Buying Better Brokers: Measuring the Relative Influence of Broker Types

• In Event: Clientelism and Distributive Politics 2

Abstract

There are many kinds of political brokers—people purporting to exchange votes for services—but studies of brokerage in politics have so far tended to focus only on those who are easy to identify. Outside of formalized brokerage by party cadres and club-goods seeking by local notables, political science has only a limited view of who brokers and the relative importance of different broker types.

To overcome previous methodological limitations, I treat political brokers as a hidden population and apply a partially respondent-driven sample design to first map electoral brokers, then survey them and rate their influence.

Using a survey of potential brokers in Indonesia and a paired survey of candidates in the same localities, I show that the population of brokers is large, some brokers are far more influential than others, influential brokers are more frequently contacted by campaigns, and find evidence of partial overlap in competing parties’ broker networks.

Author

• Seth Nathan Soderborg, Harvard University