clientelist methods. To be sure, an important literature on electoral violence has documented such threats to voters in several regions, but this literature has remained largely separate from the literature on clientelism. So a third goal of this paper is to connect conceptually these two different literatures. To be specific, this paper provides a new typology of clientelist methods to manipulate voters based on three characteristics: the nature of the inducements to voters; the broker providing the inducements; and the voters receiving the inducements. The paper postulates two types of inducements (positive and negative), three types of brokers (bureaucrats, partisans and employers), and three types of voters (supporters, undecided and opposed). Combining the types of brokers and the types of voters with the types of inducements leads to twelve possible methods of manipulation that patrons (i.e. politicians) may use to influence their clients (i.e. citizens). These subcategories are illustrated with empirical cases from the large and rapidly growing literature on clientelism around the world, with special focus on Mexico. Developing such typology can bring conceptual clarity to a series of important phenomena that hinder the proper functioning of elections in many new and old democracies, and which have been collectively labeled “clientelism”.

Author

• Gilles Serra, CIDE (Centro de Investigacion y Docencia Economicas)